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The Man with the Golden Ear
With a staggering knack for breaking bands in the US, KCRW-LA's Nic Harcourt is the man on-the-cusp bands hope to woo.
AUSTIN, Tex.--For the past week, hundreds of bands from all over the world have crammed into Austin for the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, hoping to get the attention of record label reps, concert bookers, or any of the abundance of industry folk that could help them get to the next level.
For the remaining 51 weeks of the year, however, many of those same bands are trying to get the attention of one guy: Nic Harcourt.
As music director at public radio giant KCRW in Los Angeles and host of the popular Morning Becomes Eclectic show, Harcourt is the standard bearer for the tastemakers of the world.
Coldplay
He's credited as the first radio DJ in America to play such diverse talents as Moby, Norah Jones, and Coldplay, and was playing demos from the Arctic Monkeys nearly a year ago, long before the boyish quartet had the fastest-selling debut album in UK history and the second-highest US debut by an independent label for Domino Records.
Dozens of the most talked-about bands at SXSW could largely credit Harcourt for that buzz, including KT Tunstall, the Editors, the Magic Numbers, Hot Chip, and She Wants Revenge, not to mention the six bands he hand-picked for his station's showcase SXSW party, headlined by emerging UK songstress Corinne Bailey Rae.
Corinne Bailey Rae at KCRW's SXSW showcase
For the 48-year-old Harcourt, SXSW isn't so much about hearing new bands, mostly because he's already heard them and, in many cases, had them in for a live set on Morning Becomes Eclectic. Instead, it's all about giving KCRW a presence in Austin, as he broadcast two shows from Austin, and networking.
"I'll be honest with you, I haven't hardly seen anything since I've been here," he said. "But you hear about stuff, you hear names being thrown around whether you get to see them or not. So for me it's not so much getting out and seeing a whole bunch of bands here but talking to people and hearing about stuff and getting people to send you CDs and maybe keeping an eye open for when they come to LA."
And despite his ever-rising VIP status in the music business, Harcourt's just like everybody else in Austin: He faces the daunting lines outside at seemingly every venue.
"When I'm standing outside a show that all the hipsters are buzzing about and I can't get in, I'm just like everybody else," he said with a laugh.
But with a mailbox that gets 400 CDs a week from major and indie labels and aspiring artists of all stripes, Harcourt is hardly like the rest of us. As often as he is able, he sits down to pour through the pile of CDs.
Some get 10 seconds to make an impression.
"I try to listen to everything that comes in, whether it gets 10 seconds or 10 minutes," he said. "That's the sort of audition process."
Others, like new albums from the Flaming Lips or Elvis Costello, skip right past the audition process and go straight into his "to play" pile, as those artists have proven track records and Harcourt knows he'll end up playing something from them on the show.
"I don't need to audition that stuff," he said.
So how did this Brit-turned-American arbiter of sonic taste garner such esteem in the music business?
Aside from his taste--he's been chosen to be music supervisor for a number of TV and movie projects--technology has played a huge role in his, and KCRW's, rise.
The station was streaming audio before Harcourt arrived there eight years ago, long before the explosion of broadband made streaming audio--and even video--a must-have for any larger radio station or music service.
"When I first got there, you couldn't have more than 200 people on a stream--but we didn't need it, either," he said. "We would look at how many people were listening online and it was maybe 80."
Now the station also archives audio and video streams of live performances, and lets users download podcasts of those performances as well, becoming the first station to podcast live sessions.
This week, KCRW took another step into the digital era, launching an online music channel, streaming both KCRW shows like Eclectic and original programming.
"If we can be ahead of the curve on this, that spreads the word about who we are and what we do and how that comes back to us later on is more and more people discover the station and strangely enough more and more people subscribe to the station," he said. "We now have subscribers in every state. I mean that was staggering for me to find that out."
The latest technology, and one heck of an ear for the Next Big Thing, has Harcourt and KCRW at the forefront of the digital music age.
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