This site is a blog for musicians and music industry people. It is a free educational resource and it is also the way I advertise my music consulting services. I am an entertainment professional with deep roots in the music industry. Throughout my music career I have been a major label A&R representative, a music supervisor, an artist manager, a reality show producer, a bass player and the head of a digital record label.
This article was originally run in November of 2009 but I have revisited it several times as advice for my own career as well as sharing it with others. I’ve done literally hundreds of interviews for musiciancoaching.com but in my opinion this one is the most valuable and the most timeless. When I looked back at the number of views it got I realized it needed to be read and shared again.
Gabe Roth is the bass player, producer, main writer and founding member of Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings and the head of their label Daptone records. Gabe also recently won a Grammy award for engineering the Amy Winehouse record “Back to Black”. I was lucky enough to be in a band with Gabe in college back when he was a drummer. He is one of those enviable musicians who can pick up any instrument and make it look effortless.
Photo © Laura Hanifin
You founded Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings and the Daptone Label and have been able to sell thousands and thousands of records and tour the world – how did you get to this point?
GR:
I think it was probably a little luck, just like with anyone else. Mostly I think I was in a unique situation because I was not that interested in being part of the music industry. I think that gave me a perspective and a pig-headedness. It was one of those things where I was too stupid to do things the way I was supposed to do them, and it ended up working out well. I never followed a lot of the paths and things that we were supposed to be doing to make, record and market records. We really relied on a lot of grassroots stuff and slowly built up an audience.
There was no real scene for retro soul prior to the predecessor to Daptone (a label Gabe founded with a Partner called Desco Records). You were the architect of bringing these people together, right?
Photo © Finlay MacKay for The New York Times
GR:
It’s probably true, because there wasn’t really a scene then. It’s a strange perception and an inside-outside thing. You don’t realize there’s enough going on around you to consider it a “scene” until someone says, “Hey, where did this scene come from?” It’s like a spontaneous party on a subway platform. We never really architected it, planned it or anticipated it. I think by not trying to concentrate on what people were going to listen to and instead of concentrating on what kind of records we were going to make, we ended up making a bunch of records that people wanted to listen to.
You wound up collaborating and producing with tons of different people over the last ten years ago. Was that the plan or was that just what you did to get by?
GR:
It was mostly just what we had to do to make ends. The Amy Winehouse stuff and working with Mark Ronson (Producer – Amy Winehouse) didn’t open up the kind of doors that are perceived from the outside. For example, when we’d go on tour with the band and go play Madison, Wisconsin or some city where we’ve played for many years, and we went from 30 people, to 50 people, to 100 people to 200 people, to 800 people, to 1,000 and 1,500 people, we’d see this curve from our point of view that was based on going out and playing music and selling 45’s – a very grassroots, organic approach. But part of the timing of that Amy Winehouse project was the door that it opened. It was not that people listened to that record and came to us. There were really very few consumers and fans that we got from this record. At these shows, I’d go and ask people, “Where did you hear about the band?” The overwhelmingly most popular answer was “Terry Gross, Fresh Air.” Doing an NPR show is for an independent artist is twenty times more important than doing David Letterman or Conan O’Brien.
The thing about doing those kind of established shows and working with Amy Winehouse and doing these major label, major production things is that those things give a different perspective on who you are to the music industry, music writers and people like that. After the Amy Winehouse thing, there were countless writers that contacted us for interviews: Sharon; myself or anyone else at the label. They would tell us that they had been fans of Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings or the label for years. They would tell us they’d been buying our stuff since the Desco days. But they could never go to Entertainment Weekly who they worked for and tell them they were going to write a story about us, other than some tiny little preview in the back. But the Amy Winehouse thing allowed them to go to the editor and say, “This is why this is a big deal.” It’s a little enigmatic – the Amy Winehouse effect, the Conan O’Brien appearance or having Sharon Jones in that Great Debaters movie. It wasn’t a direct marketing effect. It wasn’t that people saw those things and came to us as listeners or consumers. It was just that it opened the door and gave us a strange leverage with print editors and A&R people at major labels. It gave us a very strange clout that opened up different doors. Like you said, in a lot of interviews, especially after the 100 Days record, people would ask me, “How are you dealing with this overnight success?” For us it seems very bizarre. I couldn’t think of anything less sudden. We’ve been doing the exact same thing for fifteen years and very slowly record by record, ticket by ticket, people have been telling their friends and very slowly have been coming up. And then we finally breached a certain ceiling. It’s not the big ceiling – we’re not up there with Madonna or Britney Spears anything. But we breached a ceiling that acknowledged us as major independent artists. I don’t know where you’d file us – not as rock stars or major celebrities. But all of a sudden certain people said, “Where did you come from?” And we thought, “Are you kidding me? Where did you come from?”
How on earth did you just take playing around NYC with a bunch of guys living in Brooklyn into an international experience?
GR:
Firstly, we did no promotional gigs. I never played for exposure. We never played in exchange for exposure or to meet somebody. We actually do it more now than we ever did then. We played for cash and valued what we did. In this market there are too many people that are too hungry, and you can’t rely on marketing yourself. You have to rely on having something people want. We really tried to concentrate on creating demand by having something people wanted. We spent our energy thinking about how we could make the show better, not how we could get more people there, and let the people figure out how to tell their friends how good the show was. It took a lot longer. If you’re a major label, and it’s 1989 and you’re putting out a new Pearl Jam record, this is an irrelevant approach. But right now, the approach they had is also kind of irrelevant. It’s a different time and a different structure. The whole game has changed.
A lot of majors are complaining about the CD market shrinking, sales going down and the sky falling, but we’ve experienced a really successful time. It’s because the basis of our business is very conservative and value based. It’s based on the idea that the reason why somebody is going to buy a Sharon Jones record is not because they saw it in a Best Buy sampler or free with a can of Coke or saw it in a Disney cartoon. The reason people are going to buy it is because someone said, “Have you heard this record? It’s great,” “I saw the show” or “My local college record DJ played this.” It’s an old school, traditional record marketing technique. Most of what we’ve done that has been successful hasn’t been innovative. It’s been really, really conservative and old school – the way people promoted records years ago. It’s “Get on the road, get on the bus, talk to the DJ’s, talk to the record store clerks, keep everything on a grassroots level and try to connect with people directly.” We’ve stayed away from hype and big marketing schemes, big marketing money and the types of things that endanger our business and livelihood. We tried to sell records the way someone would sell ice cream or paint at the local store. We tried to cater to the customers and not think about, “How are we going to become bigger?” By staying away from that, we’ve kept ourselves safe, secure and stable in a time that has been very volatile for a lot of companies.
You were self booked, put together the label you signed and produced records on, didn’t have a manager until six or seven years ago. How did you go about breaking a second market? Who did you call?
GR:
The call I was making was to better musicians. I wasn’t staying up all night trying to figure out how to get people to shows. I was staying up trying to write a better horn chart. It was all value based. I never spent a lot of time trying to hustle friends and family down to shows. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but I have family and friends that come into town and ask to come to shows, and it was the same way before. They’re not calling me because I’m their buddy; they’re calling me because it’s a good show.
Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of tips other than that. I think concentrating on the music and putting a lot of heart into it is important. To be fair, I think a big advantage I had is I didn’t have a lot of illusions about or aspirations in this industry. That was a huge advantage. I think a lot of people have this itching in the back of their head: “How am I going to make it? How am I going to break this record? How am I going to break this band and take over the world?” Those things work against you and make a lot of people fall victim to predators in this business. There are a lot of people that make their living off artists giving things away. Artists are so hungry to make ten million dollars that they’ll never make $1,000. If you concentrate on making $100, next thing you know you’ll make $1,000, $10,000 and $100,000. But if you’re walking around the streets with your demo trying to think about breaking a record or being a pop sensation all you’re going to do is give yourself away for nothing. And if anyone makes money, it’s not going to be you, it’s going to be somebody else.
When you look at the whole American Idol picture of the music industry, you have a bunch of people signing the worst contracts you could imagine, because they want something so badly that it puts them at a horrible disadvantage negotiating wise. And you can say, “Okay, that’s kind of a far out hypothetical when you’re talking about a TV show and people coming from all over the world and signing a contract with the biggest label for a million dollars.” It’s an extreme situation, but I think it exemplifies the same psychology that goes on when a band drives from South Carolina to New York and plays a gig for nothing. The reason they’re playing a gig for nothing is because they think that’s going to make them bigger. If they were thinking, “How can we make $50?” they wouldn’t play a gig for nothing. Maybe they wouldn’t come to New York, but if they didn’t come to New York, the demand for bands would be higher. The club owner in New York could not be expecting bands to play for nothing. It really drives down the value of music when there are that many people out there that are that hungry and that anxious to give their stuff away.
That’s one of the problems in the CD market as a whole on a different scale. It has to do with devaluing music and trying to mass-market music. The only way you’re going to be able to sell a million of anything is to give it away. But that’s not a great strategy if you’re on the corner selling lemonade. It’s stupid to sit there on the corner selling lemonade for 25 cents and say, “I’m going to give this away for free for a couple days to people that look like they might want to buy lemonade, because in the future they’re going to want to buy lemonade.” It doesn’t make sense. Take the 25 cents and go make some better lemonade and keep going. I was patient enough to take those organic steps and it’s put me in a situation where I’m very secure and not depending on anyone for anything and it is because we were very patient and we didn’t take those huge leaps to try to make ourselves bigger. We tried to keep the business focused inward.
