Drop The MIC: Music Industry Conversations

From Artist Management to Activism: Carving Your Own Path in the Music Industry with Kyle Frenette

Season 2 Episode 9

In this episode, we’re talking with Kyle Frenette, who previously was the long-time manager of the band Bon Iver. Throughout his successful and multi-faceted career in the music industry, Kyle has been involved in many different ventures including artist management, starting a record label to promote the local music scene, and political activism--even running for Congress. We’ll hear Kyle’s take on what the most important skills are for a successful artist manager and how he applied his skills managing Bon Iver to other parts of his career including his latest chapter on empowering musicians to use their platforms to promote impactful causes.

Jay:

Welcome to the Drop the MIC podcast where we'll dive into conversations with some of the music industry's most established professionals. Like all of our episodes, what you will hear today has been created and curated by Stanford students who are breaking their way into the music scene. I'm Jay LeBouef and I lead Stanford University's music industry initiatives. Whether you're aspiring to launch your career in the music industry are already a music industry pro, or just curious to learn more. We've got you covered.

Dan:

Howdy folks! Thanks for joining me for this week's episode of the Drop the MIC podcast. My name is Dan Sosa, I'm a grad student here at Stanford and I'll be your host and composer for this episode. Today I'll be joined by Kyle Fernet discussing his career as the longtime artist manager of Justin Vernon, best known as the front man of the band Bon Iver. During his career, Kyle started a record label called Amble Down to promote the music of Eau Clair, Wisconsin. While working with Justin of Bon Iver and gaining loads of experience in a relatively short time, he also went on to found Middle West Management, an artist management firm based in Minneapolis. In the latest chapter of his career, Kyle took a bit of time away from managing to run for Congress and is currently working on projects at the intersection of political activism and music, helping musicians use their platform for causes that inspire them. In talking with Kyle, I learned just how interconnected the music industry is and how keeping an enterprising attitude can lead to the creation of your own opportunities in such a massive industry. All right. Let's get to it! Kyle, thanks so much for joining me for this episode of Drop the MIC. So first things first, how did you get into artist management and how did you start working with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver?

Kyle:

I was a musician first and foremost and that's what I wanted to do and that's what propelled me into music and made me very passionate about music. I was the one in all of the bands that I was in, who was booking the shows, buying all the merchandise, balancing the books-- handling all of the business side of things, the marketing, the promotion. And so I was in bands throughout high school and when it was time to graduate four of my friends, my close friends who were all in a band together, decided to all move here to Minneapolis from a small town in Wisconsin called Chippewa falls, which is 10 minutes North of Eau Claire, Wisconsin where Justin and Bon Iver are from. And so we moved to South Minneapolis and all went to music college. As you might imagine, the band fizzled out pretty quickly with 19 year olds, all living in a house together for the first time. So I spent most of that year trying to figure out what was going to be next for me. My band mates and I had always talked about starting a record label. And in high school I discovered indie music and fell in love with the idea of creating a scene, and studying up on Sub Pop and the scene in Seattle and Saddle Creek and the scene in Omaha and just loved the idea of a bunch of friends making music in their bedrooms and putting it out in the world and having this recognition beyond their little town and their little scene. So that was my goal and so I figured, well, I can either continue my education or move back home and work three jobs and try to promote the music coming out of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, or we call it the Chippewa Valley, which is Eau Claire, Chippewa Falls, where I'm from and this town called Menominee. That was my plan and the spring semester of my first year in college the band had broken up. I had started the label, released my own music, plus some friends' music and was preparing for the third release when Justin posted the"For Emma, Forever Ago" album on MySpace in its entirety. He used some type of plugin to post more than three songs or however many, they let you post. We were all fans and when he posted that, I was home for spring break. I remember he had posted Lump Sum on like, on his website before he posted the whole thing and hearing that for the first time and it just like completely flooring me. You know, it's rare to have a reaction like that. It's only happened a few times for me with music where you hear something and you're just like, wow, this is unlike anything I've ever heard. He, and I had met a few times. My band opened for his band when I was in high school and I took piano lessons from his friend, Phil, who played in his band. And so we had met briefly. and when he posted the whole album, I just couldn't help, but reach out to him and say, you know,"Hey, I started this label and I'm going to school for music business. And if you ever need some help, let me know." And from there I didn't, I didn't really know what my intentions were. Like it was just, I loved the music and I wanted to help him. And I had built a teeny, tiny little like marketing and promotion infrastructure on my laptop, in my bedroom for the records I had released on my label. So I thought maybe I could lend them a hand and he was gracious and kind enough to meet with me and we met and the rest is history, I guess. I basically just plugged that record into this tiny system I had of getting it out to blogs and emailing the right people and it just snowballed. And that's essentially then how I fell into management because we decided that the best strategic thing to do would be to self-release it and shop it around to labels instead of me releasing it on my tiny label. That was, I guess, when we officially said that I was his manager and him and I ventured out into the great unknown together and continued doing it for 10 plus years.

