#GetOnTheNightrain March 1st

[Dazey]

I guess this is for people who like to donate whenever they can, like it doesn't even matter where their money goes. Always giving that 10% for good karma.

Axl Rose, the Joseph Smith of Rock n' Roll.

[Dr. Who]

This is GNR at this point. Axl being Saruman of course.

[Intercourse]

For a brand of this size it could be so easy for Axl/GNR to be fucking great with fans.

Go to art schools and tell students to design every kind of merc shit they can think of, the winner gets to see their work mass produced and sold on the open market with some $$ kickback on all items sold. Every other submission you could place on a gallery in the fan site and ask fans to nominate products to be produced.

Axl should do a podcast like Bill Burr does. Just talk about anything for 10 minutes or longer a week and put it on the fan site. People would listen because its Axl Fucking Rose.

Release the UYI tour movies, the current band apes this old band anyway so what harm? It might help sell a few more nostalgia tickets on the next Vegas run.

Axl should record himself singing cover tunes on his piano or accompanied by a guitar and put them up on youtube. Fans would eat up that shit all day.

Ask young and gifted mixers to mess the shit out of GNR tunes, put them up on youtube too.

It could take Axl 5-10 hours a week to make this shit happen.

Edited March 6, 2015 by Intercourse

[stella]

Asking art students to design the band's merch could have some pretty negative fallout. There's a very valid philosophy among professional artists never to do unpaid work on spec. If someone wants a sample of your work, they pay for it. And certainly there's a philosophy that one should be properly paid for their work, whcih means being contracted and receiving a fee for the design and implementation. If GnR did this, unless it was a one-time thing for a contest, I think the criticism would be "they have the money to properly pay a design studio/artist to do professional work for them, but instead they are exploiting students and fans who don't know better, and expecting them to do professional work without a professional wage." And honestly IMHO it would be a valid observation.

They CAN afford to pay for a professional designer to develop a merch line and art for them, just as was done in the AfD, Illusions and CD eras. Axl likes art. He purchases a lot of original pieces. The AfD and Illusions artwork and themes came from art that Axl had found and blossomed with professional designers working it into a brand concept. So they need to do that again. Send Axl around to a lot of art galleries. Let him pick out stuff he likes. Purchase it and work with those artists - paying them of course - to come up with some shiny new stuff.

Of course one of the impediments right now might be that they don't know what the band's identity is supposed to be, what they are supposed to be promoting, etc. If they brought back more of the original merch designs from AfD and Illusions it might be far more successful than what they are doing now.

Edited March 6, 2015 by stella

[tinyrobot]

For a brand of this size it could be so easy for Axl/GNR to be fucking great with fans.

Go to art schools and tell students to design every kind of merc shit they can think of, the winner gets to see their work mass produced and sold on the open market with some $$ kickback on all items sold. Every other submission you could place on a gallery in the fan site and ask fans to nominate products to be produced.

Axl should do a podcast like Bill Burr does. Just talk about anything for 10 minutes or longer a week and put it on the fan site. People would listen because its Axl Fucking Rose.

Release the UYI tour movies, the current band apes this old band anyway so what harm? It might help sell a few more nostalgia tickets on the next Vegas run.

Axl should record himself singing cover tunes on his piano or accompanied by a guitar and put them up on youtube. Fans would eat up that shit all day.

Ask young and gifted mixers to mess the shit out of GNR tunes, put them up on youtube too.

It could take Axl 5-10 hours a week to make this shit happen.

One thing that bothers me the most is how much talent Axl wastes on nothing and I'm not talking about releasing music because we all know he's got an allergy to it now.

But I agree with you on the amount of things he could do that are not related to singing and that would completely change the general "negative" perception people have of him.

He could exploit that funny side of his with said podcast or a radio show. I'm pretty sure he could do stand up comedy and be successful at if. He could also write fiction since he's very creative with prose or have a blog and write about anything he was interested in.

As for music, my dream would be for him to openly become a solo artist and do his stuff alone , with just a piano and a guitar. Everybody says he spent his "reclusive" years learning how to play guitar... Well, I'd love to see the results!!