You did make certain bets. You borrowed money. You invested in your career but not in such a way that you couldn’t hope to pay it back without a huge titanic success. I clearly remember times you telling me your credit cards were maxed.
GR:
Yes, but they were my credit cards. They had a stake in my ass, but they didn’t have a stake in my music. There are a lot of perspectives on credit card money, especially now. But I built a career out of it. I built businesses that makes a lot of money off credit cards because that’s all I had. I borrowed money from people in my family and credit cards, and none of them have any interest in my business now. I was able to pay them back in full, and now I own everything completely. I’m not recommending that, but that was the only option I had. The other option would’ve been to try to find somebody who will invest money in my career. I never went that route, and I had a lot of opportunities. Since then, every day we have offers on the table to buy the label. If we wanted to sell the label and become an imprint of one of the majors, I’m sure we wouldn’t have problems doing that. We could get a lot of cash, and we wouldn’t have to worry about a lot of things, but in the long term we would lose interest. I think the other thing is I was never set on being wealthy. I want to have money and take care of my family, but if I can go to work every day and do something I love and own what I write and record and record exactly the way I want and live my life the way I want to, I’m going to be a lot happier than if I’m making ten times as much money but not doing something I enjoy. I definitely couldn’t stomach the music industry if I had to be part of it in that way. I don’t have the constitution for it.
A lot of times you find the things that are profitable are not necessarily the most fun. I’m no monk, we do a lot of things I don’t like doing. But there are some things that come out funny. For example, Chase commercials. When we got approached to do replay music for Chase commercials, it was very distasteful because I hate Chase. You go in there, and they’re assholes. They charge you too much, and it’s not a company I want to help promote in any way. But musically what they asked us to do was so unbelievably rewarding for me. They were asking us to replay Stevie Wonder songs. And what that meant was for me to go into the studio in one day and go soup-to-nuts rhythm section through background singers and strings and mixes and everything and try to recreate Motown masters. I learned more in those couple days doing that than I learned in years of engineering school. It was really going to school. It was a very humbling experience getting inside those masters in that way. It turned out to be a very enjoyable thing and it paid well. Of course, there have been other things I didn’t enjoy.
Any words of caution or mistakes you made along the way that you’d advise people to avoid?
GR:
The first thing I would say – and it seems little, but it crushes me every day – is that at Dap-Tone we get piles of demos and packages with full glossy photos and DVD’s, press clippings, CD’s with full artwork and digi-packs. I would tell people not to send anything unsolicited, because that’s a lot of money you’re spending. If you’re trying to make a living as an artist, you have to look at it as a business. You can’t be banking on selling a million records. You have to look at it and think, “How can I make $4,000?” The first way is, don’t spend $4,000 making and sending demos to labels that didn’t ask for them. It seems stupid, but it’s the first thing everybody does. If you’re looking at what you do as a career, it doesn’t make any sense. It is another thing driven by an illusion – that something like that is going to give you your big break. If somebody’s looking for a huge break, I don’t have any advice, because I never got one. If you’re looking to really do something like I did – more conservatively create your own business and market – you have to really watch your pennies and spend your money on things that are important like rent and food and paying good musicians – things that are going to make you survive and do this for a long time.
There are a lot of people that end up giving up on music because they feel like they fell on their faces, but I think a lot of times their energies are misdirected. Instead of looking inward and local and trying to create something small that they can build from and concentrating on their music and their craft and relating to people on a direct level, they’re shooting for stars. It’s like playing the lottery. It’s fun, and if you win it’s amazing, but it’s not a business plan. You don’t say, “Okay, we want to start a business and want $500,000. The first thing we’re going to do is buy $4,000 worth of scratcher tickets.” It’s kind of the same thing when you start sending demos around. If you have $4,000, don’t press up full CD’s and glossy pictures and sent them to me, especially if you haven’t done any research to find out if I’m into that music or I could be slightly into that music or you’ve never made any contact with me. I’m not saying people shouldn’t make demos or connections, because they should. But I think trying to make meaningful contact is much more important than any kind of shotgun approach.
—–
Please check out Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings and their label Daptone Records.
Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings “Let Them Knock” LIVE @ 89.3 the Current
Sean O’Connell is the founder of Creative Allies, a company that provides creative opportunities for designers and artists. He is also the founder of Music Allies, an agency that consults on strategy, marketing, publicity and radio promotions for music festivals and independent labels and works with the Hangout Music Festival, Camp Bisco, Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, Lights All Night and many others. Sean has done almost everything in the music industry, including artist management, concert promotion, label marketing, radio and booking. He has advised record labels owned by major indie artists including Ani DiFranco, Aimee Mann, Justin Timberlake and Jack Johnson. Last year Sean launched Creative Allies a platform that showcases designers and illustrators from around the world and provides opportunities for them to enter design contests to create art and merchandise for bands, films and festivals.
I got to talk to Sean recently about his history in the music business and how artists can seize opportunities that will help them maintain long-term careers. We also talked about how the music industry has evolved for indie and DIY artists in the past 15-20 years and how his companies Music Allies and Creative Allies work to provide opportunities to members of the creative community in the current industry climate.
Thanks for taking some time to talk to me, Sean. How did you get into music?
SO:
When I was 18-years old, I went off to a small college in New York State. I’d grown up listening to Canadian radio stations under the pillow as I was going to sleep. I grew up in Buffalo, New York, and we’re only about an hour and a half away from Canada. I listened to CFNY, and it was probably one of the biggest things in my life. It introduced me to so much music that wasn’t getting poured down my throat. I was always a music nut, and the younger brother of someone who was even more of a music nut.
I went to a small college, and I felt very suffocated culturally. And there was a group of kids running a radio show on the information channel – local cable access. So, if you looked at messages about what was in the cafeteria or something, you’d hear these guys’ music on Channel 10.
So, then I met a mentor who taught me what it took to start a college radio station. And we raised $100,000 and started a station. I never went home for summers again. I just stayed and built studios. But I felt there still wasn’t enough stuff to do in town. So, I started a club on Wednesday nights called “The Freak Show,” which was at a sports bar. We completely made it over. And we packed 500 kids in at $5 per head every Wednesday.
I’ve always had an intuition for what other kids and other music fans gravitated towards. And I really never looked back. That time at school, being at a small college allowed me to get funding for local musicians and get a key to the recording studio at the college. Although I suck at engineering, I was the guy with the key, so we’d spend all night just making records for everybody. I eventually decided to go out on my own, move back to Buffalo and start a concert promotion company while managing some bands.
Which bands did you manage?
SO:
I managed a band called Johny Vegas. They didn’t go down the record label path, but we figured out how to sell 20,000 CDs each year and fill up clubs from Boston to Detroit. We’d built up a really good following. I quickly went from not knowing anyone in Buffalo – because I was only a kid the last time I’d been in Buffalo and didn’t have access to people at the clubs – to having success booking a lot of bands. Pretty quickly I was booking ten shows per month. And I got an opportunity booking a club called Nietzsche’s. When I was growing up, I had always wanted to get into that place. Then, all of a sudden I had two venues, the first and then a club called Network that Jim Kelly of the Buffalo Bills had opened. And then quickly grabbed a third, which was a 3,500-seat venue called Melody Fair. By the age of 24, I had an amazing business running three of the most important music venues in a city that had a huge music legacy.
I had my fingers in a lot of different aspects of the industry. But I was essentially a self-made guy. And I was managing two bands and running a record label for one, marketing for three venues, putting on lots of concerts with huge risk. Because I was only 24, I wasn’t really good at saving money. But I was good at spending it. It became a very risky business, and I started gravitating to a couple folks who were at Righteous Babe. At the time, Ani DiFranco was really taking off. And I really wanted to focus on something. Within my first year, we had Ani DiFranco a Top 10 hit. I was working with them on radio promotion and other marketing.
Well, and clearly Ani DiFranco invented DIY. That was the first time I heard of someone saying, “I’m going to do this on my own.” And at the time, I was at a major label thinking, “What? I don’t understand.” What was it that drove her to be a DIY pioneer?
SO:
First and foremost, it has everything to do with her. There is a lot of great music out there. But there is very little great music that just connects. She would open her mouth and sing stuff that related to so many people. It was powerful and emotional. It’s 20-years later, and I’ve seen very little that’s like it. Her music was clearly her drive and why she’s on this planet. She was always an incredibly reserved person socially. But on stage, she really opened up and talked about what was going on in her life, how she perceived the world around her and barriers that were put up and the ones she thought could be easily broken down. It was powerful.
At the same time, there was a guy named Scott Fisher, who is still Ani’s manager and is amazing. He started as a carpenter, and had gone to law school in order to offer services to defend defendants on death row. So, they shared a lot of values. And he saw how things were starting up for her and came in and said, “I think this could be done better.” He was a very system-oriented guy. It was fantastic, and incredibly refreshing for me, because I had built a lot of my own systems. And we all just decided we didn’t care how the major labels were doing it. We were in Buffalo, New York, and we were having a great time. Clearly, no one was going to starve, because she was already selling 1,000 tickets.