Dan:

You're referring to your label, Amble Down, right? Did you keep running that while you were working with Justin?

Kyle:

Yeah. Yeah. I kept running Amble Down. Instead of working three jobs, I was managing Justin and getting all of this experience in the music industry and making okay money. And so I was investing a lot of what I was making on the management side into my plan to promote music coming out of the Chippewa Valley. And so, signed some more bands. And in total Amble Down released, I think, 22 albums over the years, course of seven or so years.

Dan:

It looks like not long after you established Amble Down, you also founded Middle West Management In doing some research, I was seeing a lot of management firms more so than I was seeing a lot of independent managers. Would you say that it's pretty typical that managers will at some point start or join a firm like Middle West?

Kyle:

It seems like a trend now, especially. I get emails more and more from managers that I've known who were either partnered up or working at a bigger firm going off on their own these days. For me, I knew that I had to grow professionally. For those first few years, here's when things were absolutely nuts, the Grammys and SNL and all and Kanye and all of that stuff. I was just working out of my house in Eau Claire. And in about 2013, after things died down a tad, I knew I had to grow and. Yeah, I figured I still had the label and continued to do it, but hadn't had the success I had wanted with it. And so, and just given the advent of streaming in 2011, when Spotify launched in the U S and Apple music came after that. I wrote a business plan for a management firm just because I figured if I wanted to keep doing this, maybe my dream of a label wasn't going to work and obviously I had something in the form of, a livelihood and, um, most, definitely a career in management. So why not grow that? it seemed like one of the only avenues open in that age of the music industry to be entrepreneurial, unless you wanted to become an agent, which I did not. Or, uh, you had a bunch of money and could buy a publishing catalog. So that's why I started it.

Dan:

Can you talk me through what some of the advantages are of starting your own management firm? What were your goals starting out and how did Middle West grow?

Kyle:

So there was a guy here who was managing a band called Poliça uh, and they were pretty successful and so I figured with the power of Bon Iver and Poliça, we could start a firm and grow it from there. The whole idea around the business plan was to do something different, than what I had seen come out of the bigger firms. In a lot of those bigger firms, I noticed that you were kind of were on an island set to do your own thing. You had the resources available to you from other managers and the network that came with that, but like you were really just kind of on your own and that even sometimes like your artists would get poached by the bigger managers. And I just, wasn't interested in that and wanted to come up with a way to spread the wealth, so to speak, um, the success that came with Justin and Bon Iver and the meteoric rise we had, was I thought an opportunity to provide up and coming managers with a way to do what they loved and grow professionally without having to work multiple jobs like I had the good fortune of being able to do. I was coming across so many managers who, you know, had this blossoming artist or a few but maybe just didn't have the time or the resources to take it to the next step. And so with Middle West, and the resources we had available to us, we basically started a company and came up with a formula to essentially sign other managers as if you would sign an artist and provide them with that safety net of a regular salary of benefits of a brain trust in us and the network we were building and support staff. And that was the idea to begin with. And yeah. We ended up building it to three offices and 30 clients at the peak. You build a collective, you know, you've got everyone's network everyone's various connections, everyone's knowledge everyone's experience. So in that sense, it was like, it was really helpful for, for all of us, including myself.

Dan:

One theme that seems emergent from your career path and I'd imagine it's true for a lot of people finding their footing in the music industry is this need to learn a lot of new skills on the fly. How were you able to learn everything you needed to know on the fly? Especially at a time when I'm sure it felt like things were going a mile a minute as Bon Iver kept rising in stardom.

