Mike Shea Interview: Founder Of Alt Press

Did you know that Alternative Press magazine was the first national music publication to put Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, NIN and Radiohead on the cover? You heard that correctly. Most of us probably had no idea Alt Press was even around "back then."

Mike Shea started Alt Press in 1985 (because of mono) and, from Day 1, has been the first (or one of the first) magazines to help launch bands into our stereos (or iPods). If you want to find 'the next big band', look no further than the latest copy of Alternative Press. There is almost 25 years of experience to fall back on.

I was honored enough to have Mike Shea, founder and owner of Alternative Press, answer a few questions I had about the history of AP, unsigned band tips and many more. I'll be releasing the Q&A through weekly blogs. Here we go....

Tim Towner: People have always come to me for new music which is the reason why I started doing music blogs. I get some of my bands from Alt Press like many other people because of Alt Press' knack for finding "the next big thing". After glancing through your past covers, you had some of my past "hidden gems" such as Urge Overkill, Therapy?, Afghan Wigs and Superchunk. It says on your Wikipedia page that Alt Press was the FIRST national music publication to put Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails on the cover.

Please tell me how you found these "buzz" bands without the internet (no Myspace plays to watch), online videos to watch or fan online chatter? How was "buzz" measured before the internet? Did you find any future front cover bands by randomly going to a show?

Mike Shea: As silly and out of the movies this sounds, but good old fashioned face to face conversation was a great way to discover bands. As well as other antiquated forms of communication like reading old school fanzines, listening to college radio, and traveling hundreds of miles via road trips just to see a band you heard Steve Albini had liked.

A lot of the bands that ended up on the cover of AP, much less within the pages, were discovered by doing the above-mentioned things; sometimes you discovered the band sucked and sometimes you discovered a new band or sound or "scene" before anyone else. It wasn't that hard to discover cool music because we had a lot of fanzines and the flow of communication between labels, publicists, writers, deejays, promoters and musicians and fans was a lot deeper and more trustworthy i think.

There was a bit of cat-and-mouse hunt to finding the latest 7" from some band or trying to dig up some import release from a band from France and that's what made it fun. That's missing today as everything is right there on myspace (at the least). You don't get to experience the asshole indie record store owner that gladly took your money for his over-priced imports but scowled at you the moment you walked in the door.

Tim Towner: Was there a band that made the cover that was a big risk but went on to sell gold/platinum records?

Mike Shea: There were a lot of bands that went on to sell a ton of records that we had on our cover, usually first, before SPIN, STONE or any of the other now-departed music magazines of the 80's and 90's. There wasn't as big of a risk back then because we weren't as big of a company or magazine so our overhead was a lot lower.

That was also before newsstand consolidation kicked in around 1996. Before that happened you could throw anything on your cover, sell 25% of your distribution for three months in a row and the retailers wouldn't do anything about it. As long as you came back at some point with a few issues that sold over 50% you were fine. You could survive as a business being cool. Once consolidation hit, and retailers started demanding everyone sell over 40-50% every issue it forced publishers to have to go lowest-common-denominator every issue so by the end of the 1990's, SPIN, STONE and AP were all fighting for the same two dozen or so bands for cover stories month after month (RATM, Korn, No Doubt, NIN, Manson, etc, etc).

Being cool didn't matter anymore, keeping your magazine in stores did- thus why we started throwing ICP and Nu-Metal bands on the cover from 1998-2001 before we went back to our roots and niched out before Advertising Age realized niches were the future. But we're very very proud of the bands we were the first national magazine to put on our cover, from the Smashing Pumpkins to Nirvana to NIN to Radiohead, and about a dozen other, now, major acts.

Next Monday, I'll post more of the Q&A with Mike Shea (www.twitter.com/mikesheaap).