Her success was also informed by it all being about her home town. All her packaging reflected that. Living Clip is a great example. That booklet has a certain sheen on the cover and there was certain kind of binding. Ani wanted the box a certain way. And it was really important to her that the visual identity and the quality of her recordings went all the way to the packaging. But we had a huge restriction, because we made a pledge that everything was going to be done in Buffalo. I think that particular album was done by four suppliers. And the volume of orders was so great that we were trucking things from the printing company, to the book-binding company, to the company that did the laminates for the CD, etc. It was a wild experience. And I don’t know what the exact numbers were, but it was a ridiculous cost per unit. No one at a major label would’ve ever done that. And we did it this way all because of these self-imposed values. We wanted to help our local economy. We wanted to not just be residents, but be a part of the community.
And I think that ties back into what you’re currently doing. Ani DiFranco was just a bullet point in your experience list.
SO:
My experience with Ani DiFranco still informs everything I do today. And she’s actually one of the first investors in this new company I have. I remember at one point in my career going back and asking them how merch was doing at one point. And they said that one t-shirt they had was selling through the roof. And it was a t-shirt that just said, “Ani Fucking DiFranco.”
It was a shirt that was being worn all over Italy on her tour. One of the crew members bought it and brought it back, and they bootlegged the bootleg. And it became the #1 selling piece of merch. I’ve heard this story over and over. But that really sticks with me, because we have – whether we’re working with bands, brands or pop culture items – traditionally taken merch design from the top, down. It’s always been some illustrator or graphic designer who is determining the look and feel. And the truth is, it doesn’t necessarily translate. In all fairness to Ani, there are a lot of young women who are at these shows. And I will look at them and think, “Why is there a 40-year old guy in an office at RBR designing these t-shirts?” That was a very informing part of the business and in a lot of ways led me to what I do with Creative Allies.
Where did you go after Righteous Babe?
SO:
I wanted to try some other things and get out of Buffalo for a while. I moved to Boston and did marketing and promotion for RYKODISC and was excited to work at a label that was so important to me when I was a kid and when I was building the college radio station. And that really expanded my network. I got to have a lot of success with older artists and different genres, and built a lot of confidence and started to believe I could make a big difference.
After that, RYKODISC was sold to a major corporation, and I started to feel like I was working for people who didn’t have the same values, were letting the idea of catalog fade away and treated people terribly. So, I decided to leave and go into independent radio promotion for a few months. I loved the guy I worked for, but hated the job and the idea that radio promotion and that world was 32 records a week going on a list, trying to get feedback from everybody, etc. There was really no creativity in it.
I was a marketing guy despite the fact I’d had a lot of success doing record promotion for some of the best indie labels in the ‘90s. But that was creative, because I didn’t have the resources and the budget. I had a voice and a direct line to the president of each company and to the artists themselves. As an indie record promoter, I was just a call jockey.
In that position, you’re a telemarketer – no question.
SO:
Yeah. It was at that point that I moved back to Boston. And I joined a startup that was three guys who had just received a $3 million raise from Sonicblue to create products called “music tellers,” which were ATM-like devices to plug your Real MP3 player into and get music quickly. There were not a lot of ways to get music and not a lot of people with high bandwidth or a lot of digital music storage, and CD burners were not very sophisticated. This particular business was obviously short-sighted because obviously very shortly, technology went into overdrive. But the idea was to increase customer satisfaction and create a cloud music environment.
It was a great experience for me. And it was pretty amazing to watch $3 million get burned that quickly.
And it’s better when it’s not your $3 million.
SO:
It was a great time, and I did learn a lot while I was there. Then RYKODISC separated from Palm, and they asked me to come back. But it just wasn’t the same. Around that time, it was really clear there was a huge opportunity to create a company to fill a huge gap for musicians and for music festivals, something I was incredibly excited about. I had really been this genre-free music fan, who actually had a lucrative career promoting fringe artists to radio. But I felt like I didn’t relate to radio stations’ programming and the concept of caging everyone into a box. And there was this European model emerging for music festivals where you could go to one and hear everything from blue grass to heavy metal. And I liked it all. And I saw that there were other people like me out there.
So, I started Music Allies. Our first clients were Ani DiFranco and Bonnaroo. Ten years later, we provide those resources and marketing expertise and strategic vision for a lot of independent music companies, but especially the ones that are owned by recording artists. During our ten years, we’ve launched labels for Martin Sexton, Ani DiFranco, Aimee Mann. I even helped Justin Timberlake launch Tenman Records. That all came out of referrals.
We don’t market Music Allies. We just do our job well and clients call us. We don’t look at how other record labels are doing it. And in this troubling time and in a fragmented world, when recording artists can really monetize their recorded music, we really decided to stick with our small family of labels: Jack Johnson’s Brushfire Records; Ani’s Righteous Babe Records and a handful of other artists. We’re not growing that part of our business or trying to solve the big questions on how to make a good middle class living if not become a superstar in this new music world. The big reason is that our work with brands and festivals has really blown up.
From your perspective, what do you think aspiring artists should be doing to be a part of these festivals?
SO:
Be great and be honest with the connection that you’re making. If there ever were magic bullets, there are less of them now. You got to hustle and make your own destiny. There are fewer guys with ponytails in suits that are going to walk into your life and make you a star.
But my biggest piece of advice is team up with someone passionate to work with you and that doesn’t mean someone from the music business. When you look at a lot of people I’ve worked with and look at who their managers are, they started as enthusiastic young people who didn’t have training in the music business, but just saw that they could really do something. Scot was that for Ani. David Sonenberg, who manages the Black Eyed Peas and others, was in his early 20s when Meatloaf came around, and that’s how he got started. I think that part is huge.
And that’s pretty consistent. Almost any time you’re doing something great and it’s really translating, don’t envision the superstar that comes around or the music mogul. Be really good at identifying the cache of fans that want to be more than fans. They don’t all have to be managers. They can also be social masters. I think that’s a first step.
To be candid, without an audience and without having built a following outside your hometown, I don’t think there is a place for you at these major music festivals. That’s not what their program is. Many of these bands that play festivals have done really well for themselves. But I would say half the people at the festivals are discovering that band for the first time. Festivals can be a good place for musical discovery, but festivals don’t have to do that with completely unknown bands. We’re all following our own path. Even with well-known artists, you may not have heard them before. If you’re walking into a tent with 5000 people that all love this band, you’re still walking in for the first time. That’s a really powerful thing.
And which qualities do you think some of these career artists have that so many others don’t?
SO:
First of all, they have an incredible work ethic. G. Love is a great example. He’s been doing it for over 20 years. He has a great career and has had some of the biggest moments in his career just in the last few years. It hasn’t been because of hit songs. It’s been because he is genuinely concerned about connecting with people – and not just in music. If you do an interview with him, he’ll remember it. He loves meeting his fans and knows where they came from. He’s eager to get up in the morning and do work with radio stations or whatever the case may be. He really cares. I think that’s a big part: Do you have that work ethic?
The other part is there isn’t one moment where it’s all going to happen and you’re going is going to sail from there. The artists I’ve worked with are on the road. For a lifetime. If you are an up and coming band, do you have what it takes to spend time a lifetime on the road? That’s a hard question. Being on the road when life happens is hard: parents being ill; friends getting sick; having a family. You deal with all that, and you have to deal with it in a very different way when you are on tour. And I don’t think that ever stops.
To have a career, bands need to have that touring base because they’re not living off royalties. The ASCAP and BMI checks that are coming in are not that big. You have to ask yourself if you can visualize yourself in this place. And I think that question is a hard question and maybe even an unfair question to ask young artists, because I know I couldn’t visualize that stuff 15 years ago.
The other part is, you build a team around you, and you don’t sweat the small stuff, but you make sure you sweat the person who is in charge of the small stuff. You need to pay attention to details, whether about your packaging, your fan relationships, etc. All the clients I have really care about all those details.
That’s a great segue to move into talking about this newest endeavor you have going on with your company. Why did you feel that there was a need to create this platform where artists and musicians could connect?
SO:
I’ve been a passionate advocate for musicians for a lifetime. My biggest joy is that I’ve been able to be involved during the creative process. I’ve been able to be at musicians’ homes when they’re making music or backstage, or in recording studios when albums are being made.
I’ve also always been a passionate advocate for all creative people, so the newest aspect of my business is really a natural extension. I’ve been involved in the process of visual arts for years. When I moved to the South and got out of entertainment hubs like New York, Boston, L.A. and San Francisco I realized that creative people didn’t have access to creative opportunities. As I discussed many of the surreal and creative moments I’ve had in my career, they would always say, “Wow.” They weren’t struck by the celebrity of it all, they were attracted to the creative opportunity. Most creative people are stuck, at best, designing restaurant menus, retail advertisements and health insurance brochures. You realize how massive the illustrator and design community is and how many people have this talent. The number of people that went to college for it and then actually got a career out of it is a fraction. Those people who actually have a career out of it very rarely have the opportunity to collaborate and design for music or anything in pop culture.
