Screaming Females Get Down To Business
Screaming Females’ Marissa Paternoster, Mike Abbate, and Jarrett Dougherty talk about community, integrity, and the business of making music
Screaming Females, a power trio from New Brunswick, New Jersey, are known for their ferocious live shows and intelligent, well-crafted songwriting—not to mention guitarist Marissa Paternoster’s nimble fretwork—but they’re also a serious business entity. Their tours—at least pre-COVID-19—are well-structured and profitable, and that’s true for the rest of their operation as well, including physical music sales, generating revenue from merchandize, and even streaming. They run their business themselves, although as bassist “King” Mike Abbate notes in our interview below, that’s on purpose. “It’s not like we were settling for DIY,” he says. “We can work hard, and do what we want to do.”
But that business model, ultimately, isn’t about business as much as it is about integrity and being a part of a community—they don’t believe in rigid classifications like “business associates,” “other musicians,” and “fans”—which is something that becomes obvious to them on tour.
“We really look forward to seeing these friends—people we’ve known for more than a decade—and sitting with them after the show,” drummer Jarrett Dougherty says. “I’ve met people in Europe, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and it’s people I never would have met who I now consider friends. Because of this band, I get the opportunity to sit at a table with them every couple of years and see what they’re up to.”
I interviewed Paternoster and Abbate back in 2016 for Premier Guitar, and we discussed, in addition to their songwriting and gear choices, their penchant for ear-splitting volume and the transformative power of punk. Here, we brought Dougherty into the conversation as well, and spoke about the pros and cons of DIY, the intricacies of band management, the advantages of working with a record label and booking agent, band finances and their mastery of the U.S. tax code, and the power of community and mutual support.
Were you in the middle of a tour when venues started canceling because of COVID-19?
Mike Abbate: Yes, but we were lucky, we only had three shows canceled. Although we’ve since had many more shows canceled.
Jarrett Dougherty: We didn’t have a full tour booked for this summer, but we had a bunch of one-off dates. We have a fall tour booked that’s being iffy. But for this last tour, we were on the west coast, and very quickly it went from thinking, “We’ll get these last few shows done,” to everything being canceled—and it was a wild ride getting home.
Did you have to drive straight back to the east coast?
Dougherty: We flew home, but we had rented gear in Los Angeles. We were in Oregon when all our shows got canceled. We had to drive about 900 miles in a day to get the gear back to L.A.—to drop it off—and then we had to figure out how to get on an earlier flight home. It all worked out, but it was a really wild two or three days.
When did the band start? Marissa and Mike, you knew each other from high school, but when did you meet Jarrett?
Marissa Paternoster: I met Jarrett at Rutgers. Our friend was putting out a compilation of local artists. Jarrett had music on it—he was helping putting it out, too—and I had a bunch of music on it. I went to one of the meetings about the compilation, and I met Jarrett there.
Dougherty: The compilation was called, I Heard This First. My two favorite songs on it were from two of Marissa’s projects. One of those projects was with Mike. We met and started playing music together.
When did you become Screaming Females?
Paternoster: Mike and I were in another band when I met Jarrett called Surgery On TV. That band disintegrated. We were very young, and people were leaving to go to college, etc. Jarrett originally joined Surgery On TV as the new drummer. Then when the keyboard player left, it was just Jarrett, Mike, and I, so we decided to start a new band.
Were you always committed to DIY? Was that your plan from the outset?
Dougherty: I would say it was our only option. There were definitely some big ethical and moral influences on us as a band—on the way we operate—but a lot of it comes down to coming up with the same solution for a similar problem, which is that if the music industry is not going to pay attention to you, or provide you with its resources, then you have to find a way to do that on your own. That’s the situation we were in being from New Brunswick, New Jersey, and playing kind of music we were playing. But as soon as you get involved in that world, you find out about the history of it, how it goes so deep into punk—and also broader than that, the jazz and folk music world, all these different worlds that have had artist-friendly labels at the center of them, not the industry per se—and you start to celebrate that. You realize how you can build a whole life with it. It’s not just a business. It’s not just an industry. It’s your friends. It’s your family. It’s the people that support you. Once you have that, that builds in that idea. It becomes more than just a decision you can make about your business. This is your connection to your whole world. If you're going to try to throw that away for a quick buck or something, not only might you get screwed in the process, you’ll probably lose the whole foundation of your life.
