“Celebrate, celebrate, celebrate, sell…”: Perryscope’s Norman Perry on his approach to crafting brand extensions for music icons

Norman, it’s great to catch up. I wanted to start by asking how you approach crafting brand extensions for your artists?
When we start work a project, like James Brown, one looks at the realities. Where are the streams coming from? What are his top four or five markets around the world? What product categories are most synonymous with who we think his audience is? But the biggest challenge is not just to connect to Norman or Billy… We want to connect to an audience that is yet to discover the music of James Brown, because they may first be attracted to a t-shirt. That t-shirt might lead them to listen to his music, or watch a documentary about him, or buy a good old fashioned vinyl record.

“Our licensees are very good at interpretation without exploitation.”

In the same way that an anniversary might kick-start activity around a movie or TV show, what helps licensing around a music artist gain traction?
We’re very blessed to work with fantastic representatives of artists like Miles Davis, Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston or James Brown, that make sure it gets noisy.

Noisy?
Noisy could mean a re-release, a cover version, a tribute night on American Idol… It could mean any number on things. But whenever it gets noisy, my job in attracting like-minded licensees is a lot easier. And their job at being able to convince retailers gets easier. I always say: ‘Give me a seat on the bus – and a seatbelt in case you drive too fast – but wherever you’re going, I’m going with you.’ If that takes me to South-east Asia, great. If that takes me to Eastern Europe, great. If it takes me into headwear, leisurewear, home goods, so be it. No two clients are the same, no two campaigns are the same and our approach differs depending on the artist.

Let’s dive into one of your recent projects. You partnered with Roots of Fight on a James Brown apparel collection.
We’re honoured to be working with a company that celebrates other like-minded superstar activists. They have launched apparel with Pelé, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali… For James Brown to be their first music-related in the Roots of Fight series of dynasty collections; that was appealing to me.

The range looks great.
I can’t ever predict how the product would turn out. I don’t say to people: “Here’s the style guide, you must use this religiously.” I tell the hundreds of licensees that we have around the world: “You have mad scientists that work for you – they’re called ‘designers’ and ‘graphic wizards’. We want them to embellish what we give you.” We approve everything and if we don’t like pink or polka dots, we’ll let you know… But we’d have never been able to have 400 different approved versions of The Dark Side of the Moon art if we’d done it all in-house. That’s how I look at it.

“My goal is to convert you to James Brown if you’re on the fence, re-energise you if you’re a dormant fan or introduce you to him if you’re young enough.”

Do any other examples come to mind where giving licensees that degree of creative freedom resulted in some really stand-out product? Something that otherwise might not have happened if you’d been ‘stricter’ with a style guide?
I could name too many! Some of the best results have come from designers out of Japan. We worked with a company called UNDERCOVER who did a phenomenal David Bowie interpretation spanning handbags, coats, dresses and high-end apparel.

HUGO BOSS did a really lovely job for David Bowie a few years ago. Burton Snowboards did a great line for Pink Floyd. We worked with a lifestyle skateboarding brand called HUF a few years ago on a Miles Davis range. They did a brilliant job and introduced him to an audience that was very hip and very fashion-forward. We let the design team ‘have their way’ as it were and the result was fantastic.

AC/DC did a small collaboration with Gucci that did so well it turned into a second collaboration – and Gucci used artwork that none of the other licensees had ever bothered to use, even though it was in their style guides. When we did some peeling back of the onion, we realised it was artwork associated with the album that first introduced AC/DC to Gucci’s then creative director. It was a fairly obscure album from the Eighties called Blow Up Your Video.

That designer did a great job in helping to re-establish that artwork, to the point where other licensees reached out and said: “Can we have that new artwork?” I laughed and said: “Of course you can have that old artwork, you always could!” It just took somebody with guts, it took somebody with conviction, it took ‘the first DJ’ to do it.

‘The first DJ’?
It takes someone – like John Peel did in the UK for decades – to play an artist before anybody else. Before anybody else could have a vote, he was already saying “I love so and so.”