I’ll hear people say, “If only I could design a poster for a festival,” or “If only I could design a shirt for Justin Timberlake” – whatever the case may be. And for me, there was that moment of “what if? This seems to be a great business.” The other part is that as much as I’ve been a passionate advocate for artists for a lifetime, my creative brush is marketing. I love marketing. It comes naturally to me, and I see angles that other people don’t. I think that’s something I’m good at and I enjoy. And it gets my mind going. It’s fantastic. I probably get a buzz off marketing similar to how a musician gets a buzz off writing a song. It’s a very creative process for me. So, in knowing there’s this opportunity to open up creative opportunities for designers, it became really obvious to me that marketing is so fragmented.
You’ve now done marketing campaigns for a lot of big names. And I’ve always thought collaborative marketing started with Mountain Dew reaching out to designers 10-15 years ago and saying, “You should redesign our bottle.” Do you find that level of interaction within the creative community contributes to building a brand, and do you have any examples of that?
SO:
Absolutely. One, it’s usually under 40% and sometimes as little as 20% of submissions that come from fans of the brand or band. What we’ve spent the last year doing is building this amazing design community of over 20,000 illustrators. And they come to us for creative opportunity. They may have never heard of your band or your festival. But the biggest fulfillment for them and what enriches their soul is the creative outlet.
We know that not everyone who participates in Creative Allies is a designer, which is a pretty small subset of a band’s fan base anyway. They’re all connected in a very social world. All of a sudden you have 200 designs, and you have immediately 50,000 wall posts that go up all over the country showing those designs.
With some much music, getting awareness for a new release is hard. Doesn’t it blow you away sometimes when you think, “I had no idea Beastie Boys released a record.” Everybody is inundated with busy lives and they don’t have any idea which albums are coming out. And the way media cycles work, five, six or seven weeks go by after that record comes out, and it’s kind of gone. It’s a huge challenge for our business. One of reason for the demise of music sales is not hard drive access, streaming or copyright infringement. It’s that we all live in the moment. By the time this phone call is over and one day from now, you and I will have had so many moments.
It was described best to me by Eric Garland of Big Champagne. He was asked after Michael Jackson’s death if there would ever be another, and he said, “It’s not that there will never be another triple or quadruple threat – dancer, singer, choreographer, musician. It’s just simply that when he was big, there were three channels where you could perceive somebody doing live music. And at any given point he was on two of them.” We’re just so impossibly fragmented now. It’s too hard to keep track of everything.
SO:
Exactly. So, you can row upstream, which I find a lot of musicians do, for example by saying they need to do a radio campaign because that’s what they grew up on. For us, the content itself creates a viral watershed moment. Images start getting shared.
Then of course, we’re adding ammunition for the bands themselves: Facebook; Twitter feeds. Then you have the re-Tweets, the Facebook postings, etc. There is a very viral aspect to this.
I interview people for my blog because I feel like the, “Hey, Ma. Look at me” concept is very real. You’re more likely to share my blog if you’re a part of it than if you aren’t, and I’m sure the same thing goes for artwork.
SO:
Exactly.
Are you offering this service to developing musicians as well?
SO:
We’re about to. We curate all our contests. Right now, the value proposition is to participate in a once-in-a-lifetime design opportunity. We haven’t opened it up to young bands. But we’ve done tons of testing. We can put an unknown band up there and get as many designs that as good quality as I will with any superstar.
That’s something we know for a fact. So far, the key to our success has been to not overload our designers. We don’t want to put too many opportunities up. We are slowly opening up that channel to younger bands. The first thing we did was a program with the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus and the Warped tour. We did a merchandising makeover programs for one of the bands that won the Warped tour contest. Designs came in from all over the world, and the band walked away with posters, t-shirts and a lot of other awesome products.
We did a similar opportunity with ReverbNation. We received 8,000 submissions per month. We hand-picked young bands to get designs. We know there’s demand there. We are going to launch a new version our band makeover program soon. Not only will bands get designs, but they will also get the ability to get an entire merchandising line, which means serious cash. And we’re getting an entire creative team around them.
The other thing we’re excited about is that around Christmas time, we’re going to launch a way to insert our platform into your Facebook page or your band’s website. We can create an opportunity for bands to come in at a really low cost and use the engine. They won’t get all the viral aspects of it. It will be for their fans, and some of our better designers will see those opportunities as a better value. And they can upgrade if they want more of the social networking. But a lot of young bands come to us because they need artwork. And the truth is, most of the bigger bands, festivals, etc. don’t just come to us because they need artwork. They come to us because it’s an amazing social marketing play.
To learn more about Sean O’Connell and the work he does, visit the Creative Allies website.
Josh Rabinowitz is the Senior Vice President/Director of Music for Grey Worldwide. He is also Bandleader of the New York City-based funk group The Second Step, a group that has been actively performing for nearly 20 years. In the past decade, he has written and produced several thousand tracks for brands throughout the world. He has worked on ad campaigns with brands like Cover Girl and Dr. Pepper, and artists such as Rihanna, the Black Eyed Peas, Run DMC, Cyndi Lauper and Natasha Bedingfield. He has also worked on music for films including Waking the Dead and Arlington Road. In 2008, Josh created the record label Pantene/Grey Music, which was the first imprint to release music as a joint venture between a brand and its agency. Josh is also an adjunct Professor of Music at The New School and has taught a course on “Music in the Media” at the Steinhardt School of Music Professions at NYU. He is also an occasional contributor to Billboard magazine.
Recently, I connected with Josh, and he shared the story about his unique journey in the music and advertising industries. He also delivered some sound advice for artists that want to build a solid career in music.
Thanks so much for taking some time to talk to me, Josh. I actually opened up for the Second Step when I was a kid. I was playing in a funk band, and anything with horns ended up on the same bill, often enough. You guys were ska back then. How did you come to be in the music business?
JR:
We eventually became a funk band. We started out as a ska band. I joined the band in 1987 and then became the leader of the group and took over the business aspect of the band. I booked all the shows. We were a touring band for a while doing 200-plus shows per year for a while. That’s what I was doing for a living at that time, if you can call it a living. During those years, the band was eight or nine people. Now we’re a seven-piece band. We still play gigs occasionally. In the summertime we’ll play on Block Island, in the Hamptons, or play a private party. We enjoy it. And when it’s a hobby, it’s a lot more fun than when you’re depending on all these gigs to pay bills and feed yourself.
There are certainly easier ways to make money, no question about it.
JR:
But it was an interesting learning experience. My problem was that after I came out of college, I wanted to get into music and was really passionate about it. I just didn’t have any great connections. I didn’t have any family members that were involved in music, and neither my parents nor I had any friends that were involved in the business of music at all. I really didn’t have a foot in the door or a way of getting my foot in the door. That was kind of disconcerting for me.
I tried over the years to get a job. And a lot of the experiences I had with taking the band on the road, being a producer in the studio and as a side musician being a trombone player I felt like I had decent real life resume. I had gone to a music and arts high school in Manhattan and was one of the top students. I thought I had some skills and abilities. But I had no way of really connecting them to money in terms of a job. I tried all kinds of things.
That’s a door that a lot of guys that are getting older or having families, but still want to stay in the business or play music as a hobby are trying to get through. How have you been able to find success with that?
JR:
It’s interesting, because I graduated college at 22 and didn’t get a job until I was 31. So, I eventually got through by banging my head against the wall, trying to connect with people I didn’t really know or have great hookups to – just doing everything I could. It was in the age where email wasn’t happening yet. So, it was a lot of faxing of resumes, cold calls and then doing whatever I could to just get by, which was essentially playing in the band, which was my main source of income. I was also a substitute music teacher and a music teacher in a public school. My daughter and son ended up both going there. And I was also a sideman on gigs.
I guess what happened was that it came to a point where I didn’t really have any promising possibilities. A lot of people told me, “I’d love to have you working in our A&R department,” or, “I’d love to have you work in our main agent booking gigs,” or, “You should definitely come work in our management department.” I got approached with a lot of things that I felt were really exciting and that would turn into something. But they didn’t.
Then, I met some guy, and he said, “I’ve been in the music business for years, and one facet of the industry that seems really interesting is the advertising music sector – the jingle houses.”
And which year was this?
JR:
This was when I was about 30. So, it was about 1994.
So, at that time, music and advertising wasn’t big yet. It wasn’t cool.
JR:
It definitely wasn’t cool. And I knew some people that were doing it that I had played with. They talked about how they did these sessions and then got paid session fees. And then they’d go to the union and get some checks. Then, I also knew some people who would just sing in ads and would get crazy money in the mail. I still thought of it as a sell out and not real music. And I was fairly principled, but I did need a job.
I didn’t have a way to find out the names of the different jingle houses. Obviously, there was no Google. I would ask people about it, but then finding the phone numbers and information was really hard. I remember once I walked into Barnes and Noble and found a book about advertising. There were a couple pages that listed some of the jingle houses. And I tore the pages out. I think I still have those pages folded up somewhere in a memorabilia folder.
That’s a great story.
JR:
Yeah. It’s funny to think about now. I found out about some of these places and sent a whole bunch of faxes. And then a guy called me and said, “Why don’t you come in, and we’ll give it a shot? I’m looking for a guy who isn’t really been in the business and hasn’t been jaded by the business.” And point I had borrowed a couple hundred dollars from my sister and bought a one-way ticket to New Orleans. As a trombone player, I figured, if I was going to be a starving musician, why not try to do it in a place where someone at least supports the type of playing I was doing? And even today, it’s amazing how many trombone players you hear about that are coming out of there and surviving doing it. So, maybe I made a mistake!