Abbate: It’s not like we were settling for DIY. For me, when we started this band, I didn’t know that DIY was a way you could be a band. I thought that every band plays to 2,000 people in New York City, and they’re all famous, and we have to either strive for that, or we’re not going to be a band. But then Jarrett showed us basement shows, and for me, I thought, “Cool, we can do it this way instead. This would be exciting.” Living some wild rock ’n’ roll dream never really entered my mind again. We can work hard and do what we want to do.
But you’re still doing all the same things like playing venues, making videos, and recording albums. But on your own terms.
Abbate: Yes, which I think is important.
Dougherty: It’s important for a number of reasons. As a self-managed artist, you constantly have to balance your artistic aspirations and inspirations with your business side of things. It’s something that we have been very good at. If you take a look at Screaming Females as just a business—remove all the really important stuff about our artistic input, expression, and communication with the audience—to run a small business successfully through the last 15 years is really rare. How many small businesses are able to last for 15 years and continue to steadily and consistently bring in profits? I think there is something to be said about how we’ve been smart about that. Perhaps you could say we could have gotten filthy rich if we had done it a different way, but the numbers don’t show that to be true. Most people that we know—whether they stayed in a DIY model or not—if, from the outset, they didn’t have a clear vision of how to operate as a business, they probably flamed out pretty quickly, because it is really hard to manage such a small amount of money in a successful way.
How do you divvy up your duties?
Dougherty: I answer the emails. Mike does the accounting, the online merch sales, and a lot of our merch production. Marissa does a lot of social media stuff, especially when we’re on tour. She has a good archive of our photos, demos, old videos, and things that are really important assets at this point. She also does our visual artistic output. That’s all in addition to, obviously, our being musicians and that important aspect of our business.
Do you have regular meetings to coordinate, or is it more organic?
Abbate: We practice once a week—and we have for the past 15 years, with the exception of this situation we’re in now—and usually we’ll talk about boring business stuff in between practicing songs. But rarely a formal meeting. Usually we’re hanging out and practicing.
Are you also your own management?
Abbate: That’s Jarrett [laughs].
Dougherty: I handle the administrative duties of the management aspect, but it’s really a group effort. And it’s not just us, we trust the people we work with, too. There’s Joe Steinhardt, who runs Don Giovani Records, and Brian Gorsegner, who we work with for booking [Wired Booking]. The reason we bring them in, is not just because, say, Joe can put our record out. It’s because he has input about how to do it, when to do it, and what the finances should be. We take into account those other people because we trust their opinions, but really it comes down to the three of us making decisions management-wise.
Why did you sign with Don Giovani as opposed to doing it yourself?
Dougherty: We put out our first two records ourselves. We put out our first 7-inch ourself. We booked our first 400 shows ourselves. We were a band for a number of years before we had any involvement with anyone else. It was literally just the three of us. But ultimately, the reason we started working with Joe was because he was persistent. He was someone we knew from our community. He hung out in New Brunswick. He knew all the punk bands in New Brunswick—he wasn’t just someone who appeared out of nowhere—and he was very persistent. At the end of a tour, he showed up at a show in DC. I said, “Joe, what are you doing here?” He said, “I am here for the show.” The next day, he was in Baltimore. “Joe what are you doing here?” He said, “I am going to be at every show until you guys do a record with me.” I said, “Give me the pitch. What do you think we’re not doing that you can do?” And the main thing, at that point, was distribution. In an era when you literally could not sell music anywhere other than the back of your van—which is what we were doing without a distributor—getting a distributor as a single artist was very difficult. I tried to do it, but for a major distributor to set up an account with one artist who has two records, they don’t want to set up an entire account for that. It doesn’t make sense for them. To be able to group together with Joe, who already had distribution—although it was small—meant that we weren’t literally selling each one of our albums out of the back of our van.
How does it work? Does he give you an advance? What does he pay for?
Dougherty: When we started working with Joe, Don Giovani was a very small label. They had mainly released hardcore punk 7-inches, and one or two full length records from slightly more pop punk bands. We were already a step out of their normal sphere, but we were in the same scene, and Joe was excited about doing it. But to that point, an advance for a label that size is literally pressing the records, which is a big advance. That’s thousands of dollars for a label that might never see that money back. The idea was never that Joe would pay for the recordings or do anything more that that. Mike runs a small label. Mike, talk about how the finances work.