I love that – and you’re right, it’s a great analogy for licensing. You need some of your licensees to be that ‘first DJ’ for a brand, or a style of artwork.
I always admire a company that will be respectful to the artist, obviously, but that’ll take a tact that’s unique and bespoke.

Does that extend to categories that might seem ‘left-field’ or not an obvious fit? Do those opportunities excite you?
We work with a company out of California called KnuckleBonz. They recreated the Pink Floyd pig from the Animals tour, and a road box that it sits on. They also took the circular screen from the Division Bell tour and recreated that as a statue. They also did it for the Hell’s Bell bell for AC/DC. It’s a different type of collectable.

When he was alive, David Bowie made the decision to never be a figurine and that remains the same now he’s not with us. That said, the David Bowie Archive loved the idea of a Barbie that’s dressed up as Ziggy Stardust. That was a great marriage of an iconic look with one of the biggest icons in history in Barbie. It was so successful that Mattel followed it up with Barbie dressed in an outfit from the Life on Mars video. That was a moment of pride for me.

And then look at what Funko did – they invented a category… We’ve done an Aretha Franklin Funko, a Whitney Houston Funko, a George Clinton Funko… And they look wonderful side-by-side. It’s affordable, it’s whimsical and it doesn’t cannibalize your t-shirt sales. It’s about celebration. Our approach is celebrate, celebrate, celebrate, sell… There are a couple of people, out there whose approach is more sell, sell, sell, sell. We celebrate, celebrate, celebrate, sell.

It’s a good mantra.
One other thing we did that I’d love to mention is a collection of collectable toy tractor trailers celebrating iconic tours. Revell did one for AC/DC’s Rock or Bust tour. We’ll probably do another one for the Power Up tour this summer. They are fun things to do and it reinforces that we’re not interested in logo-slapping. And our licensees are very good at interpretation without exploitation.

‘Interpretation without exploitation’. I’m writing that down! Looping back to James Brown for a moment. What does he represent for you, and what other categories do you think he could work in?
First of all, I don’t think he gets enough credit as an activist. Neither does Aretha Franklin. In the case of James Brown, the documentary that came out recently here in the US – Say it Loud – reminds you how terrible things were at the beginning of his career. Segregated hotels… Numerous shocking reminders of what the Chitlin’ Circuit was all about in the fifties. Then, as we saw with so many artists, when he goes to Europe, he’s treated equally, fairly and as a superstar. Over there, colour was a non-issue and talent was what it was all about. Also, here in America, James Brown was also a big advocate of education. He wanted young people to stay in school and made a big effort to give back in that direction. We want to make sure the licensing programme honours some of those things.

Away from that, he was known for his level of performance. Any way that we can state the obvious through photography of him doing the splits or being on stage with The Famous Flames… If we can reflect his talents in the merchandise, that’s great. That could bring us into footwear, or maybe a jacket that recreates a satin jacket he wore on tour in the seventies. A great licensing programme means never having one too many of something… If anything, you want one too few.

My goal is to convert you to James Brown if you’re on the fence, re-energise you if you’re a dormant fan or introduce you to him if you’re young enough. If I can do that through the right mix of wearables and collectables, that’s great. That also includes prints and lithographs. We work with a company called Studio Maxe and they do great work. They’ve done wonderful things for me on Whitney and Aretha, and now they’re doing great stuff for James Brown.

They look great. Now, as mentioned, you’re dealing with artists and estates. How do you navigate the thoughts, feelings and multiple interests that come when licensing real people?
Every client is set up slightly differently. My perfect scenario – with a living or a dead client – is to have one to two key people that you can root business and creative opportunities through to get a quick “yes”, “no” or “maybe” – with some input. To just turn down something doesn’t give me or a designer insight into why it was turned down. I won’t deny there are times when we deal with lots of people and it can be a little dysfunctional, because everyone wants to get the final word in. In those cases, I prefer if they can fight amongst themselves and then give me one person to deal with!