But, I took a job with this guy at a company called JSM. His name was John Silberman. And I worked with him for a few months. Once I got my foot in the door, I said, “Alright, I’m 31-years old. I have to make something happen.” So, I learned the business, which didn’t seem too complex to me. And I met a lot of the people. I went to parties, and I read all the industry trades and saw who was doing what. I was in the business, so it was a good way to meet people.
It sounds like you really drank it up, unlike somebody like myself, who stumbled into the business early and took it for granted. It seems like you wrung the life out of it and really seized every opportunity once you got your foot in the door.
JR:
Yeah. I really needed to. I came from a nice, Jewish, middle-class Brooklyn family of professionals. And although there were some pretty unique experiences I look back on now fondly – in my 20s, it felt like, “Everyone is doing pretty well. The economy’s not doing badly. Why can’t I get a job doing what I love?” Obviously, to be able to sustain yourself doing what you love and playing music is kind of like winning the lottery in some respects; it’s very hard to do it. Certainly, I got pretty lucky and got my foot in the door.
JSM didn’t work out very well for me in terms of being long term. But I had my eye on the people who were the big-time hitters in the business. And there was a conglomerate called tomandandy. It was two guys that had a place in SoHo on Greene Street and a place out in Santa Monica. And they were doing some really cool film work and cutting-edge advertising work.
And when you were at JSM, were you supervising spots or hiring musicians? What kind of role did you start out having when you got into the business?
JR:
I was hiring musicians, I was working on projects and was the point person between the music company and composers, engineers, musicians and advertising agency production people.
So, you had to speak a collection of languages.
JR:
Yes. It’s useful knowing the language and balancing it with the business practices, and it was just about that and being a good and reliable person; those are all key skills in any business. It was also creating original music. Essentially, I created some jingles with singing in them, but a lot of instrumental music.
Then I started working at this place tomandandy, and they were working with “cooler” people and on more creative projects. I was hired as a producer and contractor of musicians and then became the executive producer there. I worked there for several years there. The problem I had with that business was the reality in the industry that if you are a truly creative spirit and have some sort of creative vision and think your work is great, that doesn’t necessarily mean the people you are selling to think it is great. And it was hard for me to swallow that. I wasn’t very good at taking the hits.
Then I thought, “What can I do next in this business? I can start my own company. But I can’t take the hits very well. Or, I could move over to the other side and be the person who’s hiring people to do the music. Maybe I can soften the blows and try to make some cool things happen.” And the advertising agencies were already my clients. So, there was an opening I’d heard about at one of the big ad agencies called Young and Rubicam (Y&R). And I connected well with them, and got the job. I ended up working there for seven years. That was probably 1998. And at that point, people were starting to license music a lot more for ads.
Right. Well, the Cadillac commercial with Led Zeppelin was in the late ‘90s. It’s the one I always think of as blowing the doors wide open.
JR:
Yeah. That was an important one. There were a few in the late ‘90s. Sting had one where they used his song “Desert Rose.” He licensed it gratis to Jaguar. They used it, and it actually really helped boost his record sales. Moby was also starting to get in on it, and there was a great deal of attention around him. It was almost like you were clicking the remote to your TV and seeing classic rock radio station after classic rock radio station. But it was mostly famous, well-known songs, and not songs from emerging artists. Eventually, of course, it became about emerging artists.
When I got to Y&R I was responsible for specific accounts and the music used in those accounts, including creating original music – which was almost the entirety of it – and some licensing of existing songs. And I got lucky enough to work with a bunch of artists, because this was a time when artists were seeking revenue opportunities and getting paid pretty decent money to be part of an ad, whether in the ad itself or writing the music for the ad. I got to work with an array of people, like the Black Eyed Peas before they were famous. I worked with Run DMC, LL Cool J, Celia Cruz, Mark McGrath, Macy Gray – there were a bunch. I also did a spot with an artist named Alana Davis who was critically acclaimed, but not necessarily a huge name. We did a spot where they put a chyron on the spot that listed the name of the artist, the song and where you can download it. We also did a synergized deal with Sony Records where we released a CD single of a version of a Crosby, Stills and Nash song that was on an ad. It got a lot of attention around the time of the Super Bowl.
Fortunately, I’ve been involved in some projects that have been bucking the trend and ahead of the curve. So, I’ve been able to get some press and create a name for myself. Eventually, there was an opening at Grey, where they wanted someone to head their music group and bring some mojo to it. They hired me about six years ago. At Grey, we’ve done a bunch of cool things, and I’ve had some great opportunities. I’ve been able to do a lot of moderating of panels and some op-ed work. I was a columnist at Billboard for a while doing a column called “With the Brand.” I’ve done a lot of extra-curricular work.
Another reason I wanted to talk to you is because you’re very good at managing your own personal brand, which these days it’s good for every musician to be able to do. You’re someone who is paying real attention to how you’re perceived in the modern era. And that’s important. It’s not just self-preserving; it’s self sustaining.
JR:
I think of it as self-sustaining. That’s totally the phrase I use. In any field that’s associated with the media, entertainment and music, you have to be self-sustaining in appropriate ways. There are inappropriate people who are completely self-serving. The way I look at it is, it’s very hard to survive doing any kind of music work consistently. And certainly, with the way the economy is, it’s just becoming incredibly challenging. We are all feeling the strain.
You’ve been a musician concurrent to your executive career, so you have a unique perspective. How is the business changing, and what should musicians be doing in order to get their music licensed? It seems like there are just so many options, because you can sign up with so many aggregators, etc.
JR:
If I were an artist trying to get my music licensed, I would be networking as much as possible, going to conferences and meeting as many people as I can. And then obviously if you’re an artist, after feeling like you’ve developed a decent sense of who the good and reliable people to work with are, get someone to represent you, or just be entrepreneurial and represent yourself. The DIY thing is in full effect. I feel like unless you’re just such a prolific creator that you just don’t have time to multitask, sell your own work and create your own matrix of connections, do it yourself. Create your own website. Create meaningful relationships. Do things on spec. And really show your value, your creativity and your reliability.
There are people that are completely entrenched in their work and can’t step away. I’m always jealous of those people, because I’ve never been able to do that.
Nor have I. It’s too much left brain and right brain for me too, which is how I probably ended up on the business side of it.
I’ve had a taste of what you’ve been talking about a little bit, though not to the extent that you have. I had a “desk where dreams go to die.” And as such, it can be really overwhelming and hard to give people the attention people deserve. I always try to put it into perspective for people and say that if they go up to someone like you with two albums and you have Sony on the other line calling with all of Western music, it’s not really a contest. Do you have any advice for artists that are approaching music supervisors like yourself?
JR:
What gets my attention – and there are just so many things that sometimes I can’t even begin to handle it – is if somebody knows somebody I know, and if that person is somebody I like and respect. That’s how I will connect with somebody and at least give their music a listen – how they become a blip on my radar. For me, that’s literally what it is.
There’s great music out there. I created playlist after playlist of songs in my early years that I thought were the most creative and interesting songs to me. And I would kill to get that artist involved in some type of work I was doing. And I also have favorite artists from my experiences over the years and a gazillion friends I grew up with. I grew up in New York, so I just know a lot of people. But it’s not always the stuff I like that will get the air.
You’re ultimately beholden to each client’s needs, I would guess.
JR:
Yes. It’s a totally collaborative process. So unfortunately, my vision isn’t always the vision. However, I am the one who’s guiding the process and trying to sell the work to all these different participants, whether it’s a specific client, the creative directors, art directors, producers or the account director on my side. Sometimes there are about ten cooks in the kitchen. But I am the one who is ultimately responsible for the music, so I am in control of the process to an extent and try to manage it well. I try to make it work. And what making it work means is that it’s not always about the thing I think is the greatest; it’s about what collectively everyone involved thinks is the greatest. I’m managing expectations of people and trying to give the group what they want. It’s great when it’s just one person I’m working with who is the ultimate decider, but that’s not necessarily the case.
I would imagine that especially with the size of the accounts that Grey handles, you’re constantly having to placate a number of different entities.
JR:
Yes. And everyone loves music. Everyone is passionate about music – or at least 95% of the population, especially people in the creative and media-related marketing fields. Music is such a powerful thing and so subjective.
I remember reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe. And there was a word – “intersubjectivity.” He said when people took drugs they came to this intersubjectivity. That’s kind of what I do. I try to create an intersubjectivity where everyone is liking something.
That is politically not an easy portal to keep open, is it?
JR:
It’s very challenging. Now, if I have a vision for something, and I think it’s going to be just groundbreaking, or if I’m involved with a project, and I can tell something is going to get a lot of attention and be positive towards my brand and great for the brand we’re working for and the brand of my agency, I’m going to fight. I try not to give up. And those instances come up occasionally. But there are some projects you work on that are impossible to make great and satisfying. It’s not necessarily what’s they’re about. It’s about scoring a concept or a story or underscoring or creating a bed for something – to steal a line from Brian Eno – that’s “as ignorable as it is interesting.” So, it’s not really about making a huge statement.