Abbate: My partner and I, we run State Champion Records. We put out tapes, CDs, and a couple of records. Nowadays, you can press 100 records, but for a while the minimum was 300, which was going to cost close to $3,000. For a band that might sell 18 of them, you’re then sitting on a lot of debt.
Dougherty: Don Giovani is now in a different place, and I assume they are able to offer some of their artists budgets for recording. But we’ve never changed our relationship to them. We still pay for everything ourselves, and they handle actually producing the albums and distribution.
You hand them a finished master?
Abbate: Yeah, and since we pay for it, we technically own the master. We can do whatever we want with the publishing, or whatever that means. But we try and cut Don Giovani into whatever tiny bit of money there might be from that, if we do get money, because we need them to exist for us to exist.
But you have complete artistic control. It’s your baby until you hand it over to them.
Paternoster: I don’t even think Joe listens to our records anymore. I highly doubt it. He might have listened to the first one we did together, but I am pretty sure he doesn’t listen to them anymore [laughs].
How aggressive are you selling merch at your shows?
Paternoster: Like do we threaten people?
One band told me they run from the stage to their merch table to sell and sign stuff. Do you do that, too?
Paternoster: Yes, basically. We usually have someone helping us on tour, who sells our stuff for us. But once we’re done playing, typically Mike and I are over there. It’s fun, too. It’s not just about selling stuff, it’s an opportunity to talk to some people—the people who were nice enough to come see us play.
Abbate: That was part of what was exciting about starting a band and playing DIY shows to begin with. It’s important to me at least, to still try and meet people even though we might be playing bigger shows now. I think a lot of our fans really appreciate that about us, too. Marissa is a very approachable person, despite how horrifying she looks on stage [laughs].
Dougherty: Those relationships jump boundaries, too. Some of the artists that Mike works with are people we met at the merch table at a Screaming Females’ show. The world isn’t divided into these classes of, “the people you do business with,” “the people you have artistic relationships with,” “fans,” “musicians.” If you open up those boundaries, you can develop some amazing relationships. You can also encounter some crazy weirdos out there, who are entertaining.
Is the band incorporated?
Dougherty: Absolutely, we’re an LLC [limited liability company], which provides a number of things. First is that for income from venues, they have to issue a W-2 or a 1099. If it’s just us as individuals, that provides a strange tax situation. Second, being an LLC provides us some legal protections for things like if someone were to get injured at a show and tried to sue us for having some responsibility for that. Whether that’s appropriate or not, that’s a fact that could happen.
Are you employees of Screaming Females?
Dougherty: We’re the owners of the business. If you own a business, there are two tax federal structures for owning a business. One is the LLC type, and the other is the official corporation type. The corporation type gets taxed as a corporation, and then the profits which are distributed to the owners of the corporation are also taxed on an individual level. LLCs do not have that double taxation, that’s the benefit. The LLC is not taxed federally, you just have to report your earnings. But the earnings—the profits—are then distributed to the owners. Me, Mike, and Marissa each get one third of the profits of Screaming Females LLC every year on our personal taxes, whether or not we personally actually see that money. Most business models operate on a quarterly cycle. They would see approximately the same income and expenses every quarter, and especially on a yearly cycle. For a band, it’s confusing, because we don’t operate on a yearly cycle, we operate on these multiyear cycles. We have to save up money for two-to-five years to pay for things like a van, recording, and major equipment investments. It looks like every year we’re making about the same amount of money, but most of that is being stored in our band LLC bank account. For example, let’s say we bring in $30,000. At the end of the year, we would each have $10,000. But what if we plan on making a record next year, and we have to save $10,000 of that to go toward paying for the record? That means that only $20,000 is distributed among the three of us, but our taxes still say that we each got $10,000. It means you have to manage money across years in this convoluted way, which means that often we owe more in taxes than we are actually earning. But it is still a better structure for us than any other potential structure for how we could operate our business.
Who’s in charge settling with the venues at the end of the night?
Dougherty: I do that. I handle the tour management aspects. A lot of bands will have tour managers, which is an important role on tour. That means scheduling, and making sure you’re in touch with venues, but also radio promotion, in-stores with record stores, interviews with press outlets, photos, and communication. Since I handle that, I usually handle settling, too. It’s just because they usually look for the tour manager, and since we don’t have a proper tour manager, I assume that role. But Mike and Marissa have both settled a million times as well.