The tragedy with artists from the fifties and sixties is that as good as some representation was, it was also the infancy of our industry. So one forgot to get full buy-out rights for merchandising or for photos used on album covers… Whenever I sign an act, the first thing I ask is: What do you own? What do you control? And if you don’t own or control it, is there someone that can tell me where those bodies are buried? And tangible assets can be all sorts of things. It could be old set lists, or tour posters or photographs… We’ve used tickets from Woodstock effectively across all sorts of product categories over the years.

“My goal, from a merch point of view, is to make The Everly Brothers a household name.”

And what helps you have ideas? How do you fuel your creativity?
We’ve all had ideas in the shower or woken up in the middle of the night with an epiphany. Keith Richards woke up with the riff to ‘Satisfaction’ in a Florida hotel room! I also always look at things from a fan’s point of view. What makes an artist cool to people? Their quotes or style? A logo? A lyric? But the main thing is that I surround myself with people that are more creative than me!

We’ve spoken about lots of your artists – but which one would you say is the most underrated?
I would say one of the great American songwriters of my lifetime, and perhaps the best American rock and roll band – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. I don’t think they get their dues around the world, possibly because they didn’t tour that much or maybe because he died young. If there’s an artist on my roster that I’d love to globalise more, it would be Tom Petty. The artwork is brilliant and their core work is spectacular.

Who would I like to see better results for? There’s still a lot more work I can do – and want to do – for Peter Tosh. I’d also love to see Olivia Newton-John do really well – she’s synonymous with that whole ‘athleisure’ scene with ‘Let’s Get Physical’. And the other one that comes to mind is The Everly Brothers. My goal, from a merch point of view, is to make The Everly Brothers a household name.

We’ve had a lot of successful and really fun reactions to what we did with Sonny & Cher. I think we could achieve a similar level of success for Olivia and The Everly Brothers. I always prefer the underdog and to introduce the world to a band like Humble Pie is a turn on as much as anything else we do.

And who’s the latest artist you’ve signed to your roster?
Last month, I proudly became involved with Why Now Music as the licensing representative for Tina Turner. It’s another phenomenal addition to our roster and a huge privilege for me. Hopefully we can make her fans proud with what we do there, and if there is such a thing as an afterlife, we can make her proud as well.

Amazing. Congrats! Norman, I realise I haven’t asked about your path into the music business. Where did your love for music come from?
I think many North Americans would answer the same way… If they’re older than me they’ll say “Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show”, but the nine-year-old me would say it was The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. That quickly led to me becoming the worst drummer in Canada.

Ha!
So I loved music from an early age; I actually went to see Bob Dylan on his first electric tour for my 12th birthday. The one where everyone was shocked to see him abandon his folk roots. I got to see a lot of artists very early on in their career… Simon & Garfunkel, The Turtles, The Byrds… I caught the same bug as everybody else.

And while I was a failed musician, I wasn’t bad at booking bands for my high school or getting the equipment organised. I soon realised as a teenager that I loved being on that side of the curtain. I got to know the booking agency in Montreal that was selling me those groups. I ended up becoming sort of a gofer at that company after hours, on weekends and in the summer holidays. I cut my teeth there as a roadie, a production manager, a stage manager, a junior booker…

I started to really love the crop of artists that we were headlining. The company also promoted all the concerts at the Montreal Forum; the big hockey rink there that staged concerts. One week it’s Deep Purple, one week it’s Procol Harum, one week it’s Led Zeppelin… I fell in the business and at the same time, fell in love with a young lady that wanted to go to France for school. I thought going to London would allow me to see her on weekends.

Oh! So you moved to the London?
Yes, naively! It wasn’t as easy as we’d imagined it would be… Fortunately, she didn’t like the schooling in France and came to London. We’ve lived together ever since.

Amazing. And was the London job similar to what you were doing in Montreal?
I saw an ad in the Melody Maker for a job at a company that was promoting almost all of the same bands that the company in Montreal was promoting. So I got a job there and the company was called John Smith Entertainments. It was a father-son company – John and Tony Smith. They had been doing The Beatles, the Stones and Pink Floyd through the Sixties and by 1973 – when I joined – they were looking for somebody to help put shows together for the bands coming back to England from America.