Sure. Not everything’s going to be an iTunes commercial.
Your story is definitely an interesting one that a lot of people would like to emulate. Do you have any parting words of advice for musicians and young music business professionals?
JR:
Try to create a meaningful relationship with someone like me that is a gatekeeper to music, or someone who can actually get you paid some money for your work. To me, it’s about having a deep pool of connections and not just pinpointing one or two people. What’s great about the business I’m in is that there are a lot of really interesting people. So the journey in terms of creating meaningful relationships with these people is a fun journey. You’re going to struggle, but it’s not like working in tax law or computer coding, where it’s arduous, detailed work. It’s fun and creative. There is a lot of music flowing, and a lot of people who are as passionate as you are to make their art happen and to monetize that creativity. In that journey, you’re going to meet a lot of interesting people. You’re also going to meet some freaks and have some disappointments. My problem was that I wasn’t enjoying the journey enough at some points because I was getting too tense and stressed. It is ultimately fun if you can enjoy it.
To learn more about Josh Rabinowitz and his work, check out JoshRabinowitzMusic.com.
Bob Knight is a drummer and the owner of BEK Music Ltd., a company based in the UK that provides session musicians ranging from soloists, horn and rhythm sections, to complete orchestras. Originally from Harrogate in Northern England, Bob grew up studying music, eventually earning a jazz degree at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he studied with renowned musicians including Bernard Purdie, Clare Fischer and John Abercrombie. Throughout his 16-year career as a session musician and musical director, he has performed, recorded, toured with, and directed many prominent artists including Charlotte Church, Seal, Eminem, Nik Kershaw, Michael Bolton and Cee-Lo Green.
I recently got to sit down with Bob and talk about the evolution of his music career, the qualities an artist needs to have in order to get steady work as a session musician and some advice he has for musicians that want to make it in the music industry.
Thanks so much for taking some time to talk, Bob. What does your current work in the music industry entail?
BK:
I kind of have a dual personality. I exist as a drummer/musical director. And then I have a fixing company. The fixing company itself is called BEK Music Ltd. It’s really just a name for registration purposes, but I tend to go by my own name, because it’s a bit more succinct. It also avoids some complication, because sometimes people who work for me, especially the younger generation, don’t realize I play music. They just think I put things together, because they haven’t seen me play or I haven’t played with them. Sometimes people who know that I play don’t know I can put things together for them if they require it. The company is a way to make sure everyone knows about everything I do.
And how did you get your start in music?
BK:
I started out a lot like everyone starts out. I’m from the North of England, from Yorkshire County from a town called Harrogate, which was a great town to grow up in. It was very geared towards the encouragement of youth music and education, and the programs were beautifully run and well involved. It was kind of a middle-class town. I studied there privately with some great drum teachers.
After I left Harrogate, I moved to London to go to the Royal Academy of Music. I did the four-year jazz degree there, which was amazing. It’s a hard course to get into. They only take eight players each year from around the world: one drummer; one bass player; one piano player; a couple horns and a singer. It was a whole day of auditions. But they have the greatest teachers and the greatest visiting faculty. If someone’s in town playing a show, the college will get an “in.” So, I had master classes and one-on-one lessons with Bernard Purdie, Clare Fischer, John Abercrombie – really heavy people.
I studied there for four years. I’m quite lucky because my brother is four years older than I. He went to Berklee and then he came to the Academy. So, I’ve always had the benefit of hindsight, because I’ve been able to see – not the mistakes that he’s made, but the problems that he’s faced trying to get established in an industry that’s already oversaturated and unregulated.
Before I graduated, I made sure I had some teaching opportunities lined up and had made fairly decent in roads with corporate function bands, etc. So, I knew I could sustain a living from music regardless of “making it” in commercial music. For me, and for anybody on the session musician side of things – not necessarily if you’re an artist – you have to do a little bit of self preservation, because of the nature of the business; there are a lot of things they don’t tell you in college about taxes, bookkeeping and accounting. It’s all quite boring, but it’s incredibly necessary. There were a lot of musicians that came out of college and got massively stuck by either earning huge amounts of money – because they got on a big gig and didn’t deal with it properly – or who could’ve gotten benefits or paid less tax because they didn’t understand what they should be registered for and how they should deal with it.
I was prepared when I left college. And I did a couple years of teaching and scratching around, playing everywhere I could and never saying no to a gig; I still try to keep that as an ethos now, especially if it’s with people I never play with. But my brother and the guys I knew that were older than me and playing clubs had opportunities come their way, one of which was my friend Steve, who got made music director (MD) for Alison Moyet. I started with her in 2003, and I still play with her now. We’ve done six or seven big tours.
Alison’s manager used to do the press for Charlotte Church, so I started playing with her and working as her MD. She had just put an album out, and we did a very small tour, because she didn’t really like touring. And then, she got her own TV show on Channel 4 here, which at the time was more cutting edge than other channels. We did three seasons of that show – over 33 shows. We had a 9-piece house band, not unlike a Letterman-type situation. And at the end of the show every week, she would do a duet with the guest. We had artists like Fergie, Nelly Furtado and the Manic Street Preachers. My job was to sort the arrangements for the theme music and all the other music played. And then – just to meet the artist and make them feel comfortable – we would prep the artist and talk to them through email in advance and argue about the key, etc. and a lot of other things drummers don’t often think about.
It sounds like as much as you are a drummer, you are also a music director and thus somebody who knows his way around arrangement.
BK:
I’ll be honest with you. The key thing I do is book a really good band. If you book a great band, most of the arrangement takes care of itself. I never write arrangements out in manuscript form – never physically score or arrange music. I book great players. And I trust a great guitar player knows more about playing the guitar than I know. I can tell him the feel I want and what I’m looking for and then let him find the part. I do the same with horns. I always book a section that work together and know how to communicate. I am a pretty traditional drummer in the sense that my harmonic knowledge is fairly piss poor. It’s as basic as it needed to be to earn my degree. And since then, I haven’t spent lots of time working on it.
By booking the right people with the right mindset and the right ability, I am able to be the MD. I’ve found that the majority of the responsibility that falls on the musical director relates to dealing with record companies, management and making an artist feel comfortable, secure and supported. And it’s also about establishing a decent line between having a good time and taking care of business.
You’ve hired a lot of musicians over the course of your career. And I know a lot of people that have been banging their heads against a wall in their original project and saying, “I love playing music so much, I have to figure out a way to stay involved. I better do some hired gun work.” What is it that you’re looking for in a session player, other than talent? And where do you find quality session musicians?
BK:
I’ll tell you what I look for. And then I’ll tell you how I come across people.
The most important thing for me, talent aside, is finding musicians that understand the music. It sounds flippant. But I’m not a fan of the gospel chops approach of playing higher, faster, louder, better. I think a lot of people don’t really grow out of that. I’ve seen so many people blow auditions by getting their chops out, because they feel that they need to prove they can play rather than just play the song. The majority of things I book are song based. So, chops aren’t that important. You need to have a degree of facility or technique beyond the music you’re playing, but that’s kind of a given. We all studied lots of things we don’t necessarily need so they would open up our musical vocabulary.
Personally, I’m really looking for people with ears, people with a good attitude and people who go the extra mile when the paycheck doesn’t necessarily dictate that they have to. I want them to want to go that extra mile because they care about turning in a good performance. Obviously, budgets these days are a real fight. I’m also looking for people who are socially aware and know how to behave in front of an artist and with other musicians. And because I’m a drummer, I’m always looking for the feel.
From a non-musical perspective, I need people to be punctual, always. You can never be the last in the lobby. You should always strive to be the first for a bus call, a lobby call or a sound check. To turn up last, a minute before the call time and say, “I’m here on time” really isn’t good enough for me. Specific timings are set out by tour managers as the latest you can arrive, not the time you should arrive; because there’s something that can go wrong – public transport or your own private transport, etc. If people are late for me, I usually give them a three strikes option. And on the third strike, they get fired. I’ve seen it through on a couple occasions, and it’s not particularly pretty. I don’t think people think you’re actually going to do it. But in a professional environment, music can be a bit deceptive: it feels quite social; everyone is getting on; you’re not in an office. I think sometimes people forget they’re at work, and they think they can take a lot of liberties.
Of course, maintenance of equipment and general personal hygiene, etc., as ridiculous as it sounds, are all really important. You don’t want guys coming on tour with a toothbrush and one shirt when you’re away for six weeks. But you’d be amazed.
As a bass player, I’m a hobbyist at this point. But I was always amazed at the gigs I got to hang onto just by being sober, punctual and doing what the part called for rather than overplaying. I can play eighth notes and I can play them really well.
BK:
That’s all you need. You’re hired!
It’s just always funny to hear it out loud.
How did you progress past Charlotte Church into having a fixing business? And what exactly is a fixing business?
BK:
With the Charlotte gig, I fixed the band; I put it together. A “fixer” is essentially the same as a contractor in the States. But we don’t work on contracts in the UK, so the range of what I do is fairly broad. Because of all the guests that came on Charlotte’s show, I met all the record company people. As you know, there are only four labels: Universal; Sony; EMI and Warner Bros. And they pretty much own everything else, unless I’m missing anybody.
