White Collar Zoo

We have to ask: why are you called White Collar Zoo?
Lee: I wrote a song called White Collar Zoo about six years ago - a guitar number about escaping the rat race. Last year I decided to professionally record the track and look into what could be done with White Collar Zoo as a brand name. So I gave Guy a call - we knew each other from when we both lived in Manchester - and brought him on board, and we got the track recorded by The Money.

You’re originally from Manchester. So why did you pick Nottingham to do this?
Guy: When I first came to Nottingham, I was astounded by the creativity here, it was off the scale. I was amazed at what was going on in a relatively small city. There’s so much fantastic stuff going on that needs to be given to a wider audience.

Lee: We saw very quickly that there were hardly any outlets for musicians, except for your standard websites like SoundCloud and YouTube. White Collar Zoo was born because we saw that we could provide a support mechanism for bands and creative people. We realised with the advent of smart TVs that you’ve got this conversion of terrestrial TV, online capabilities, online apps, and everything else. There’s YouTube, of course, but there’s two
million pieces on it - it’s a bit saturated.  We wanted to structure it a bit better, have something more user-friendly, and focus on independent and new music, and films and documentaries and anything creative and original.

You’re calling WCZ a ‘revolution in television’. How is it going to be different to standard magazine shows?
Guy: We’re going to change the world. The revolution comes from being able to reach a mainstream audience that you couldn’t reach before. All the barriers to the broadcast TV market have evaporated; we can be in exactly the same place as the BBC and Sky, but without the constraints that they have. So we can be as broad as we like, and provide a platform for all the people out there who are producing quality independent music.

WCZ isn’t just about music - what can viewers expect to see on the channel?
Guy: The creative community know what’s going on, but the wider Nottingham community aren’t necessarily aware of the fantastic things that are happening. We want to have programmes to get that out there and reach those people. We’ve got a weekly live show called The Zoo Lounge; it’s a comedy chat show that’s going to showcase the local creative scene. The format will include a band, a host, a comedy slot and a comedy news desk. It’s going to be an hour-or-so-long show focussed on what’s happening in Nottingham. It’ll be going out on Sunday late mornings, so it’ll be like hangover TV. We’ll
be supplementing our own content with films and animation too. We want people to see the quality work that is found on Vimeo and suchlike, that only have a relatively small following of viewers because of the mass of content on there.

So you’ll be taking away the choice to make it more focussed on what people want.
Lee: Yeah. We’ve set up three of the channels already. We’ve got FreeZoo which is, as the name suggests, a free offering with promos and tasters of the shows that showcase what you get for your subscription. Zoo One will be scheduled, and the rest of the channels will be on demand and you can flick through. One of my bugbears with YouTube is that there’s so much stuff on there that it’s difficult to find what you want, unless you have a link. We want to try and basically provide a really good user experience for people. We’re looking at the terrestrial TV experience and saying, “How can we copy that? How can we replicate that with WCZ?”

Will the content be exclusively Nottingham sourced?
Lee: To start with. We want to produce these shows, build up a loyal fanbase, and then expand it out. We’re making connections in the States with universities and film companies. What we want to do is export Notts talent - nationally and internationally - and bring that kind of creative content back into Nottingham too. 

Guy: JamCafé is our first live venue - we’ve been testing there for a few months now. Our vision is to have hundreds of live venues across the world that stream different live music at different times, so you can flick on at 2 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon and find something going on in Australia, or 7 o’clock in the evening and find something from Bolivia or England. 

How has the local creative community taken to your ideas? You’re already working with JamCafé, Farmyard Records, I’m Not From London… 
Lee: Yeah, they’ve definitely embraced us. They love what we’re doing, they love the fact that we’re providing a platform for these bands, filmmakers, comedians, artists... we’re all
about collaboration. ‘Unite and Lead’ is our motto, we don’t see anyone out there as competitors - we’re forging links with lots of different organisations such as NCN and Confetti, we’ve reached out to Broadway and Nottingham Contemporary. We want to embrace them and support them and hopefully we can all come together.

WCZ is subscription based. Have you chosen not to go down the route of advertising, then?
Lee: There will be limited advertising on there, and there’ll be sponsorship and commercial partnerships. It’s not commercials in the normal sense; there won’t be adverts between programmes. We won’t do intros or adverts over the top like a lot of video sites. There might be sections on the website where you can find partner products, but we’re not going to do display advertising at all.

Guy: Working on a subscription basis allows you to be entirely independent and choose the direction you want to go in yourself. A lot of the content on WCZ will be available for free - on the internet, or at venues. 

What is it that’s going to make people want to pay?
Lee: We’ve chatted to people within and outside of the creative community, and the main feedback is that if we provide fresh content and live quality broadcast shows plus all the other content, then people are happy to pay. It means people can get some drinks in and stay in and watch a gig, but then if people do want to go to JamCafé or another WCZ venue then they might get to see themselves on TV. We’ve talked about Zoo Lounge to people and they’re excited because it’s Notts focussed and it’s creative.  It’s an unproven model, but we’re hoping people will support it: for £4.99 a month, instead of buying a kebab
and chips, you can see brilliant content and fantastic talent in Nottingham. You can support them as well, because any content provided for White Collar Zoo is going to get paid.
 

Guy: We devote 20% of all the subscription money to the Zoo Pot, which is a pot for Nottingham’s creative community. We wouldn’t be able to do this with an advertising model.

How does that get distributed?
Guy: It’s ‘drive and subscribe’. A band can earn 50p per fan per month when their fans subscribe to White Collar Zoo. And that’s forever, so they can earn an ongoing income just from driving their subscribers. So as a band grows, their income does too. This doesn’t just work for bands; this can be filmmakers or artists or anyone who contributes to WCZ.

You’ve secured yourself a pretty swanky building in Lace Market Square that you’re calling Zoo Café...
Lee: It’s going to be a great part of WCZ and will help to build a community. We decided we needed some studio space and we needed an HQ. I’ve always loved Lace Market Square - it’s been empty for years, but it just lends itself to WCZ perfectly. Straight away we thought, we can put a café downstairs and have free gallery space for artists, and upstairs we can have a production area. We’re hoping that it will be up and running in the next month or two. 

Is the Zoo Café going to be a live venue?
Guy: We will have acoustic music and jamming sessions in the café, and in the Square we’re going to look at getting a screen up in the summer to show independent films and have performing arts too, hopefully. It’ll be a very different vibe. The area is all residential, so it’s going to be a different kind of offering to what you get at JamCafé.

You didn’t put in a bid for Nottingham’s City TV franchise. How come?
Lee: We reviewed and analysed what was going on with the tender process, and had a chat with the development team, but decided it wasn’t for us. It’s a fantastic win for Craig and his consortium at Confetti and we wish them the best of luck - the licence is going to provide them with the capability to showcase new shows and it will give Confetti students a platform - but we definitely want to focus on web TV.

Guy: We’re looking globally. Nottingham is very much our home and we go out here but the rest of the world is open to us – that’s the beauty of the web, you can reach such a large audience. 

The website is due to go live at the beginning of December - how can people subscribe?
Lee: The beta site will go live in December and we’ll have a lot more content and our first Zoo Lounge show. It’s not going to be a big-bang launch, but we want content to be up there so people have something to watch, and then from there there’ll be the live shows and more content from the hundreds of hours of footage we’ve shot since March plus loads of new stuff. 

How can people get in touch to be involved or have their music, art or films broadcast?
Lee: You just need to send us an email to studio@whitecollarzoo.tv or drop us a line on Facebook.