Questions for the Fan Club
• How do I go about starting up my own fan club? Do you have special connections?
We made connections with Warner, but having connections is not necessarily required. Find a new artist and call their head office early on. If there's no fan club, go to the office in person and state your plan. Or, if you're in a rural area, write a letter outlining your plan and send it. Write that you're interested in starting up a fan club and specify the names of your proposed staff. When the letter arrives at the headquarters, call again to confirm they received it.
Toshiba EMI is difficult to get to unless you live near Tokyo.
Polydor does not give out endorsements. CBS Sony also does not give official approval.
• What kind of benefits do you get as the head of the fan club? For example, when the band or artist comes to Japan?
Well, you can get your photo published in the newsletter. Also goods–posters, stickers, stuff like that. As far as when they come to Japan, there isn't much special treatment for the staff... depending on who's in charge at the record company, you may be able to attend a press conference or something, but there will likely be no other benefits.
One thing you have to be careful of is the promoter. Before they arrive in Japan, the promoter may say all sorts of nice things, like they'll let you meet the band when they come, or they'll give you two hours for an interview. But you'll be up until midnight working on promotional stuff and then when they actually get to Japan, they'll say they know nothing about any of that. If you let yourself get taken in by sweet promises, you'll be in big trouble. Once the Japanese visit is over, the promoter has no further contact with the artist, so the fan club is quite irrelevant.
Some of the good promoters work with Kyodo and Universal. Be careful who you work with or you may end up like our fan club has.
• Some fan clubs only release newsletters once a year! What gives?
Yes, a lot of them do. Some fan clubs have been around as long as the Beatles, but their publications are barely 20 pages long, cheaply printed, and released once every six months! It sucks. What is your 1500 yen a year going towards??
But there are some smaller fan clubs, such as Mott the Hoople's, which is quite small and doesn't print a magazine proper, but they do send out a flyer every month and it provides quite conscientious and trustworthy info. Or sometimes, a fan club might go on hiatus (or even disband...) and just stop publishing.
And so on.
And so you are left to wonder! (Of course we're not perfect either though...) That's the circumstances that we're dealing with now, and it's embarrassing, I tell you!! But, that doesn't mean they formed it with the intent of the schedule falling by the wayside. School, work, and life get in the way, and some fan clubs don't have full staffs to help because of low membership.
But still, I think it's good to be proactive and do something about it.
And what about you, on the membership side? You changed your address, did you notify the F.C.? Did you pay your dues on time? We all need to work together here. If you are thinking of starting a fan club and you're not confident in your ability to do it, then you definitely should not try to do it! It's not advisable to start a fan club with a half-hearted attitude, or just because you want some photos.
• What do you dislike about running a fan club?
There's plenty not to like about it.
When membership is low, it's frustrating not being able to put out a newsletter, and when the membership is high, it's hard to get the newsletter to everyone. It takes about a month to address everything. It's really difficult to manage.
Other than that, we get prank calls. Since March, there have been two people making harassing calls to us from the Osaka area, which has been unpleasant. Recently, we've been looking forward to receiving those calls so I can treat them terribly. ("What should I say to them next time? UGHHH!" —Ikko) And then there's the issue of jealousy.
As mentioned earlier, there are almost no benefits when the band comes to Japan. When I join a fan club, I usually receive a special issue from them whenever the artist comes to Japan, which I thought was enough since the staff works so hard for us... Don't you think it's counterintuitive to be jealous of the fan club staff? After all, if the artist comes to Japan and the F.C. doesnt get to meet them, there'll be no content for your newsletter! Telling the staff not to get too close to your favorite member is just serving your own selfish ego, and it's really embarrassing, so knock it off. The prank phonecalls are a good example of that. (By the way, to the people making those calls, you're not shocking the staff–we find it funny and are embarrassed for you.)
• What did you like best about running the fan club?
The friends we made. And catching Roger's drumstick... it's a bit personal, really. But that's about it. The friends were really what made it, though.
• I couldn't get through on the phone!
We also eat and sleep. Imagine trying to call someone at that hour! We are human beings too. Especially during the run-up to Queen's Japan trip... please think about your fan club staff a little. The reason you couldn't get through is because we had to limit how much we answer, and we had to end conversations quickly because if it cost us anything, we wouldn't have been able to make newsletters or organize items for sale.
Imagine answering the phone all day long... it would drive you crazy! And it would be a nuisance to your family. The reason we had to answer sparingly is because we got so many calls with requests for info about Queen. If it's really important, like if your newsletter or merchandise hasn't arrived, then one or two minutes should be enough. There just isn't enough time in a day. (Isn't that what phonecalls are for in the first place?) And the fan club staff are ordinary people. Sometimes we felt bad about it. Also, if we get a nasty phonecall, we're going to respond accordingly. We're all human, and you need to think about the other person on the line as well... Especially because I'm a sensitive person.
• How are the F.C.'s finances?
Now, when I look back at the savings we had at the time of our dissolution, all that was leftover was the profit from the merchandise that we sold (and the snapshots we sold that were taken on Queen's visit to Japan; to be honest, we made a profit on these snapshots). But that would quickly have been wiped out by the cost of printing, shipping, sending the guidebook (which was paid for by the F.C.), and the cost of buying back the photos, etc.
If the sales of these snapshots had been poor, we would've incurred a huge loss, since we had paid a high price to purchase the negatives.
We, the staff, will use this profit to pay for our future endeavors. (It's been a tough year!)