There are a few large independents, but those represent the majority, sure.
BK:
For over 33 shows, I met all the reps for promo and good in roads there. I should go back a bit. Even before I got a gig with Alison or Charlotte – in about 1998 or 1999 – there were a couple people I was working with doing this fixing kind of thing. Neither of them were musicians. And neither of them were doing it very well in my opinion, because they didn’t know who to book or what they were booking. Essentially, I saw a gap in the market. And I knew people at a couple labels.
I bought a crappy old black-and-white camera, got in my beat-up car and drove around the whole of London photographing friends of mine in black and white standing against brick walls to make a portfolio book and try to get labels to take meetings with me so I could tell them I could supply them with musicians. I had a meeting with Steve Lillywhite, who was head of Mercury Records at that point. I knew him through a few different degrees of separation. He and a couple other guys saw my portfolio, and I managed to speak to a girl at Warner Bros. who was head of TV promotions.
For a while, I didn’t hear anything from anybody. But I kept building the book. And I was dropping cold emails and cold calls to people to let them know this is what I did. It took two years before I got a call. And the first call I got was from Sarah Adams at Warner Bros, who needed a TV band for Craig David. He had a touring band, but they wanted a younger look to do his TV appearances. I had the photographs all ready and had scanned everything into my computer, so I put a band for his shows on TV together.
At the time, there were a lot more shows on TV in Britain than there are now. And that band I put together did the whole campaign, which was about nine or ten shows. And then someone else in Sarah’s office said, “That band looked great. Where did you get them from?” So, she passed my number along.
And that was literally how it grew. I’ve been doing it for ten years now. As I was saying before, it was all about booking the right people who had the right attitude and turned up at the right time with the right dress, had learned the track, etc. Pretty much 85% of the live music on TV in the UK is mine.
Are you also doing fixing for people who need a touring band when there’s no television appearances?
BK:
I’m taking all kinds of calls now. But it wasn’t that way at first. I was predominantly mining TV stuff. So, through that, I would meet management and other members of labels. Most live things tend to come from different parts of the company or direct from an artist or their management, rather than through promotions; because by the time a project gets to promotions it’s mostly complete.
That’s how my fixing business got started. And it’s really progressed from there in the same way your career progresses when you’re a musician. Through word of mouth, by being organized and by delivering what I’m asked to deliver when I’m asked to deliver it, word has spread. And maintaining relationships with people has been really important.
So, your business is built largely on being affable and on being someone people keep in touch with and vice versa. It sounds like you’re a living example of someone whose Rolodex has sustained his musical career.
BK:
Yeah. I would agree with that.
And how are you balancing running a music business with being a session player and keeping your chops together?
BK:
I find it easy, to be honest. The internet is everywhere, and I have a smartphone and all the other necessary tools. The only thing working against me sometimes is the time difference. But if I’m in L.A. or New York, and I have to get up at stupid o’clock, then I just have to get up at stupid o’clock. And when you’re touring, there’s plenty of downtime. So, if I have to deal with something urgent related to my business when I’m out on tour, I can usually get it done. Most things you get good notice on.
On the live side, things take care of themselves. It’s very rare someone calls me needing to fix a whole band. There’s a girl called Rumer on Atlantic who I’m MD’ing for at the moment. And for her, I don’t fix the band. I just put the band together, because it’s very important to me that everyone gets paid fairly and correctly. And when we got the gig, the wages weren’t spectacular. And I didn’t feel it was right to take a commission there. So, I took an MD rate. But while the band is answerable to me, they essentially work for themselves. They’re not invoicing me; they’re invoicing her or the label.
Some of my friends that are MDs will put their own band together. But then they might call me. For example, there’s a band called Hurts that’s doing really well in Europe. They’re just now going to arenas. Their MD Pete is a friend of mine. And he will call me and say, “I need a girl who can sing, play the saxophone and play the violin.”
That’s pretty specific.
BK:
It’s very specific, and it’s also very unlikely. But because I know loads of people from college, from being out of college and making it well known that I do this kind of thing for a job, lots of people have gravitated towards me or have been recommended. I knew one girl who could do all those things, and I had to see if she was free. She had been on the road for most of last year just playing violin, but had just finished. I was able to negotiate her wages, put everything in place and send her down for an audition. She got the gig and has been out with them for about seven months.
On a gig like that, I don’t have to deal with any day-to-day stuff. I just deal with the invoicing, any contract negotiations for DVD or TV buyouts and other things like that. She becomes the responsibility of the tour manager. She and I have no contracts. She knows if she decides she doesn’t want to work for me anymore, she’ll never work for me again and I’ll never put her up for anything again. More often than not, that type of relationship is good enough, so you don’t have to contract people.
Contracts for session musicians don’t exist here. I’ve never had a contract as a session musician ever. I don’t know what it’s like in the U.S. But over here, you don’t get a contract for a tour or anything else similar. At the higher end, I’ve had musicians with contracts. For example, I have a girl out on tour with Shakira playing violin and a bunch of other things that has a contract. When an artist is that big and is playing arenas and some stadiums, they obviously need everyone on contract because of the sheer volume of people. But on a tour with a six-piece band and a ten-piece crew that is doing festivals and five- or six-week runs in different parts of Europe, it’s very rare you have a contract.
With something like Shakira, there’s insurance and liability, etc. You’d have to have that all nailed down.
It also sounds like your music direction and your fixing has improved your ability to find gigs as a drummer and that you’ve really leveraged one against the other.
BK:
I already had a reputation as a drummer. And contrary to popular belief, I don’t just work for myself. I play with a lot of other artists and get booked by other people – including other fixers – to play drums. And playing drums is my passion. It is always first and foremost. But as a session musician, there is a lot of downtime. And I’m not one for resting on my laurels. So, with my business, I saw what I thought was an opportunity.
I definitely have gotten some gigs because I’ve done something well for somebody as a drummer. And then maybe they needed a guitar player or someone who played the saxophone or guitar and as a result has come back to me on their next project and said, “We need a whole band for this.” And if I’m suited to it, I’ll also play drums. I’m very much aware of what my strengths are and aren’t as a drummer. I don’t really work with electronics. That’s not to say I won’t, but I haven’t as of yet. If something in that category comes in without a lot of prep time, I have guys I call.
If I’m being honest, I’ve managed to keep the two things I do very separate. And I like it that way. That’s why I set up the company in a way that, although it’s my initials, it’s not instantly recognizable to someone who might say “That’s Bob Knight, I know him,” or, “That’s Bob Knight, I don’t know him.” I still feel like I have something to prove as a drummer, as a result of people knowing me for doing many other things.
From the perspective of your 16 years of experience, which advice do you think would’ve helped you if you had heard it when you were just starting out?
BK:
Always give a good account of yourself, professionally and musically. Make sure that wherever you are or whatever gig you are on – regardless of how bad or how brilliant (but mostly of how bad) it seems – you are always giving your best. People always say, “You never know who is in the audience.” And you think, “That’s bullshit.” But, for example, I play with Nik Kershaw, and I’m very proud to do so. I grew up listening to his music. And I got that gig because I played a wedding with Nik’s bass player. And unbeknownst to me, the bass player went back to Nik and said, “I know who we need to get to play drums on the next tour.” And I’ve been holding that gig down for three or four years now.
With that in mind, you should always give the best account you can.
To learn more about Bob Knight, his business and his music, please visit the Bob Knight Drums website.
The two clips below are taken from an interview with renowned singer-songwriter, spoken-word artist, writer, comedian, publisher, actor and radio DJ Hentry Rollins.
Rollins shares some insights about why the internet is such an essential tool for artists – at all stages in their careers – that want to develop close relationships with their fans and build a strong following:
Jeff Rabhan is the chair of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (NYU). A seasoned writer, music industry executive, manager and consultant, Jeff got his first job in the music industry fresh out of journalism school, when he wrote articles for music magazines such as Rolling Stone, Spin and Vibe. During his over 20-year career in the music industry, he has worked in almost every area of the music industry, with artists that have earned over a dozen Grammy Awards and sold hundreds of millions of records, including Kelly Clarkson, Lil’ Kim, DMX and Jermaine Dupri.
I recently got to sit down with Jeff and talk to him about his experience in the music industry , the value of a well-rounded music business program and some advice he has for aspiring artists and executives that want to achieve success in the modern music climate.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me, Jeff. Tell me a little bit about your experience in the music business.
JR:
My first job was when I came out of school as a journalism major. I did some writing for Rolling Stone and Spin. I also did some freelance work for The Source, Vibe and some other magazines before I moved from New York City to California, where I did A&R and soundtracks for Atlantic and Elektra. After that, I did some music supervision, A&R consulting and managing. I also worked at HITS writing two columns. One was called “Wheels and Deals,” which was a service to the A&R community. The other was called “Shoots and Scores,” which was a film music tip sheet as well. I was a partner at a company called The Firm for five years as a manager. I also had my own management company and a label through Universal.
Over the years, I have worked with artists including Michelle Branch, Kelly Clarkson, Kelis, Everlast, Kelly Rowland, Jermaine Dupri, Lil’ Kim and DMX.
What does your position at NYU entail?
