The Mattson 2 Talk Shop
Jared and Jonathan Mattson talk about publishing and licensing, strategic touring, working the merch table, taking risks to evolve your career, and the thrills of having a number one-selling album
Jared and Jonathan Mattson, identical twin brothers from Southern California, are the Mattson 2. Their music is a breezy, laidback synthesis of modal jazz, ambient textures, open-ended jams, and surf. They played their first gigs about 15 years ago, and have released four full-length albums, three EPs, and a number of collaborative projects with artists like famed skateboarder and guitarist, Ray Barbee, Chaz Bear (Chaz Bundick, Toro y Moi), Money Mark (Beastie Boys), and many others. In 2018, they covered John Coltrane’s opus, A Love Supreme, which—surprising for the sometimes overly-reverent jazz world—was met with critical acclaim, and last year’s release, Paradise, reached number one on Billboard’s contemporary jazz chart.
The Mattson 2 is a committed, well-oiled, and hard-working machine. They tour regularly—and were mid-tour in March before COVID-19-related cancelations sent them back to San Diego. They also work the festival circuit, and release new music almost every year. They have a loyal, dedicated following, turn a profit with the various streaming services, and Jared even has an endorsement deal with Fender.
“Once you get to a level that companies know you have your own audience and culture, they want to be a part of that culture,” Jared says. “The Eric Clapton’s of the world are only going to be selling guitars for so many years. Eventually, there are going to be kids who don’t know who Eric Clapton is. These brands who are big, are not as big as people think sometimes, and they need to be able to relate to your average consumer. They are realizing the value of these indie bands. They want to be a part of that early period of growth, and be a part of those artists’ careers.”
I last spoke with Jared back in 2014 for Premier Guitar, and we focused on his prodigious looping, compositional process, and idiosyncratic gear. This time I spoke with both Jared and Jonathan, and explored their serious business chops. They explained the nuts and bolts of their publishing company; the importance of touring, engaging your audience, and working the merch table; the types of risks you need to take in order to evolve your career and discover your band’s actual value; and—in addition to sales—the type of foresight and planning that goes into placing an album at the top of the charts.
You were on tour when the COVID-19 crisis hit, but weren’t you also in Nashville right after the tornado, too?
Jonathan Mattson: My wife called me that morning and asked if I heard about the tornado. I checked the news, it just devastated Nashville right near the area where we were going to be staying. It was crazy. But the show still happened, and people still came out. The venue said it was a good idea to still do the show—we checked with them first, we didn’t want to still do a show if it wasn’t the right thing to do. They said, “We definitely still need you guys to play, and it would be a good thing for the people.” And it was a great show. We started the tour in Dallas, and that was right when the talks of COVID started unfolding. It hadn’t really been covered yet.
Did you get most of your tour in or was a lot of it canceled?
Jared Mattson: We got three quarters of the tour in, which was great. We did our whole east coast routing. We also did the south, Texas, made it all the way to the midwest, and after our Minneapolis show, that was when we had to hightail it home. We had to cancel 13 or 15 shows—but we got play 23 or 25 of them—so I am thankful that we got to play what we played.
Were you planning to play festivals this summer, too?
Jared: We always want to play more festivals, that’s always the goal. We were just starting to line up the summer when all this happened, so the summer is either postponed or we’re moving the rescheduled dates.
When did you officially establish the Mattson 2 as a band and incorporate as a business?
Jonathan: We incorporated as a business in 2014, which was seven years after our first tour in Japan. That is when we say the band actually started, as in doing legitimate tours. But we started in high school. We wanted to play with a bigger band, but no one would commit to it. We were really serious about it, so we finally decided to just make it a duo.
You never brought in a bass player?
Jonathan: We did, but they’d always cancel. They’d say, “We can’t do this, or we’ve got soccer practice.” So we decided to be a duo. We just wanted to make music, we didn’t want to be tied down by anyone else’s schedule or things that interrupted it.
Jared: There was a time where I was super-interested in upright bass. I was playing upright bass almost exclusively for about three years. Once we started looping, we started working in some looping of the upright, and then I switched to guitar. That was in the very early stages of Mattson 2.
Did you already have an album out when you did that first Japanese tour?
Jonathan: That was Ray Barbee Meets Mattson 2, and we toured there with Ray. We played this one cool noteworthy venue called Ageha, which is right on the water there, and it was a crazy festival that lasted all night. I think our set was at four in the morning. It was a full crowd and there were tons of people there. We did shows in other cities as well.
Jared: But becoming a business started roughly when we were in Orange County after grad school, when we really started making a living doing music, and playing shows around town. That was partly due to our maturing and understanding the need to make money. It was also due to meeting people along the way—including Jonathan’s wife, and also our friend Coach—who have a good business sense, and encouraged us to raise our rates, and only do a certain number of hours per show.
