As I walk into a room called “The Cottage” (a quaint sun room inside the apartment that is shared between Bobby Kimberley and his girlfriend Anna), I notice the wall of nostalgic board games from the 80’s and am greeted by Olive, their cat who loves to claw at my sweater and is in a deep search for affection. My conversation with Kimberley begins with my fascination with the Young Lions Music Club’s, Club Card. It provides instant access to value added programs, discounts on stores and restaurants in my community, and invites to some of the most creative and exclusive events Young Lions Music Club has to offer. The events are specifically catered to a genre who identifies with Young Lions’ cultural scene and shares the same enthusiasm for music. I, for one, cannot wait to get my card in the mail. (Who gets mail these days?) I’ve also signed up a few friends along the way since without it, they won’t be able to get into free shows like the Teenage Kicks show that Kimberley threw for Club Card members a month and a half before the sold out show at Lee's Palace.
What do you do?
I started Young Lions Music Club in June 2011 which is a Music Marketing Company that works with artists and brands to connect them to the music community and their audience through the common language of music. The way that we do this is by doubling as a fan club for music fans.
How did you get to what you are doing now?
My first foray in music was as a small town teenager in Lindsay, Ontario where I tried my hand at putting together local music festivals. I did that for a couple of years and really found interest in it. So when I went to University, I did it through the Student Union side of things so I could put on concerts. I also felt like I was able to get a good understanding of my audience and how to appeal to them, cater to them and communicate with them. I did all the frosh week programming and trips to spring break but it was mostly just to throw concerts with other people's money. I helped bring in Metric, Billy Talent and the Constantines, who are my favorite, all because I didn't have to pay for it out of my own pocket. So I made some contacts and when I graduated, the next move was to move to Toronto and figure out how to make a career out of music. I moved to Toronto in 2007 in February without a job, worked at HMV for a bit, then a marketing company, and by September, I was working at Sony Music, the record label. I did that for a year, and then I got a phone call one day from a woman who ran a boutique music publicity agency out of New York and Toronto and she was looking for somebody to head up the Toronto Office for The MuseBox. They needed a director and I took it on as a way to demonstrate my own impact and my own abilities in a small team, because when you work at a place like Sony, it's difficult to do that. I took the job on for a couple years and ultimately saw a huge flaw in the business model where all of their clients were artists and labels. Artists and labels had increasingly less budgets to spend on marketing and this meant that we had to start taking on an increasing number of clients to make it work (that really dilutes the brand if you are trying to be cool and relevant and work with only the top tier artists and labels). That’s when I learned the value of being very careful with the clients that you work with. So I left in March 2011, and by June, I'd started YLMC.
What was your Eureka moment?
When I was still working at The MuseBox, I was pushing hard to shift our focus. If we had one brand client on a decent-sized campaign, then that would have covered the costs of our whole company for 6 months, which would have allowed us to work with only the bands that we wanted to work with, and that fit our brand. All of these things were making sense to me and the fact that it wasn't making sense to the people I was reporting to, was sort of the eureka moment; not only is this not going to work, but there are a lot of people in this game that don't know how to have a business model that is sustainable in 2011. So that's when I realized that I think I could do this (YLMC). And then my second eureka moment happened by accident, when I had already started the company. Young Lions Music Club - the name was a combination of a reference and an homage to a song by the Constantines, "Young Lions", and also I just thought it sounded cool. It didn't sound like a marketing company, it sounded like a community; something like "The Babysitters Club", or something. It resonated with me. So the name came first and then I was like, “how do I make this a club, to build a community? Because Toronto is a big scary city and if we can help like-minded music fans find one another, then that's a great objective to have”. So through trying to turn YLMC into more of a club, the idea of the membership card came along. I remember it distinctly. My girlfriend and I were in bed one night and I asked her "I have this idea...do you think that it will resonate?" The music audience is known as being kind of finicky. So I asked her, “do you think people are going to be like: What? A club card? I'm going to pull out a club card? Or if done properly, could this work?" So we kind of brainstormed how it could and would work and that next morning, I emailed my graphic designer and told her my idea and we rolled it out that week. The club community aspect kind of developed as we went along, but when it came together, it was like "yes, this is the identity we are looking for". The ability to not have to sell anybody else in your office on (kind of) a weird idea is the greatest sigh of relief of being an entrepreneur.
Tell me more about the “Club Card”.
When you sign up, we mail you a Club Card in a nice envelope with a hand-written note. We add as much value into the program as possible for our card members. It started with discounts on events (free tickets to shows, or if you missed the advanced ticket price, no big deal, you can just pay the advanced ticket price at the door), drink deals (show your card and your first drink is free). Then, when we generated more numbers, we started having conversations with local businesses that we felt were a good fit culturally for our members. We are shy of 800 members currently, and we are continuing to grow. We have aligned with local businesses such as Poutini’s, Fresh, 69 Vintage, Hawker Bar, Johnny Jackson, and many more to give discounts to our members. Our members are also invited to exclusive brand and cultural events. For example, we put on a free show for our card members at the Dakota for Teenage Kicks who have since sold out Lee's Palace.
What was the biggest event that you've thrown for your members?
