FAU has its own student-run record label. You probably didn’t know that, and for good reason.
It’s called Hoot Records, and with a staff of nearly 100 students, it’s supposed to record, promote and sell albums from musical acts ranging from rock to country. The only requirement is that at least one member of each act must be a current student or FAU alumni.
“There are a lot of schools that put out CDs, but we haven’t found anything that’s modeled the way ours is,” boasted Hoot’s leader, music professor Michael Zager, in a 2004 interview with City Link, a south Florida arts weekly. “We literally do everything.”
Actually, they’ve almost done nothing. Literally.In the five years since Hoot opened its studio doors, the label has released just one commercial project: Synchrofunkinicity by a West Palm Beach funk band called The People Upstairs. That was just over two years ago, back in January 2005. Since then, Hoot has barely promoted the album and has sold only a handful of copies.
In fact, as of last semester, Hoot hadn’t even finished a press kit for Synchrofunkinicity. That vital packet of information is supposed to be sent to radio stations, retail stores and media outlets.
“They’re working on our third press kit now,” says Ryan Lockett, who plays percussion in The People Upstairs – and once ran Hoot’s Business Committee. “Either it’s been held up by a faculty board on the university level, or new students come in and they want to do something different.”
So Lockett and lead singer Casey Buckley (a former FAU music student) made their own press kits. And they’ve sold their own albums – usually from the back of their van after gigs at nightclubs throughout south Florida. So far, they figure they’ve hawked almost 400 of them. So how many has Hoot sold?
“I’d say less than 50,” estimates Buckley.
Supposedly, Hoot managed to get Synchrofunkinicity stocked at both the Borders and Barnes & Noble and stores on Glades Road. But no one in the band knows exactly how many CDs have been sold at those bookstores – because they’ve never seen any sort of sales statement.
“When I was the head of business at Hoot, I went to Zager looking for sales statements for those few stores,” Lockett says. “I never got anything.”
Zager insists the statements exist.
“I just received the final statement yesterday,” Zager told the UP in late October. But he wouldn’t divulge the number. “There are a couple of contractual issues that need to be straightened out, but it’s something I’d rather not say.”
The band seems to have mixed feelings about their Hoot contract. On one hand, Lockett says, “The kids who were working there were great people.” But he adds, “At the same time, I think most of [the trouble] comes from a lack of direction from the lead guy.”
And Zager is that lead guy. He’s a veteran producer and songwriter who founded the ’70s funk band Ten Wheel Drive and worked with Whitney Houston long before she became a pop diva. Zager won the bid to create FAU’s Commercial Music Program – and a record label that would operate in tandem with the program.
“It’s an extremely unusual opportunity for students,” Zager says. “Who’s going to say to you, ‘Our goal is to get you going and get you signed out of here?'”
But Zager admits that he’d only give the marketing end of Hoot a “fair” grade.
“That’s something we’re trying to work on, to get it to the point where artists are getting the best promotion that we can afford to give them,” he says, adding that the students “make the decisions. The only time I would step in is if they were doing something that wasn’t proper, or didn’t go along with the guidelines of the label.”
Zager says he’s brought in consultants to help the students learn promotion the way it’s done in the real world. But Lockett is unconvinced.
“Week to week, it didn’t seem like there was a whole lot getting done,” he recalls. “If leadership were a little better, Hoot would really get a lot more done and students could focus on and know what they are doing.”
And it can be done – because it’s already being done just an hour’s drive south of Zager’s office.