Do you have a publishing company, too?
Jared: We do. It’s called Bohsheekwo Music, which is an inside joke—it’s a gibberish word that we made up—we own our own publishing, and license out the publishing to different entities for each record.
How does that work?
Jared: You license the publishing rights to bigger publishing agencies to get bigger publishing deals, if that makes sense. It behooves you to give 50 percent of your publishing to say, Warner Brothers, for seven years, if they’re going to work for your record for seven years and really do a good job, rather than just sit on your own publishing 100 percent and not make any money because you don’t have the connections.
Does that mean for each album, you license the publishing to someone else, and then they put out the album?
Jared: For our last record, Paradise, we put that out on Chaz Bear’s label, Company Records, and licensed the publishing to his subsidiary, Car Park Publishing. We still own our publishing, but for the next five years, we have an arrangement with Car Park where we share 50 percent of publishing royalties, which is a typical independent deal.
Do you do that album by album?
Jared: Ideally, we’d like to do a bigger album deal, like three albums or so, but if you do an album-by-album deal, that keeps everyone safe. It gives you freedom to explore other options if you don’t like the label, and it gives the label other options if they feel like you aren’t selling records very well. It is a win-win for both, in many cases.
Paradise charted on the Billboard charts as well. Does any album that sells land on their charts, or do you have to be a part of a system?
Jonathan: It’s an interesting world and we don’t know much about it, but we have people that know about it for us. We hired Terrorbird Media and Grandstand Publicity to help with the PR for the album. Grandstand helped getting our music in the journals and reviewed, and then Terrorbird helped with the radio play. We have companies that are helping with all the behind the scenes. I mean, your average listener probably thinks, “They’re on there because their music is amazing.” But it’s also because you have this team that’s working under the radar, that’s getting your music out to these places and media outlets. In addition to that, you have to be selling records, of course. We were stoked, we were at number one for a week or two—definitely for a week but maybe a little longer—and you get at number one for selling a certain number of albums.
Jared: We just beat out the tail end of Willie Nelson’s charting of his jazz record [My Way]. His record was on the top of the charts for months, and then we came in at the very tail end of that, and got to number one. There are these little anomalies that happen within the business, where your record can come out at exactly the right time. For instance, it can come out two weeks after Kamasi Washington’s record, and on paper your record got number one, and Kamasi was number three, but the reality is you came at the ideal time. What’s a bummer, which has not happened to us and I am thankful for, is if you get overshadowed by a bigger release that comes out the same day as yours. Hopefully, you’re with a label that understands when the big albums are due, and they know how to schedule around those so you’re not overshadowed.
Do you release everything on vinyl as well?
Jonathan: Everything starting with our 2011 release, Feeling Hands, came out on vinyl, although a lot of them are out of print now.
Do you sell them from them bandstand and work the merch table after the set?
Jared: We were recently on tour with Khruangbin, which was such a blast and one of the best tours we’ve been on—other great ones were with Chaz and Toro y Moi—but the Khruangbin tour was sick. They were blowing up—they still are—but they were hot and selling out every venue on tour, one day after the next. We called our agent and asked for advice, “What should we be focusing on on this tour? How can we make the most of our time, and make it the most impactful experience for new fans and current fans?” His biggest advice was to interact with the audience from the stage. Talk to them, but in your own natural way. Acknowledge them and try to connect with them on a personal, social level—and then work the merch table—be there throughout the headliner’s entire set. If you’re the opener, and you have a whole hour to kill as the headliner is playing their set, do not go home. Don’t leave, stay there, network, associate with the audience, and work your merch table the whole time. Chances are you’ll get 50 to 100 people talking to you, and maybe 20 of them will buy an album.
The headliner doesn’t care, they’re cool with that?
Jared: Yeah, that’s partly how the opener makes their money, by selling their merch. It’s super important. It’s an artists’ dilemma, or a defect with certain artists’ mentalities, where they think they’re too-cool-for-school, or the creativity goes to their head and they don’t want to interact. They think it’s cool to be out there and separate from everyone. But that’s not the best business thing to do, especially if you want to make a living doing it.
Is your music available on the different streaming platforms?
Jonathan: There’s an interesting dynamic happening right now, because I think artists, and even booking agents and other people, are rethinking the whole streaming thing. While it’s extremely valuable to be on streaming—because that’s how everyone consumes music now—but according to a Princeton survey I was reading about recently, only 20 percent of the artists make any money, and even then, for the artists that do make money, it might only be a couple hundred dollars per year.
Someone I interviewed recently said he’s making between $6,000 and $8,000 for every million streams.