Abbate: Something usually goes wrong when we do though. We usually mess something up [laughs]. One time recently, somebody tried to stiff us, and they knew that Jarrett was the one who would know what the actual deal was, so they found me and Marissa instead and handed us an envelope full of money and ran away. Then we realized they shorted us a few hundred dollars.
But in general, are venues sketchy like that?
Abbate: It’s rarely that sketchy. That’s a very unusual story that I just told you.
Dougherty: The vast majority of people who are involved in live music are doing it because they love it. It’s not it’s like a big money business—other than on a huge Coachella-style scale—the places that we’re dealing with, if they don’t have good relationships with the people coming through, that reputation is going to get out there quick and they are going to lose to the club on the other side of town.
How about with larger venues?
Dougherty: With the more professional, bigger venues, the numbers will be obvious from the get-go, but it’s usually that you’re getting screwed. That’s what it comes down to. If you’re a big corporate entity, you need to have all these people on staff, and you staff the events a month in advance. You staff them the same, regardless of who’s coming through, because you’ve got this corporate structure. A lot of time, they’re not going to give tailored deals in the same way that a small venue is able to, because of that huge corporate structure. With a smaller venue, they might think, “Screaming Females are coming through, which means the show is going to sell out. And their fans aren’t assholes, so we don’t need three bouncers tonight. We can probably deal with one bouncer because these people aren’t going to be so wasted that we’re going to have to kick out a bunch of people.” People really do make those calculations, and that adds an extra $200 or $300 onto the night. They’ll tell us, “We didn’t have to hire the extra bouncers tonight. I know it was in the deal that it said we were going to have three bouncers, but we only have one. We’re going to give you that extra $300 because we love when you come through.” That sort of thing seems mild, but it happens all the time when you deal with small venues. They do little things like that. They’ll say, “We had meals on here as part of the budget, but we had a big corporate event last night and they ordered way too much food. If you don’t mind eating the leftovers, we can cut that out of the deal, and then we don’t have to worry about it.” And we’ll do it. But big corporate venues are not going to have that sort of flexibility.
Do you play the same places in each city?
Dougherty: We go to a lot of the same places. There are certain places where we have sold out the same venue a few times, and we think about trying a bigger spot. We’ll go to the bigger spot, and they’ll say, “Here are the expenses, blah, blah, blah.” When we run the numbers, say, if the venue fits 450 people, we’ll have to bring in 400 to make the same amount of money that the club that fits 190 has been giving us for the last 10 or 15 years. Plus, we’re probably going to be one of the best events the smaller venue has on the calendar that month. We’ll go with the smaller place that’s always supported us, and likely, when we bring 190 people, we’re going to get paid as much as the bigger venue.
Abbate: And it also supports the small venue, which is an important cultural institution.
How has streaming impacted your income?
Abbate: It’s definitely not a life-changing income stream. But I imagine more people are listening to our music as a result of it, or at least giving it a shot. I check out a lot more bands because of it—I don’t like most of them—but I might give them a shot.
Dougherty: A lot more people have probably heard Screaming Females because of streaming than without it, but the actual intimate long-term engagement that people have with music, I would say has been reduced greatly. If you buy an album, you are going to spend time listening to it. You’ll play the record, flip it over, grab the jacket, think about the art. It’s an experience that’s lost in the world of streaming. Viscerally, certain types of music are easier to absorb on first listen. But my favorite types of music are rarely the ones that grabbed me the first time. A lot of times, it takes maybe a dozen listens before I think, “I didn’t realize that was happening, that was cool.” As far as the money goes, we do actually make some money streaming, it is a real income source, but I think the net is a loss, ultimately. If there was no streaming, in a magic world, we would make more money on physical sales that are being taken away because of streaming. Streaming seems somewhat inevitable—considering going back to the Napster years—but the structure that has been created around it was not inevitable. People treat it as though it’s just a natural occurrence, as opposed to these corporate structures pushing for a model that is best for them.
But as Mike was saying, it helps in terms of discovery. Have you seen that at all?
Abbate: Probably. I don’t know how we would measure that impact. I personally have only met a handful of people who said, “I checked you out on Spotify and now I am here.” So yeah, we have at least five more fans [laughs].