I started off as a production guy and slowly but surely started to listen to some of the bands that record company reps would drop off… Next thing you know I’m working with groups like Thin Lizzy, Be Bop Deluxe and one of my favourites of all time, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band.

Is that also when you would’ve been first exposed to the world of music merchandise?
Yes, it was during my time working as a junior promoter that we got involved in the merchandising business. I got the bug almost immediately. And while I wasn’t directly involved in that division while I lived in England, I did help set up its American operation – and that led to my career as it is now.

So did you set up Perryscope from that point?
I took a slight detour. I set up a concert promoting company – originally called Perryscope – that operated in western Canada. During that time, the American division of that merch company bought out the British division and that company was subsequently sold.

“I loved music from an early age; I actually went to see Bob Dylan on his first electric tour for my 12th birthday.”

Along with a partner I started another company called Anthill Trading in the Nineties. We sold Anthill to Live Nation, and then I set up Perryscope 2.0 around 11 years ago. We’re a full-service licensing company. With a stellar staff that make me proud, we still have some touring artists and I still have huge respect and admiration for the people I started with at the beginning in England; many of whom I still work with today.

How has the licensing industry around band and artists evolved over the years?
Well, back in those early days, once the ticket touts in England stopped scalping the tickets, they started selling unofficial posters. There would be Black Sabbath on one side and Deep Purple on the other… It was done without any rhyme or reason. Bands would hate the bootleggers.

Brian Epstein was considered the next genius manager and he did things around The Beatles that no-one else had done, including taking them into a touring mode that’s still considered to be the beginning of the live industry. Many of the deals he did were flats and there was no back-end. As we learned from the concert business, if there’s no back-end the promoter makes too much money. If you do the same thing in the merchandising business, the licensee makes too much money as well.

So people like Epstein were making deals left, right and centre, but they didn’t have the infrastructure that they do now at Apple to ensure the contract was the greater of X versus Y. He was grabbing his X, but he was never getting Y. The next crop of managers that came along – people like Steve O’Rourke from Pink Floyd or Peter Grant of Led Zeppelin – made sure that X was double X, and that they still got Y.

The other thing to note is that back then, the merchandising revenues were not yet that big. T-shirts were selling for $10 or $15, so it wasn’t generating masses amounts of money. I think Genesis’ 1977 Wind and Wuthering tour grossed half a million dollars… Now there are artists that can do that on the so called “come in” at a stadium show, and do $1m to $1.5m in total. The numbers are massively different these days.

“We’re seeing retailers that stock Disney or Manchester United merch, also embrace pop or rock and roll merchandise.”

So slowly but surely those merch prices started to increase, our expertise started to increase – and we gained the ability to earn bands money seven days a week, 365 days a year, around the world. It really gave us a seat at the table.

So the savviness of those managers played a part in creating this part of the licensing business?
Yes, but the other major event that contributed was when a lot of bands fell in love with music videos in the Eighties. When MTV was the name of the game, a lot of record companies shifted their money towards subsidising these videos. And these videos had massive budgets for certain artists, so the merchandising equation changed dramatically. Merchandisers started to pre-pay the artists for the privilege of working with them. Instead of “Here’s what we made last month”, it became “I think you’re going to make no less than X this year and here’s a good faith deposit against it.”

The bands used some of that advance merch money to help subsidise their start-up costs and other costs associated with getting tours ready. They needed to do that because record companies were no longer giving ‘tour support’ because they were putting that money into videos. That’s when you see artists start to earn massive amounts of money in the non-touring world, to the point where they didn’t need to tour because they were making so much money from retail. And in the last two decades, we’ve seen the entire high street want to be part of the equation.

Do you feel music brands now have equal appeal at retail to other character and entertainment brand?
Absolutely, licensed product centred around bands and artists belongs side-by-side other types of brands. And we’re seeing retailers that stock Disney or Manchester United merch, also embrace pop or rock and roll merchandise. We feel that Pink Floyd, or James Brown, or AC/DC belong in every tier of distribution. David Bowie belongs everywhere; we just have to make sure the product, and the design, are authentic.

Absolutely. Norman, this has been a treat. Huge thanks for taking the time and hopefully we can catch up again very soon.