New business aims to fill Springfield with live music

If you've seen live music at Hotel Vandivort or Tie & Timber Beer Co. recently, you have Brett Johnston to thank.

The longtime Springfield show promoter and PR pro is launching a company, Compass Rose, that he hopes will expand the presence of live music in town by connecting musicians with venues.

He'll do it by offering flat-fee booking.

"The primary goal is to get musicians jobs and keep them in town," Johnston said this week.

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Johnston, until recently a media relations official with Springfield Regional Arts Council, said he thinks there is a market waiting to be developed for more live music, in Springfield and beyond.

"A lot of venues and businesses see value in having live music and would like to have it, but don't know where to start," he said.

For example, Johnston said the owners of Tie & Timber, a brewery that opened April 14, were interested in consistently offering live music to draw customers.

"Curtis and Jen are big music lovers and wanted it to be part of their business," Johnton said, referring to Jen Leonard and Curtis Marshall of Tie & Timber.

Meanwhile, "some artists aren't always the best at communicating for themselves to curate those gigs and to fulfill them."

This is where Compass Rose comes in.

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"The venue tells me when and where, and I set it up," Johnston said. He connects them with a music act and handles other arrangements.

"I provide the sound equipment, the lighting, the pieces of marketing, from there (venue management) can be pretty hands off," he explained. "I tell them who's performing, they get excited, I go in and build the thing, they don’t have to worry about anything."

Payment is a flat fee depending on the number of recurring performances, Johnston said, typically billed each month.

Previously, Johnston has booked shows with traditional venues with a live music mission. In a recent example, he set up a January show at Lindberg's Tavern by The Accidentals, a nationally praised Michigan band.

Compass Rose will continue with that type of booking, but it will also aim to broaden Springfield's idea of what makes a live music venue.

"I’m basically going venue to venue and saying, ‘this room needs live music,'" he explained.

For example, he has begun working with a real-estate developer who has three ribbon-cutting events per month. The developer wants live music at all of them.

"A venue can be anything," Johnston said. "It can be a business office. It can be a tire shop."

Customers who have a great experience tend to tell their friends, Johnston pointed out. Companies that have live music during employee events like a brown bag lunch can make a reputation as a great place to work — and that's helpful, when unemployment is at historic lows.

Meanwhile, Johnston is also identifying venues that can serve as places for ticketed shows, allowing businesses to monetize the space they already have.

For example, on Saturday, White River Brewing Company's tap room hosts a ticketed show by the Steel Wheels, a folk string act from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Founded in 2012, Johnston said White River has not been a venue for ticketed shows, with the exception of participating in the revived Queen City Shout music festival last year.

Photos from 2017: Queen City Shout

The tour manager for the Steel Wheels emailed Johnston recently.

"It was kind of like The Accidentals, where it's like, holy crap, I have to get this in Springfield," Johnston said.

He called venues, hoping May 19 was open. White River was available. Its back room just needed to be temporarily outfitted for a show.

He hopes to leverage these types of developments into entire music festivals and tourism promotions down the road.

Along with providing start-to-finish turnkey service for venues wanting musicians, Compass Rose is an attempt to ensure musicians get fair pay for a solid gig's work, Johnston said.

"By and large, we have a surplus of incredible talent in our region, but a small amount of venues who will pay fairly or even know what that kind of means," Johnston acknowledged. "I do think there are artists who are frustrated."

Theoretically, musicians in southwest Missouri can be union members of American Federation of Musicians Local No. 257 — based in Nashville, Tennessee.

But it has been about a quarter-century since a musicians' union was active in Springfield, Johnston said.

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Compass Rose is also a media company. Noting that news organizations spend fewer resources covering music than they once did, Johnston said he has already begun publishing items like band profiles and music videos on his brand's Facebook page and website. He also wants to publish a print magazine.

Johnston does not plan to limit his content to the musicians he books with venues, he said.

But Compass Rose is not a critical website like Pitchfork or Metacritic. "We value saying something nice, or nothing at all," it states on its About page.

In keeping with a mission to celebrate musical communities, and Springfield, Compass Rose online platforms are all decorated by a logo that resembles the "compass crown" at the center of the proposed blue-and-white city flag circulated by the Springfield Flag Movement in beginning in early 2017.

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Johnston acknowledged that developing this type of business is a "long play," but one that makes sense in terms of supply and demand.

He said he is leveraging professional contacts and relationships he's been developing for many years in local media, including the now-defunct TAG SGF and a stint as a college DJ for Drury University's KDRU.

"Well," Johnston added after a moment of reflection. "I was on my bicycle when I was a teenager handing out quarter flyers for coffeeshop gigs. It's been my whole life."

How to orient yourself in the direction of Compass Rose

Online: Enter CompassRose.Online into your browser.

Social media: Search "Compass Rose Online" on Facebook.

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