Jonathan: It’s cool to get a check in the mail, but that’s not how an artist should expect to make money. The thing that’s good about streaming is it will definitely help promote your show. People will say, “I saw it on Spotify. It said you were playing tonight.” If you’re not on streaming, people won’t know about your stuff most likely. But at the same time, given that COVID-19 is preventing musicians from performing live—which because of streaming has become their main source of income—I feel I would rather sell our music directly.
Jared: For our next album, we’re thinking of releasing it on our website, and that’ll be the only place you can buy it—digital download from our website or vinyl—but we won’t put it up on Spotify until a year later or something. Spotify will get it on playlists, and get it everywhere, but like Johnathan said, the focus for artists is on the show side. If you have an album on Spotify and that person is following your page on Spotify, they’ll see your shows when you’re coming to their city. But if we’re not playing shows, that revenue is gone. The desirable thing about Spotify is they can sell you more tickets, and now no one is buying tickets because there are no live events right now.
Your audience is loyal enough that you can drive them to your website and bypass Spotify?
Jared: What’s amazing to consider is that each genre has its own avatar of listeners. The Mac DeMarco, Tame Impala, indie music crew—those are people who buy records. Whereas the Bieber crew, and a lot of the hip hop stuff, those are all digital sales. Depending on the type of genre the particular artist wants to get into, those genres have different avatars of listeners who consume music in different ways.
How do you set up your tours?
Jonathan: We have an agent and he books our tours. We consult together. We’ll say, “We don’t want to do this area of the U.S. this year, but let’s do this area.” We’ll have some input. He’ll secure the shows months in advance. Ideally, five months in advance is a great time, because that gives you time to gather the marketing, send your marketing assets to the venues, and get a great campaign going to help push the shows. That’s an ideal time frame for a tour to be booked. Sometimes you’ll get a guarantee for the shows—you’ll get a set amount of money—other shows you’ll get a ticket deal, where you get a percentage of the tickets. It’s always different.
Who settles at the end of the show, you or the agency?
Jared: Traditionally the tour manager does, but we do it because we choose not to have a tour manager. We just want to make as much money as possible, it’s lean and mean. The agent very rarely settles with the venue, unless there’s a problem or a discrepancy, but that usually never happens. The venues are trustworthy and honorable, and everything is already lined up before a note is even played. We know exactly what we’re getting. Usually, the way it works, if you’re on an agency they can leverage and get a deposit before anything even happens, and the deposit is more to keep the agency covered rather than you.
Are venues generally trustworthy, not like those sketchy stories you hear about?
Jonathan: There is still tons of sketchiness going on, but if you have the right agency, they’re connected to the right venues that will honor that. If you’re on your own, that’s the time where you might get taken advantage of. We’re fortunate not to have to worry about that.
Jared: The thing I find solace in, is I don’t have hard feelings against the people who have taken advantage of us over the years. When you sign up to be in the music business, you are signing up to be in one of the most cutthroat, savage industries there is. You need to be ready for it, and if you’re not, you are going to be taken advantage of. If you get taken advantage of, you can’t point the finger, because people should do their homework and figure out what they deserve, what they are owed, and what their value is. There are tons of resources. The Music Industry (Explained In Plain English) is amazing. But if you know your stuff, and you have the insider knowledge of what your value is, it will protect you.
How do you find out what a venue should be paying you?
Jonathan: That’s why you need an agent. The agent will vouch for you, and then at the end of the night, you get the settlement sheet and it tells you how many people bought tickets and all that stuff. And that’s how you know.
Jared: A lot of it has to do with if you are returning to a market that you played before. It depends on your market history. If the promoter and agent both know that you’re going to sell 400 tickets, they’re going to give you a super good deal. But if you’re a new artist—and you’re new to the territory, or you don’t know much about the territory—they’ll probably give you $1,000 or $500 or something. But if you really know what you’re doing, and you’re in a market that you know is going to sell tickets, then that’s your leverage. It’s as simple as that. My advice to my 10-years-ago self would be play as many ticketed shows as possible. Don’t worry about doing these guarantee shows where you get $500 from this restaurant or $800 from this bar. That’s cool to a certain degree, but you’ll never evolve your career by just doing those monthly gigs. You’ve got to start expanding and selling tickets, because then you’ll realize your value.
