Phil Sweetland’s
COUNTRY and SPORTS INSIDER
NASHVILLE – Good morning to all our friends along Music Row and at country radio stations, and especially to our heroes in uniform, serving in harm’s way all over the world.
Next year AristoMedia will celebrate its 35th year of remarkable service to Music Row and country radio, and a visit to their offices last week and to the company Web site revealed that two huge keys to success for the firm have been versatility and flexibility.
We really need to study closely the eight business cards of the key members of Aristo’s team to get a feel for the company’s versatility.
Begin with Jeff Walker, the engaging Australian who as president and chief executive of AristoMedia Group, which brands itself as “an entertainment marketing company,” oversees all of the company’s extremely diverse divisions.
Those divisions handle a wide range of business. Walker, Executive VP Craig Bann, and VP of Operations Matt Watkins are key administrative executives for AristoMedia Group.
AristoPR handles Entertainment PR & Publicity, Event Planning & Marketing, and Media Planning & Consulting. VP Christy Walker-Watkins oversees these critical functions.
Rick Kelly is VP of Radio Marketing for AristoMedia’s Marco Music Group, which handles secondary radio promotion. Marco Club Promotion covers club and venue marketing, one of many booming businesses.
The countless tech, online, and digital aspects of today’s music and radio businesses are handled through AristoWorks, with VP Jon Walker leading the way.
Other services this very varied company can offer its elite list of clients big and small include Aristo Video (video marketing), the Goodland Group (distribution services), Walkerbout Music (publishing), GMV Nashville (digital label services), and Jeff Walker & Associates (entertainment consulting).
Phew. That’s a lot of divisions, and a whole lot of capabilities which when combined truly make AristoMedia Group a single-source and Nashville-based shop for showbiz clients all over the world.
And unlike many Row firms, Aristo has decades of service here. The company has helped countless clients weather the ups and downs of a rapidly changing industry since 1980, and in fact can trace its corporate roots back farther than that, to Jeff’s dad Bill Walker, who worked as the music director for superstar acts in the 1960s and 1970s including Johnny Cash, Eddy Arnold, and the CMA Awards.
As Jeff fondly recalls, Cash would sign off his iconic TV program by thanking Bill Walker, who is still very much alive and living in semi-retirement, still as a key role model for the Aristo team.
“It started with my Dad,” Jeff Walker says during an interview in Aristo’s offices at 1620 16th Avenue South in Nashville on a rainy July 18 afternoon.
After being born in Australia, Jeff moved with his family to South Africa, where Bill Walker ran RCA Records’ local A&R operations. Bill handled the soundtrack when the country superstar Jim Reeves came to South Africa in 1963 to play the title role in what would be Reeves’s only film as an actor, Kimberley Jim, set in the diamond mining region of that country.
“Jim loved what Dad did with his music so much he said, `come to Nashville,’ ” Jeff Walker recalls. “Well, the week Dad got here, Jim Reeves was killed in a plane crash.”
That was July 31, 1964, exactly 50 years ago next Thursday.
By that time, Jeff, his mother, and his two brothers had returned Down Under, where Jeff completed his schooling and university education.
“Fortunately, Chet Atkins was running RCA at the time, so Chet put Dad on the road with Eddy Arnold as music director,” Jeff recalls. “He went into the studio with Eddy and arranged all those hit records of Eddy’s in that period, classic records such as `What’s He Doing In My World’ and Make The World Go Away.’ Dad did the arranging and conducting on those, and he brought that sort of European sound that he’d developed.”
Around that same time, Johnny Cash was preparing to launch and host his own weekly ABC-TV program. The first episode in 1969, taped at the Ryman Auditorium and beginning with Johnny looking straight into the camera and intoning, `hello, I’m Johnny Cash,’ included Bob Dylan as guest star in one of Dylan’s extremely rare live appearances of that era.
“Every time the show aired, Johnny used to say `hello, Bill Walker’ or `goodnight, Bill Walker,’ ” Jeff proudly recollects.
Following the end of the Cash program in 1971, Bill went on to do the CMA Awards telecasts for 15 years and network specials, serving as music director.
“My history started when I came over from Australia after finishing my education,” Jeff says, “and began working with my Dad’s record label, Con Brio Records.”
Appropriately, “con brio” means with enthusiasm in Italian. In any language, Jeff Walker and the whole AristoMedia Group team bring that same upbeat spirit – plus decades of real-world expertise – to each and every project.
Con Brio Records racked up 43 nationally charted singles in under four years. Billboard named Con Brio country’s Independent Label of the Year in 1977.
“Then in April of 1980 I formed Aristo on Music Row, and now we’ve got the five divisions,” he said. “It’s a one-stop shop. People can come in and use all the services or they can be a la carte.”
Jeff reckons that probably about 80% of AristoMedia Group clients go the a la carte route. “People like to pick and choose,” he says, “because we work with the other companies in town that do some of the same elements as us, like publicity. We might be doing video or radio work with them, and they have their own publicist. Or we might be doing publicity, but they’re working with other radio people. So it just sort of mixes and matches.”