Kyle:

Uh, put everything, I think aside, including my own personal life and sometimes health to just like focus, I think when I was young and determined. That plus really good mentors. Justin and I early on built, I think a very good team around us. Mostly just based on gut. And like I said, he was a little bit older than me so I feel like his instincts from maybe a bit more developed than mine in 2007. He still works with everyone that we started working with back then, except for our attorney, but that's only because our attorney isn't an attorney anymore and he runs a label. I think they saw themselves in me and understood that I was determined and had Justin's back and so they kind of took me under their wing and really helped me out. And instead of like, you know, saying, who's this guy, you know, like they like really guided me through a lot of things. So in that sense, that just really helped a lot. But yeah, other than that, it was just like reading and just literally working all the time to make up for being thrown into a situation that, I wasn't totally ready for.

Dan:

How did you know when it was time to add someone new to the team and who would you add next?

Kyle:

You know, things were growing rapidly. And I remember for instance, after our first tours Justin had said, I think we need a sound guy. And I said, Oh, I don't know. Okay. What does that mean? Um, and so we convinced his friend Brian to move to Wisconsin from Colorado, and he had been touring with The Fray and was his good friend's cousin. So. He started touring with us as our front of house guy. And then we got a monitor person and a tour manager and everything just kept growing and growing and growing and we just had to like roll with the punches because we needed, we needed all the help. We, you know, we hired an accountant. Early on it's best to conserve your resources. Like if you don't need a team that big of a team, you shouldn't have that big of a team. I always also say to artists that like, you don't need a manager until you need a manager. Managers don't always have the secret formula. I think a good manager has two qualities and that's the most important One is the network and the, connections. And then two is work ethic and professionalism and not complaining when you have to take the artists' car in to get brakes, repaired, you know, like doing everything from that to, negotiating a hundred thousand dollars publishing deal or whatever. You don't need to build the team until you absolutely need to build the team, until you have so much coming at you that you just can't handle it on your own. And I do think too, it's important for artists to at least like experience some of the business side of things before a team is built around them because it's important to understand what everyone's doing for you.

Dan:

If you don't mind, could you tell us a bit more about how you worked with Justin? How did you two make decisions together? And would you say that that's pretty typical for an artist manager duo?

Kyle:

Good question. With Bon Iver in particular, Justin drove the ship creatively 100%. I would definitely give my input but the buck stopped at him. I think now it might be a little different, cause I'm, I'm older, my frontal lobe is fully developed. Like I said, I was a musician and have recently with more time on my hands, like reconnected with that side of myself. And I think that at least for me personally, if I were to start managing an artist like that again, these days I would definitely have more to say from a artistic creative standpoint, even to a cultural standpoint and just being like way more informed about politics and culture and because that just being older and more present and not so, uh, lost in the direction of my early career and where it was going. But generally that is a very important quality that managers should have. Like thinking about things from a bird's eye view, from an artistic standpoint, from a creative standpoint and from a cultural standpoint and these days too, because everything is so political, a political standpoint. The best managers I know have that plus the other two things I named the networking and the connections and then the work ethic. So I guess there's three. I need to add another one. And that's the creative side.

Dan:

So it seems like once things started to take off for Bon Iver, they really took off. With such a success story. I'm sure it's hard to have many regrets, but are there any things that you wish you would've done differently?

Kyle:

I wish we would have pressed the brakes a little bit more you know, cause for a while, if you followed his career, he has been pretty resistant to showing his face, um, and giving interviews especially more recently. And that's because of fatigue and just like, we, I feel like in, early on, we just said yes to way too many things because it was all new to us and it was exciting And so we wanted to be the nice Wisconsin guys we were and say,"Oh, sure. Yeah. Okay. Sounds good." And I just think we did that a little bit too much and there could have been a bit more mystique around things and like, even more generally like licensing songs too.

Dan:

One thing I wanted to touch on was that it seems like throughout your career, you've always made it a point of keeping close ties with your home, specifically the Chippewa Valley area in Wisconsin and later the Twin Cities. Can you talk a bit more about the connection for you between your career and your Midwest roots?

Kyle:

I mentioned before my teenage admiration for scenes music scenes, especially Saddle Creek and Omaha and just seeing, you know, all of these friends in nowhere America uh, do something and have the world recognize it. Like I just, I had that idea to, before I started managing to move back home and promote the music that my friends were making in Wisconsin and just really wanted to do that. And so, because of that, I just kind of like set my sights on it and decided to stay. And then once things took off for us, like it was easy to conduct business from a laptop and a cell phone and never really had to, to move. I mean, there was definitely a advantage during those few years, we had an office in New York city to be there and have a presence there and to visit and be a subway, ride away from a meeting, with a label or whoever. But, early on we didn't need that like I said, because things were coming to us and it was just a matter of managing that and I wanted to promote the music coming from that region so I stayed.