Axl playing guitar and piano, things like Grand Torino, I'd so much love to listen to a full piano album: only Axl, only his voice.

Sometimes I feel like Axl is too far from the fans, too high, unlike before when he would connect a lot on stage and advice us when we were kids. Nowadays, he acts and looks too much like an unreachable rockstar... Impossible for us simple and humble kids to identify with his clothing, his diamond rings, all that jewelry we cannot afford.

Back in the day, he was so much like us, just wearing cotton shirts and cheap collars and Converse shoes. If he would just lose all that crap and be old Axl again

[Intercourse]

Asking art students to design the band's merch could have some pretty negative fallout. There's a very valid philosophy among professional artists never to do unpaid work on spec. If someone wants a sample of your work, they pay for it. And certainly there's a philosophy that one should be properly paid for their work, whcih means being contracted and receiving a fee for the design and implementation. If GnR did this, unless it was a one-time thing for a contest, I think the criticism would be "they have the money to properly pay a design studio/artist to do professional work for them, but instead they are exploiting students and fans who don't know better, and expecting them to do professional work without a professional wage." And honestly IMHO it would be a valid observation.

They CAN afford to pay for a professional designer to develop a merch line and art for them, just as was done in the AfD, Illusions and CD eras. Axl likes art. He purchases a lot of original pieces. The AfD and Illusions artwork and themes came from art that Axl had found and blossomed with professional designers working it into a brand concept. So they need to do that again. Send Axl around to a lot of art galleries. Let him pick out stuff he likes. Purchase it and work with those artists - paying them of course - to come up with some shiny new stuff.

Of course one of the impediments right now might be that they don't know what the band's identity is supposed to be, what they are supposed to be promoting, etc. If they brought back more of the original merch designs from AfD and Illusions it might be far more successful than what they are doing now.

That's all very noble but the fact is that many struggling young artists would jump at the chance to have their work up on a GNR site.

When you are a nobody in the arts, you work for free until you're stock rises enough to stop the exploitation. That's a fact of life.

Most bands spend 95% of their early career playing for nothing or worse loosing money in a shitty record deal when they make 13% on an album and still have to pay the company whose keeping the other 87% the full amount of their record deal.

Actors the same way. Its either work at whatever you can for half nothing or do porn; that's why there are so many titty shots of women like young Madonna, Jo-Lo etc.

Giving students a chance to put a single contribution onto a big stage could help find the next big talent. Pay that talent if someone buys the design.

Everybody in business has to spend to earn, loss leaders are common currency.... even more so in the Arts.

[RussTCB]

Just wanted to stop back on the 2006 merch thing for a sec. I own and love this:

[Słash]

So If I post something good about Slash or the former members on the Nightrain Forum then they will Ban me?

[RussTCB]

So If I post something good about Slash or the former members on the Nightrain Forum then they will Ban me?

I don't think so, no. I can't remember but I don't think there was any sort of rules about that.

[GUNNER PT]

The "official" tinychat still exist?

[stella]

Asking art students to design the band's merch could have some pretty negative fallout. There's a very valid philosophy among professional artists never to do unpaid work on spec. If someone wants a sample of your work, they pay for it. And certainly there's a philosophy that one should be properly paid for their work, whcih means being contracted and receiving a fee for the design and implementation. If GnR did this, unless it was a one-time thing for a contest, I think the criticism would be "they have the money to properly pay a design studio/artist to do professional work for them, but instead they are exploiting students and fans who don't know better, and expecting them to do professional work without a professional wage." And honestly IMHO it would be a valid observation.

They CAN afford to pay for a professional designer to develop a merch line and art for them, just as was done in the AfD, Illusions and CD eras. Axl likes art. He purchases a lot of original pieces. The AfD and Illusions artwork and themes came from art that Axl had found and blossomed with professional designers working it into a brand concept. So they need to do that again. Send Axl around to a lot of art galleries. Let him pick out stuff he likes. Purchase it and work with those artists - paying them of course - to come up with some shiny new stuff.