We did a series of two events last month in September around TIFF. One of them was an event that I had kind of been brewing in my brain of parties themed after Stanley Kubrick movies. There are so many great ones, like 2001 Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove... but for TIFF we decided to launch the first of these series, and did one themed after The Shining on September 7, 2012. We brought in bands that fit the theme, but we also brought in set designers, costume designers, muralists, projectionists, actors and all this sort of stuff so that when you came to this party, it was basically stepping into the movie. We had the bartender in costume of Lloyd the bartender who was also an actor, who could play the part from the movie and so he was serving drinks in character all night long. We had another actor play the role of Jack Torrance (Jack Nicolson's character) and we set up a self contained room to look exactly like the room that he does all the writing in the movie. So we had the desk, typewriter and stacks and stacks of 'All work and no play, makes Jack a dull boy' and then we got a projection artist to project that on the wall behind him so that you could actually watch the typewriter, typing all night long. Then the actor would come in and legitimately interact with this thing. The set designer that we hired (Adam Belanger) was out of control. He even bought and painted a piece of carpet to look exactly like the carpet from the movie. People would wander in this room and then the actor playing Jack would see them and get up from his desk and lose his mind on them, exactly the same way that Jack Nicholson loses his mind on his wife when she comes and says "I'm going to make you some sandwiches" and he retorts back to her "No, how about you don't make me some sandwiches? How about when you hear me in here and I'm working or when I'm not working, whenever I'm in here don't fucking come in!" People would walk into this room and be like "whoaaa this is really intense". We built a photobooth that was a door with a big axe hack through it so that you could stick your head into it and do your best ‘Here's Johnny!’ impersonation and we had a photographer photograph it all and post it online after.
Then the following Friday, was the grand finale to our Songs: A Dance Party series. The whole premise of the series was, each month had a different indie rock band or rock n' roll band play guest DJ for the night. It was a way to get inside their tastes and interests. It was as if you would go to these people's houses for a house party, this was the kind of soundtrack you would get. Over the course of the series we had Tokyo Police Club, Broken Social Scene, Beirut, who served (mostly) the who's who of the local Toronto music scene. We eventually decided to shut that series down just because we were running out of bands to invite. We wanted it to stay a fresh idea and didn't want to recycle bands so we did a grand finale for the event where we rented a boat and had Andy Rourke who is the bass player from The Smiths come down from NY to DJ on a boat. Then we had bands play in the basement in the lower hull of the boat. So those two events were packaged for club members where they got tickets to both events for a fraction of the price. It's not the biggest discount we have offered for club members but definitely the biggest packaged offering on the event side that we've ever delivered. Both were huge successes, we had 400+ at the events. It was a really good time.
What are some events coming up?
YLMC also works with an artist that is a super group cover band called Dwayne Gretzky. Dwayne Gretzky’s members are from touring bands when they are not on tour playing the best rock and roll covers ever. Everything from Blondie, to Bruce Springsteen to David Bowie to Mariah Carey, No Diggity to whatever, but depending on whoever is in town. Members of Sweet Thing, Flash Lightnin', Allie Hughes, Dan Kanter (who is Justin Bieber's guitar player) and Robin Hatch who plays in the all-girl Weezer cover band Sheezer but she is also the touring keyboard player for Our Lady Peace. So they have become kind of a focal point of what we are doing and what we do. They are playing tonight at The Horseshoe for Halloween.
How does the branding part of the company come into play?
One of a number of ways. One, we execute events for brands. For example this past summer, I did a series of shows for Coca Cola across the country. It was part of their Olympics promotion where they got a UK-style double decker bus and did pop up concerts from Vancouver to Ottawa. I was hired to execute the actual concerts, book the stage and audio companies, help with the talent and ultimately be the production manager. Coca Cola saw us as a company that knows what we are doing in the music/events space and is valuable. Similarly, we're also helping Red Bull with their Crashed Ice event. They do it every year in Quebec City, and this year they are doing it at Niagara Falls also. They want to do an outdoor concert the day before the race and they've hired us to help them with that. So ideally, if the brands want to hold an event like that but don't know that much about it, or need an extra hand, they would hire us. At times the brand will seek my help to book the artists that I have a relationship with. It depends, I think the one thing the brands do have is an idea of who they are want to target; so they get someone like myself to reach that audience via the proper artists or event. Our job is to know their target audience and make sure that the audience has a good time at all costs. We want to create memorable experiences; not ones that are entirely sterile.
3 words that describe YLMC:
We strive to be YOUNG, CREATIVE and the right amount of RECKLESS.
Five things that people don't know about you.
1) I'm a huge hockey fan, like huge. I own one of the most insane hockey collections anybody has ever seen.
2) I grew up in a small town with a very small town upbringing. I am the only member of my family who has ever left the continent. Being a city marketing culture dude, I don't think people expect that.
3) I am not always as self-motivated as one would expect from an entrepreneur. Sometimes I wake up and play videogames for 6 hours.
4) I am very efficient in anything that I set my mind to. I will never be the person that works 14 hour days. But when it gets down to my work days, what takes someone 14 hours to do, might take me 6 hours to do. Once I get my shit going, I would say my work day is something like 11-5pm -12-5pm? Honestly, what I have learned is life's ultimate luxury is the ability to own your own time. And you only get there, if you know how to manage your own time well.
5) I own the original pressing of the board game Trouble, 1964, gifted to me for my birthday a couple years ago from my friend Lauren.
What are some things coming up for Young Lions Music Club?
Right now we have the Movember Campaign. We just rebranded the company for the month called the Young Lions Moustache club, and everyday we're doing a profile of a different person that is signed up as part of the Moustache Club. That's really our focus for the month.
Who works at Young Lions Music Club?
It's predominantly myself at the moment. I also have a couple of interns, Chantel, Curtis, and Julia that come in a day a week, and a designer, Cassie, who designs all of our stuff. Chantel is a student at OCAD in advertising, Julia goes to Humber for Journalism, and I brought on Curtis, who studies Music Business at Harris Institute specifically to help us with our Movember campaign.
Anna (My girlfriend) is the sounding board of everything that I do. Usually I have an idea and she builds upon on my ideas and I'm like OH MY GOD.
So staff wise, in the traditional sense, it's just me, but I definitely couldn't do this without these people.
Find Bobby at: www.younglionsmusicclub.com | twitter @YoungLionsClub
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