Dan:

Typically, of course, when we're thinking about the music industry, we think about places like New York, LA Nashville, London as being the meccas of the industry. What was it like for you being headquartered in the Midwest away from these massive industry hubs?

Kyle:

I mean, it had its struggles. My situation's unique in that I was running the label, but you know, Justin was always my number one priority. And it felt like for a lot of years, we were just playing catch-up all the time. So I just kind of put my head down and did that work from my house in Wisconsin. And then when it was time to go to the bigger shows in LA and New York and wherever else, or go on tour or travel with the band to the specific place where like in Bloomington, Indiana, where the label was that's when I would get on a plane and do that and conduct business and then go home and get work done. So it wasn't, it wasn't too difficult for me. But yeah, I mean, even like right now, like in this COVID pandemic world, we're living in so much business is now just this people just on Zoom talking all day. Especially now that there aren't shows. Shows were like where most business got done the pre or post dinner hang and all that. When you're managing an artist, a successful artist, you gotta show up to where the industry is. Not necessarily Nashville. I mean if you're, you're managing a country artist. Absolutely. But, uh, New York, LA London, Tokyo, you know where the business is.

Dan:

So I wanted to shift gears a little bit and talk about activism. It seems like activism has always been a big part of the image of Bon Iver with Justin often partnering with local activist organizations or other charitable causes. Can you talk a bit more about that and how that came to be?

Kyle:

It's great that you say that because I feel like early on we weren't doing as much as we should have been because we were just so buried in work and trying to get from point a to point B. Whenever an opportunity would come across my desk and I'd always present it to Justin, but it was, it was difficult to know what to say yes to and how to spend our resources doing things like that while also trying to like make the business work and get to Cincinnati after a tire blew out, you know, for example. But yeah, later on, definitely I, especially around the time when things were pretty solid on the Middle West side. I had a great staff around me. We were going into our third record campaign, you know, knew what to expect from, from most sides. We set out to do a lot of work around domestic violence and sexual abuse and women's reproductive rights. And so we started a organization called Two, A Billion a play on the album title"22, A Million" and it's still around. it's mostly just been partnering with local organizations on tour to promote their message, their mission, raise some money, and they table at each show. But it's also been more than that too. Recently, the band gave a portion of their publishing and record sales royalties to various organizations working in the field. Especially now that they're not touring.

Dan:

So related to being more politically involved. A few years ago, you ran for Congress actually to represent Wisconsin. What inspired you to run for office?

Kyle:

I mean, there was a lot that went into it, but really it was. I saw an opportunity and dove in headfirst, not knowing anything about what I was getting into and I don't regret it by any means, but it wasn't for me. I learned a lot though. And I took what I learned and decided I wanted to explore this notion of what I described in like, these artists and their teams, not having any time to focus on the things that matter beyond music, I mean, of course music matters and building a business around your music, but like building some kind of business or organization acting as a consultant to artists and their teams to raise awareness around political issues, social issues just to do more activation overall in everything that they were doing. And so that came from my campaign from being out of management and wanting to do something different. Given this the upside down world, we found ourselves in with everything going on and being still a novice, but like way more politically informed than I was in those early years. And so I started this thing called Be Political, which is really now just a name of an LLC that I use for all of these different activities. The first thing after the campaign was I convinced Justin to go down to Madison, Wisconsin, to play a benefit show for our Senator Tammy Baldwin and it was hugely successful. Unbeknownst to us, she raised the most money she had ever raised in a single night. We signed up a hundred and some volunteers in the last two weeks of her campaign to knock on doors and promoted early voting on campus at UW Madison and she won. And it's not because of us at all, but we had a hand in it, I guess. Navigating that show how to raise money for a political candidate after coming off a campaign myself and navigating the FEC laws and all of that and having it be so successful is pretty eye-opening and so I took that and created this campaign called 46 for 46. That was meant to be 46 concerts to elect the 46th president and launched that in July of 2019. The idea was to partner with artists who have a strong connection with a place, you know, inspired by Bon Iver's strong connection to Wisconsin and put on shows across the country, starting shortly after the primary for the democratic nominee in 2020. Obviously that didn't happen because concerts don't exist anymore. But, uh, we pivoted and partnered with a company called Propeller to build out the platform that music fans at these concerts would take action on. They're an online platform, and it's all incentive-based action. So artists approach them about a cause they want to support, they have various organizations on their website that support that cause, and then music fans take action to support those organizations for a chance to win something. We pivoted the 46 or 46 campaign called it pledge 46 and it became basically a bunch of online sweepstakes with 25 or so artists and all of them were offering different prizes. Uh, Bon Iver offered a, fly away trip to Sydney, Australia. The next time they play all expenses paid which was really cool. Jason Isbell did a virtual guitar lesson with a fan. Lissie did a private concert for some fans. My Morning Jacket signed an original lacquer from their latest album test pressing. And so fans took political action and had a chance to win these prizes. And I think it was successful on all given the circumstances we find ourselves in.

