Scott FeinblattSuccess stories are always exciting to read, especially if they concern one’s hometown. Naturally, Irvine has an extensive history of being the home of a number of notable people. Actor/comedian Will Ferrell, burlesque performer Dita Von Teese, and Washington Post/ MSNBC writer and Vox editor-at-large Ezra Klein all hail from Irvine, as do a multitude of athletes, entertainers, writers and politicians. The latest rising stars, Bryce Savage and Cameron Wales, comprise the pop, electronic, hip-hop and alternative duo Neffex. Neffex is currently in the midst of its first European tour, and released its first EP, Q203 on October 16. The story of Savage (vocals), who is from Irvine, and Cameron Wales (guitar, decks), who is from Newport Beach, is a 21st-century tale.
Starting in 2017, former high school punk rock garage bandmates Savage and Wales challenged themselves to release one song every week for 100 weeks. In order to do this, they used a variety of online platforms, such as YouTube and Spotify, and before long, they had an audience of millions. Prior to their tour, which launched on September 12 at The Troubadour in Los Angeles, Irvine Weekly had a chance to speak with Savage and Wales about their journey as musicians and producers.
“After the punk rock band, we kind of got together and started actually producing music on computers [using] Garageband, Mixcraft, Reason … all sorts of different programs,” Savage said. “And our only production background was basically teaching ourselves how to produce stuff like that.”
Wales added that he had a bit of experience with producing music in studios. “I moved to L.A. when I was around 18 years old, after going to high school, and then started getting really into engineering. Then I went and interned and started a studio up there.”
Q203
The decision to begin writing and releasing music on a weekly basis came after college. “After I graduated college, Cam and I basically moved into an apartment together [in Costa Mesa], and we realized you can make the best song in the world, but it really didn’t matter unless people heard it and you got it out to enough people,” Savage recalled. “So we were just trying to figure out how the heck we could get our songs out to more people. And it ended up, we saw this guy Russ was doing pretty well — and so had Lil Wayne — by just releasing a large quantity of music, just a ton of music.”
Inspired by the potential that various platforms provided for Russ and Lil Wayne, Savage and Wales formulated their plan. “We kind of sat down and we were like, ‘Yo, what’s something that we could do that is consistent, that we can keep ourselves accountable for?’ and all that good stuff.” Savage said, “And we figured out that with our nine-to-fives, we could get a track a week out basically. And so we picked a day, Wednesday, at 9 a.m., and we just decided, ‘Hey, let’s start pumping out a track a week, start sending it to people and see what happens.’”
Using the tools at their disposal, they built a recording booth in their apartment. Wales recalled, “We built a soundproof booth out of PVC pipe and soundproof blankets. It was super janky, and it would get really hot in there, but that’s pretty much how we recorded almost all of the 100 songs in 100 weeks.”
Throughout that period, Savage and Wales never missed a week. In regards to how they got people to start noticing them, it was all about networking and providing a useful commodity. They blindly emailed notices to hundreds of YouTube channels, blogs and influencers, and before long, word of Neffex’s free music started to spread. “We kind of put together this strategy of emailing YouTube channels that we thought would fit our music, and once we had about 10 to 12 songs,” Savage recalled, “good quality and diverse copyright free music was so rare that people really started to use our songs and our videos, and we could see a direct correlation to a spike in Spotify streams and stuff like that. It seems that a lot of people are becoming savvy to that strategy now, but fortunately we were ahead of it, and it really worked out for us.”
While YouTube does provide a means for content producers to make money, Savage and Wales used it mainly as a marketing tool through which they were able to capitalize off numerous music streaming platforms. “We just decided right off the bat we’d rather [that] people use our music than make the, you know, the penny to every stream that you get on YouTube or whatever it is,” Savage explained. “All other streaming platforms, Apple Music, Spotify, Deezer, Rhapsody, whatever it is, they all pay out to Tunecore, so essentially YouTube was like our marketing funnel that got everyone out to the different DSPs [digital service providers] and streaming platforms. That’s what basically started paying us, and we almost immediately saw revenue once our YouTube started growing.”
The next chapter of Neffex’s journey has been very fast and has occurred very recently. After their manager reached out to the A&R [artists and repertoire] department of 12 Tone Music Group, former Def Jam CEO Steve Bartels, who is now with 12 Tone, met the duo, liked their music, and that was that. Neffex was signed to the label two months ago. Since then, they have released singles “It’s My Life” and “Sunday” through the label.
Needless to say, they were very excited about their tour. However, they did have some parting words of advice for musical dreamers that might want to follow in their footsteps. “Don’t reinvent the wheel. Figure out what other people have done right and done well and just do it better than they did,” Savage said. “All in all, just understand that music is only half of it. You gotta be able to market it too; you gotta be able to get it into people’s ears. … [It’s got to] be quality, and it takes years and years and years to build; it doesn’t happen in six months. … We’ve known each other for 11 years and we’ve been building Neffex for about four of them, now. So it takes time. It takes a really long time.”
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