On a periodic basis, Matt Mason will go into adult video stores and survey the shelves in an effort to gain some understanding of the trends shaping the gay adult industry.
"I'll go in and they'll have 100 [big-studio] titles in a rental store, and 90 of them are still there. Then you go and look at Treasure Island or Primal, and they're rented. But they only have three copies on the shelf, which is strange," notes the director of sales for New Barbary Coast Distribution. "And you look at the other companies that are rented out, and it might be something that's a daddy and a 20-year-old. That's the kind of stuff that we like to distribute. They're usually smaller studios."
New Barbary Coast started five years ago, initially as an outlet to distribute Treasure Island Media titles, which have been around since 1996. While both were created by Paul Morris, Mason notes that they are two distinct, different companies.
"They felt it would be a good idea to be able to distribute themselves so they would make the most profit and they could make some good decisions for their own company," Mason says. "A lot of distributors have a lot of influence in the products coming out, and they didn't want any of those types of decisions happening quite yet, which helped them in the long run."
Treasure Island has many successful titles and series - like the wildly popular Damon Blows America oral series - that helped New Barbary Coast build its name. The word spread and other studios hopped onboard.
"We really started growing about a year and a half ago," Mason says. "We had just a couple of exclusive companies, and we started taking in some non-exclusive companies. We've actually grown about 240 percent within a year, so we're really trying to cut away the fat and select our product wisely. We've always done that, but we're just paying a little better attention to the market trends."
Last year, the company had four exclusive studies; now they have 20 - including Bear Films, Primal, Spunk Boy, Ty Lattimore Entertainment and Wurstfilm - and it distributes nearly 40 other studios, including Eurocreme and the Club Inferno line from Hot House Entertainment.
"We've been paying attention to what's being perused on the Internet," says product manager Jerry Deal. "And we're going after - not even so much studios, because we don't consider them studios - but people who are producing content for the Internet that had no intention of going to DVD, or any intention of doing anything other than saying ‘Oh, look, we can show cock and balls and make money with it!' We're trying to find those visions that are interesting."
New Barbary Coast just signed a deal with Boys-Pissing, which started as an Internet site and is now an exclusive studio. Deal and Mason emphasize that the fetish angle works well, and stores can't keep them on the shelves. Deal notes that a lot of retailers come to them as a one-stop shop for their unique niche of porn, and adds that he constantly looks for content that fetishizes the way human sexuality is developing.
"If you look at things, you are able to watch how specifically gay sexuality is taking a course through different fetishes, different niches that may have been present that are becoming more present and are ways of defining the gay man. Like BDSM was kind of created to shift roles with a dom and a submissive person, who could be the top or the bottom...it's role switching. It's about watching how the industry has been shaped by gay sexuality, and how gay sexuality is defining what today's gay man is," he says.
"If you look at gay culture over the past 20 years and then also look at the porn that is being distributed through those years - what was succeeding and what was not - you see some big studios that were thriving at one point are now starting to feel a crunch. And smaller studios producing a fetish-driven, different niche are thriving."
New Barbary Coast produces some of its own content and also buys content from other studios and rebrands it, like European line Raw Pups. Treasure Island continues to be a leading seller, and new efforts that have extended into clothing and lube have helped build the brand even more.
"We've learned a lot about how to get our product on the shelves. We offer our product at such a discounted price, and we put banners up. We've learned this from great companies, and we get it on the shelves and it sells really quickly," Mason says. "The managers and buyers of these retail stores are amazed at how well that line will do, and that's how we get into stores."
Deal notes that they encourage their studios to create watermarked product to use in establishments like bathhouses or clubs across the country for marketing exposure, and New Barbary Coast also supplies product to help fund-raisers (like one at the recent International Bear Rendezvous in San Francisco to help AIDS causes).
"As far as new studios, we're going to be really selective this year. It's almost going to be like an audition process. We're looking for some different things, for really good producers," Mason says. "We have 35 shelves currently open that we need to fill, because we can't keep the shelves full. Things have been going off so quickly, which is great."
CONTACT: NewBarbaryCoast.com; (415) 553-4073.
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