Of course one of the impediments right now might be that they don't know what the band's identity is supposed to be, what they are supposed to be promoting, etc. If they brought back more of the original merch designs from AfD and Illusions it might be far more successful than what they are doing now.

That's all very noble but the fact is that many struggling young artists would jump at the chance to have their work up on a GNR site.

When you are a nobody in the arts, you work for free until you're stock rises enough to stop the exploitation. That's a fact of life.

Most bands spend 95% of their early career playing for nothing or worse loosing money in a shitty record deal when they make 13% on an album and still have to pay the company whose keeping the other 87% the full amount of their record deal.

Actors the same way. Its either work at whatever you can for half nothing or do porn; that's why there are so many titty shots of women like young Madonna, Jo-Lo etc.

Giving students a chance to put a single contribution onto a big stage could help find the next big talent. Pay that talent if someone buys the design.

Everybody in business has to spend to earn, loss leaders are common currency.... even more so in the Arts.

That doesn't mean it's at all ethical. Guns N' Roses has the money to pay their artists, and well. They don't NEED to exploit anyone. Plus, there's a growing trend of major companies expecting creative people to work for free or low pay, and GnR doesn't need to be a part of it. Exposure does not pay the bills, and it's the thing that artists hear over and over again..."work for free and you will gain exposure!" So it really isn't that you work your way up anymore; it's that you have a constant slew of people asking you to work for free. Plus, if they are having their work designed by a bunch of different students they are unlikely to have any sort of unified brand.

They can afford to pay someone like, say, Shephard Fairey or Danny Curnen to design something formidable for them, and they should.

http://www.gwarlingo.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/If-Other-People-Were-Paid-Like-Artists.jpg

Edited March 6, 2015 by stella

[stella]

Just wanted to stop back on the 2006 merch thing for a sec. I own and love this:

That really is nice. Not too busy, unified design.

I like all of the stars that showed up between 2006 -2011.

http://www.ladydairhean.0catch.com/Images/Clothing/Concert/046_2.jpg

http://www.ladydairhean.0catch.com/Images/Clothing/Concert/046_1.jpg

http://asset.bravado.de/assets/asset_300x300/P5023209788529_2.jpg

[Apollo]

For a brand of this size it could be so easy for Axl/GNR to be fucking great with fans.

Go to art schools and tell students to design every kind of merc shit they can think of, the winner gets to see their work mass produced and sold on the open market with some $$ kickback on all items sold. Every other submission you could place on a gallery in the fan site and ask fans to nominate products to be produced.

Axl should do a podcast like Bill Burr does. Just talk about anything for 10 minutes or longer a week and put it on the fan site. People would listen because its Axl Fucking Rose.

Release the UYI tour movies, the current band apes this old band anyway so what harm? It might help sell a few more nostalgia tickets on the next Vegas run.

Axl should record himself singing cover tunes on his piano or accompanied by a guitar and put them up on youtube. Fans would eat up that shit all day.

Ask young and gifted mixers to mess the shit out of GNR tunes, put them up on youtube too.

It could take Axl 5-10 hours a week to make this shit happen.

That's why I always say that Axl could easily be the most relevant singer in rock again. If he only wanted to put forth a little effort. Just a tiny bit of effort to give back to the FANS. The people whose money has made Axl so rich and famous.

Wouldn't it be cool if for a few years Axl dedicated time to them?

******

Tinyrobot - great post

*******

Stella......seriously?

Exploiting young artists? That's one of the most idiotic things I've ever seen on this forum. Do you not actually know what the word exploit means?

People would choose to submit their ideas. Nobody would force them. And GnR would then PAY the people who came up with winning designs.

Thousands of young artists would LOVE to have a chance to design a merchandise line for a major band.

If GnR dis this is would bring them tremendous positive publicity.

Did UK Subs exploit forum members when they let us turn in new designs for the forum? Should he have just paid a professional to do it?

Edited March 6, 2015 by Apollo

[tinyrobot]

Thank you Apollo (can't like your post cuz I ran out of likes)

Please people, watch this one (jump to 1:15), this Axl Rose PLEASE BE BAAACK!!