The firm also honors and respects the work of competitors. “We’ve got a lot of friends that do the same thing as us and do it very well, too,” Jeff remarks. “We pride ourselves in being real active in the community.”
A firm believer in volunteerism and giving back to the Nashville community he loves so well, over the years Jeff has served as president of NEJA (Nashville Entertainment Journalists Assn.) and the Nashville Film Festival. His current board tenures include the Country Music Assn. (CMA), and the Country Radio Broadcasters (CRB).
He’s also serving as co-chair of the upcoming Leadership Music 25th Anniversary event, which will be held in August.
One of Jeff’s great strengths, and that of his firm, is a vision for the global growth of country music and country’s international base. Because of his efforts around the world, the CMA honored Jeff with the Jo Walker-Meador International Award last year.
“I think that country’s international growth is very exciting,” Walker says. “The industry now understands the necessity for expanding the format on a global basis. As all businesses are these days, country music has to reach new territories as the Internet creates new opportunities but also presents new challenges.”
He sees those opportunities as being the “instant dissemination of information” but the simultaneous challenges come “with the availability of streaming and downloading. The opportunities for people to purcharse full records aren’t there like they used to be.”
Walker believes that the music business is slowly adjusting to these changing environments, but “we still have growing pains.”
Country radio promotion, a highly complex business and a challenge for anyone, has been a constant source of strength at AristoMedia Group, which focuses on secondary, tertiary, and Internet stations.
“I think one of the reasons we’ve been so successful at radio is that because of our five divisions, we don’t have to do it on quantity. We can and do focus on quality,” Walker says. “We have a client list that we’re proud of, and we can restrict our client list in several areas. For us, it’s not as much about volume as it is about just having the ability to be proud of every individual project we’re working.”
Jeff says that this is a key point. “The companies we work with all know that we’re not going to try to push something that is below our standards,” he says.
Stability is very comforting for investors, for key clients and top-level artists, and AristoMedia has been a name and a brand these major companies and superstar artists have known and trusted for over three decades.
This extends to key staff as well. Craig Bann has been at Aristo for 25 years, Rick Kelly for almost 15 on the radio side.
“The whole entity is a family,” Jeff says. “During the 1990s, we had over 20 staff, and I sort of didn’t like it. It was just too big for me. I like to be where you have a friendship with everybody, and we’re at 16 now, plus we use interns and we use different part-time people. That works for us.
“What I call it is managed growth,” Walker continues. “We’ve been able to do that because of the benefits offered by computers. With videos, we can send our clients links. With press releases, we don’t have to lick stamps, which I certainly had to do when we started out.”
Looking ahead, Jeff stresses the vital function of marketing in all of AristoMedia’s various projects. “If you look at our Web site,” he points out, “you’ll see it’s an entertainment marketing company, because that’s what we’ve evolved into. We’re essentially a marketing one-stop.”
The dance club segment is one of the most dynamic fields AristoMedia services.
“We’ve seen tremendous growth and opportunity for exposure in the dance-club area,” Jeff says. “Here in the States, you’re getting a lot of pop or rock clubs who will have a dedicated country night one night a week. They’ll play country records, and often they’ll bring in the local country DJs to spin those records. Often, getting airplay at those dance clubs can generate requests at the local stations.”
Texas is a particularly fertile market for dance clubs. “Some of the big clubs get thousands and thousands of people on a monthly basis,” he notes.
The addition of a dance club division is another example of Jeff Walker’s visionary nature. Aristo, thanks in large part to him, has been willing to change with the times, even embracing change as it comes, and its very diversity adds major value for current and potential clients who contract with the company.
In the tech area, “digital marketing is completely different from video marketing,” Walker notes. “There’s a lot of small-market radio station Web sites that really could be capitalizing a lot more on using updated apps, using their sites almost as their 25th hour for advertising. There are a lot of opportunities to cross-collateralize.”
Walker sees a massive upside in international growth. Each country has its own challenges and opportunities, but Jeff sees facets such as the booming country touring opportunities globally as being a major chance for country music expansion.
Finally, we asked Jeff to look into the crystal ball and forecast where AristoMedia Group and country music as a whole might be in 2020. “I see both of us continuing to grow,” he says. “I think that country music is gonna have to reach out and embrace more of the Hispanic audience in a lot of ways, mainly because that demographic is growing so rapidly in this country. I think country music will continue to be successful because it’s so diversified.”
He continues: “In terms of AristoMedia’s growth, there’s always new areas that we’re exploring and thinking of ways to get into. The main thing is to stay ahead of the game and be forward-thinking. Think about where you think things are going to be, and educate yourself in the trades with what’s happening, particularly with our brethren in the pop format because they tend to innovate, and figure out how we can take that and adopt that to our format here in Music City.”