Jonathan: That brings up a good point. You could be a musician that makes a great living and all you do is play restaurants and little speak easies—you could make $1,000 a month, and that’s good for a lot of people—or you can take the risk of being in the market of the music business. Playing in a restaurant or a speak easy is cool, but you’re not, per se, developing a music market. If you’re playing at legit venues, where they have touring bands coming through—whether they be big or small—you’re developing an audience. Even though there is an audience coming for the restaurant or speak easy, in our experience—because we did that too back in the day—it’s a limited amount of people that end up coming, because it’s more of a background music vibe. If you’re playing at an actual venue, that’s where they can actually experience your music, your sound, and your originality. If you feel you have something unique, get outside of the comfort zone of playing weekly residency things at a restaurant or speak easy and play stuff at a legit music venue. If you think you have an original sound that you think people are going to resonate with, even if only 50 people come to your first show, see how many come the next time.
Are you saying that that’s the difference between developing your audience versus relying on the audience the club draws?
Jared: That’s a good way to look at it. And also, some people are happy with that lifestyle. Some people want to play the same bar for the next 20 years, do that four times a month, and they’re happy with that. That’s super cool and I admire that. There are many different mediums within the music industry. There are also wedding bands that make way more money than we do annually, and all they do is play weddings. There are agents who only book cover bands, and they are at a reputable agency and they only book cover bands. There are so many things you can do in the music industry, but we decided to go the indie music route, and it’s fulfilling because when you do shows where people buy tickets, you know those people are there to see you. But if you play a restaurant, that’s the restaurant’s audience, and those are people who want the fillet mignon a la carte.
How does playing music venues differ from festivals?
Jonathan: Festivals are like venues, but on a grander scale. They have a heavy marketing team that’s involved with booking, moving ticket sales, and pushing attendance to the festival. It’s great because you also have the ability to tap into an audience of a band that might be bigger than you. It’s a great place for discovery, and for building your fans in a certain market. For instance, we played Forecastle in Louisville, Kentucky, and we had never played there before. But we played that festival—and it was a great festival, great turnout—and that definitely helped secure a venue show in that city six months after that. If we didn’t do that festival, we probably wouldn’t have gotten the same sort of treatment as we did.
Jared: Payment wise, unless you’re a band like the Flaming Lips or the Killers or whatever— and even they probably have the same pay structure—you usually just get a guarantee. You don’t get any percentage of the ticket. It’s a soft ticket. People are buying one ticket for all these artists, and you can’t really track what this person bought the ticket for. Usually, the festival life is a guarantee-based thing. Some opening bands don’t even get a paycheck for it. They’ll get their expenses covered and that’s it. But they want to be there because they want the exposure. Like Jonathan said, the quickest way to develop and penetrate a market is by doing a festival in that city. The other way is by doing an opening set for a bigger band that has a similar audience in that city. All that is easier said than done though, and you need an agent to even get an opening slot playing with a good band. Festivals are a good amalgamation of everything we’ve talked about so far. They do have that restaurant vibe of a built-in audience, but there are also people there only to see the music. As an opening band or smaller band on the bill, you basically get this amazing built-in audience.
Are there limitations in terms of other festivals or gigs you can do in the area?
Jonathan: That’s a radius clause, which is at certain venues, too. If you’re playing a show at a festival or venue, typically you can’t go back there or play a show within, say, 100 miles of that area for maybe three months later.
Jared: It’s usually three months. Sometimes you can talk to the promoter and say, “We’ve got a show and it’s 70 days from the radius clause, do you mind if we take it?” It’s all about communication. They’ll usually tell you to go for it. You become intertwined as people as well as businesses. It benefits all parties to make sure everyone is happy. If you have an important thing to do, you communicate that, and they’ll usually let you do it. But you don’t want to be that shady band that tries to play whatever gig they can in a certain radius and burn all your bridges.
Is that true even in big markets like New York?
Jonathan: Even New York. If you’re playing ticketed shows, that’s where it matters, because that’s when the venue has invested. It was extremely difficult even before this outbreak happened. After the dust settles, the venues are going to be busier than ever before. There are so many people in line that had to reschedule, it’s going to be a long time to get back to where things were. But even before this happened, it was very competitive to get yourself into a legitimate venue in major, and even small, markets. When you’re getting one of those deals, the venue is as invested in you as you are invested in them. In a situation like that, they’re not going to want you to play a venue 30 minutes outside of town. They’re working hard, pushing the show, giving you a guarantee, and taking a risk.
How strict are they? Do New York venues care about Philadelphia? Do Manhattan venues care about Brooklyn?
Jared: They don’t want someone buying a ticket to a Brooklyn show when they could buy one to a Manhattan show. Typically, they’ll say that you can do a Brooklyn show, but we have to sell out the Manhattan show first. They don’t want you to effect pre-sales with the announcement of a rival show right around the corner. But Philadelphia is a completely different market, so that doesn’t matter. It would matter for someone like the Rolling Stones, but it doesn’t matter for an indie band who gets 200 or 300 people at every show.