Dan:

Did you find that you were able to apply your background as an artist manager to your political career?

Kyle:

Yeah, totally. And especially running for Congress was an eye-opening experience in that for in many ways, but the similarities there. It was fun for me when it was like similar to a record campaign, which it was very much so, making a video, setting a launch date, the marketing promotion, taking photos, making logos, establishing an aesthetic and a narrative and a story. Those are all things that I love to do and had experienced doing and releasing albums for so long. So there were a lot of similar similarities there. I figured I could maybe make more of an impact going back to music and trying to pair these two worlds which is how the Tammy Baldwin fundraiser came about. And then after that I partnered with a friend of mine who runs the Live Nation branch here in the Twin Cities to do a show for the Boundary Waters. We did a show up in Duluth to benefit an organization called Save the Boundary Waters, which is working to stop mining from happening up there and ruining it forever because it's a very unique and sacred place completely protected. Um, and so we did that show up in Duluth in summer of 2019, and we raised a bit of money for the organization and just had a hell of a time doing it, it was so fun and it amplified the organization's message and it was, uh I've got the poster here right in front of me. It was a complete Minnesota based lineup. A lot of artists had gone to the Boundary Waters multiple times in their life and were able to tell stories about it and yeah, it was just, it was another eye-opening experience to be like, Oh wow, music has the power to like really amplify these, these messages and, and make an impact. And so I felt like I was really onto something there with concerts for a cause if you will, quote unquote yeah, so everything I've we've done since has definitely been informed by my career in artist management. Absolutely.

Dan:

That's awesome. So what's in store for you in the future?

Kyle:

I'm enjoying the work I'm doing with Propeller, propeller.la if you want to check it out, they're doing all kinds of cool stuff. I don't know where that's going to lead but yeah, like I definitely do think there, there is something in that. After the Tammy Baldwin experience, I was talking to a few campaigns trying to get artists to do like concerts for congressional candidates or state candidates. I mean, Donald Trump did do one thing. And that was, uh, and I don't know if it's a good thing or not, but completely merged culture with politics. And now if you're an artist not politically informed or speaking out, like, what are you doing? That's my question. Like, should have at least have an opinion on, on something. And that's why I like Propeller because Propeller offers this platform that has it all built in for artists and their teams. And it's very turnkey. So it makes it if you have an album coming out or a tour or a live stream, you can build a Propeller campaign around it to give away a few tickets to the live stream or to the show, or do a meet and greet at the shows or do a exclusive early listening party of the album or the single with some fans to give that away in exchange for action, that's going to make an impact on the world instead of building it from scratch.

Dan:

Kyle it's been awesome chatting with you. Before we wrap up, do you have any final nuggets of wisdom or anything for prospective artist managers out there?

Kyle:

Do as much as you can to learn as much as you can early on so that when things are coming at you and you have to delegate work to other people, you understand what they're doing for you and your artist. That's the biggest piece of advice I would give. Even more simply, and this does apply to the industry today once we get past this pandemic, but acting as a tour manager gives you an immense amount of experience going out on the road with a band touring the country, the world, sometimes meeting people at venues in the industry. That is an immense amount of experience and I know a lot of managers who came from tour management, so that's something more specific, that up and coming managers, might be able to do to, springboard their career.

Dan:

Kyle it's been so great chatting with you. Thank you so much for talking about your career and sharing so much wisdom with all the listeners. And thank you listeners for tuning in for another episode of Drop the MIC. We hope that you've enjoyed hearing about Kyle Frenette's massively successful and very diverse career path and got a glimpse of how interconnected the music industry is and how really"choose your own adventure" it can be with the right attitude. Stay tuned for another episode of Drop the MIC next week. Again, I'm Dan Sosa and it's been a pleasure hosting you. See you next time!