JR:
I am the chair of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. I oversee all the faculty, the curriculum, admission, etc. for this program, which is the premier training ground for tomorrow’s music industry entrepreneurs. We train executives, digital marketers, techpreneurs, artists and producers. The curriculum is very holistic in the sense that everybody has to learn all the different areas – business, production, history and criticism – in order to be as well versed in all the different areas of the business as possible. You have to be as informed and educated as possible regardless of which area of the business you want to go into.
You and I are peers age wise. We both came out of NYU, which seems like it puts you a year ahead of other folks, because you’re already ensconced in the industry you want to be in by virtue of being downtown in New York City. In the mid 1990s I found that after a year of interning at record companies some of the music business school graduates ended up reporting to me, even when they had come straight out of a music business program. Today, it seems that in order to get your foot in the door in any major music company, you need to have a music business degree. Is this true?
JR:
That’s a very good question. There have been music business programs around for a long time. A majority of the music programs are centered around conservatory training, and there is an audition component that is required to get in. We don’t do that, and we never have. We’re the only music business program of any in the country that does not require an audition. I think what that does is attract a different type of kid. You don’t necessarily have to play an instrument to be in the music business. A lot of us in the music industry don’t play instruments; we just happen to love music. When you create an environment where there is an audition, you’re taking a huge part of the population out of the equation.
I don’t think you need to have a music degree or a music business degree to get your foot in the door in the music industry, but it sure helps. There are a lot of different ways to get in. But in today’s industry, you really do have to know how to do a lot of different things in order to be successful. The jobs are still there. But the job descriptions have changed. When an artist manager comes out of a program and knows how to engineer and produce records, that has a lot of value. For me, as a manager, it took me 15 years of knocking around to figure out which buttons did what, and I still don’t really know.
I think there is also a great synergy for an artist to understand the subtleties of business and marketing in order to put together business plans. Those are skills that are very important and without question put you ahead of the game. There’s always going to be room for the hustler – the person who works hard and is out on the street making it happen. That’s what makes the music industry great. It’s not like the world of banking where everybody has an MBA or a finance degree. People come from all different places in the music industry. But a music business degree definitely puts you a little bit ahead.
I find in the consulting and teaching I do that I end up teaching very basic business and marketing skills. Which tools do you feel are essential for people walking out of your program?
JR:
There are a few areas that are important. So much is happening in terms of the way records are made. Therefore, I think everyone should have – and everyone who graduates does have – a good understanding of a lot of recording software, like Pro Tools, Logic, Ableton Live and Reason. Those are skills that everybody needs to and should have if they’re going to be involved in music in any way. That’s really how a lot of records are made.
On the history and criticism side, I think you have to have a really good grasp of popular music, its evolution, sound, the technology and the economy surrounding that as well as what was happening in the world at the time when specific types of music was being produced. For example, how can you talk about the music of the 1960s without understanding the Vietnam War, the “Summer of Love” and other things of that nature? I think making that connection is very important.
A skill that is rapidly diminishing is learning how to articulate and understand what it is you hear. That really falls into every area of music. You have to know how to write. And in the Twitter Age, people don’t write the way they used to. But if you know how to use words, it helps you communicate your lyrics as an artist, communicate with the artist as a producer and as a manager, it helps you communicate with everyone you have to deal with.
On the business side, you have to understand the fundamentals of all the different areas of the music business, from publishing to marketing, to management, to how records are distributed, released, made, marketed, etc. That’s going to be the building block that helps you discover your passion and what you want to do. Without a great understanding, it’s going to be difficult to excel in any area.
When I was in my early 20s and starting to join the work force, everyone wanted to be in A&R. Is there an area that a lot of people in the program wants to be in now or does it vary?
JR:
That’s a really great question, and I’m not sure that there’s one answer. The thing that’s interesting about the kids in our program is that a lot of them are hyper intelligent. Our average kid comes in with a 3.6 GPA and a 1360 SAT score. A lot of these people are very entrepreneurial types and very interested in launching their own ventures. They are also interested in really talking to their audience in a niche sort of way. For example, they are interested in sub-genres of hip hop or in alt rock or in what is happening in the Brooklyn scene. We also have a number of kids that are interested in vinyl-only companies.
A lot of kids are interested in launching their own ventures, because, for them, the consumption level is still very high. They’re not thinking of building an internationally-scalable business; they’re interested in continuing to make a living in the music business doing something they love, which is the exact opposite philosophy that a lot of people getting into the music 25 years ago had. Those people wanted to take over the world.
There has been a lot of criticism of music business programs in general. Critics have said these programs may be preparing people for jobs that might not exist in an industry that might not support them. As far as I’m concerned, just because I point somebody towards the diving board and teach them how to dive doesn’t mean I’m helping them jump; it just means I’m protecting them should they decide to jump. Do you think the business will be able to sustain the many music business students that are out there right now?
JR:
That’s a fair and accurate question. You have to be nuts not to evaluate the value of a music industry degree during this time, not only as a bright-eyed 17-year old applying to schools, but also as a parent. You have to evaluate it, because you’re spending a lot of money on a college education when you don’t know what’s out there; it really is the great unknown. We still don’t know what the music industry’s going to look like in four or five years. It’s a huge leap.
The thing that’s most important about what we do – and I can’t speak for other programs – is that from the moment kids enter our program, we’re preparing them for their exit. We have done an amazing job of blurring the line between academia and the professional world. I hate when people say “the real world.” A lot of our kids are working two jobs and are in bands along with being in school. It’s real. I don’t know how to separate my “real” from their “real.” It’s all real.
We operate our program like a professional space: Our studio is run like a professional space; our classes are run like a professional space and all our faculty members are working professionals. We don’t have career teachers here. What you get is an experience which has prepared you for your exit. If kids that have graduated from our program are sending out resumes waiting to be discovered, we’ve failed. That doesn’t happen here. It does happen in other programs. I think a lot of our success has to do with the way we’ve been set up and also our location. I don’t care if you’re the greatest hip hop artist of all time; if you don’t know how to write a business plan, make a presentation, sell yourself and if you don’t know the ins and outs of the business, you’re setting yourself up for failure. I think schools that don’t teach you to do that are missing the boat.
You’ve worn a lot of different hats in the music industry. Is there any general advice you have for executives or artists about which areas they should be focusing on if they want to make it?
JR:
I think knowing how to communicate ideas and articulate what it is you hear and express yourself are all critical skills. The business is changing. We’re probably in year five or six of a ten-year storm. It’s going to be different; it’s not going to be the way it used to be. One of the reasons I took this job is because I got tired of people talking about “the good old days.” I’m too young to talk about the “good old days.” My best days are ahead of me. And there’s more music, and more ways to get it and distribute it and more methods of understanding what other people like than there have ever been before. And that creates opportunity.
I think you have to find what you love and give it 110 percent. Those things never change. You just have to go for it. Most people get into music because it’s what they love, and they don’t consider it to be a way of getting rich beyond their wildest dreams. People want to make a living doing what they love. If you approach it in that way, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
You can read more about Jeff Rabhan by visiting his personal website. He also has a book coming out entitled What You Can Do in the Music Business. To learn more about NYU’s music business program, check out the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music website.
George White is General Manager of Billboard Digital. With nearly two decades of experience in the music and digital media industries, he has worked for major record labels such as Atlantic Records and the CD-ROM industry pioneer The Voyager Company, where he developed enhanced CDs, CD-ROMS, DVDs and games as well as some of the first artist websites in the 1990s. He has worked with artists including Laurie Anderson, Hootie & the Blowfish, T.I. and Led Zeppelin. Just prior to joining the Billboard Digital team, he worked for Warner Music Group, where he was Senior Vice President, Strategy & Product Development and headed up development of Warner’s digital mobile products to develop new ways of delivering music. He is also the co-founder of the major digital media package standard-setting organization Connected Media Experience (CME).
I had the opportunity to sit down with George and talk to him about how he found his way to music industry, the history and future of internet music, and some new initiatives Billboard is taking to nurture the careers of new and emerging artists.
Thanks for talking to me today, George. How did you get your start in the music business?
GW:
I had eliminated a number of career paths when I was at Davidson College primarily by trying some different things out. I started off thinking I wanted to work on Wall Street and also considered being an attorney, but ultimately decided neither were exactly the direction that I wanted to go. I took a year after college and taught in the western province of Kenya and did some thinking about the direction I wanted to take and what I wanted to focus on. Music had always been something that took up a lot of my leisure time. I had worked at the college union and had done a lot of recording and live sound. I played guitar, but not very well, and had some friends who were trying to make a go of it as a band in Durham, North Carolina. So when I got back from Kenya, I decided I was really going to make music a focus and really try to work with my friends’ fledgling band, the Iotas, with the goal of learning how to be a band manager and learning how to help bands, but also learning the business of touring and recording, which they were doing a lot of, just to see if there was a niche in the music industry that I could explore.
While I was working with them, I met a band called The Veldt, who had been signed by Capitol Records, dropped by Capitol, and then resigned by Mercury Records on the Stardog imprint. In between their being dropped and re-signed, I had read a piece about them in Rolling Stone that said this great band was basically hanging around and having a hard time getting gigs. So I called them up and asked if they would let my band open up for them if I got them some gigs. They said, “Yes,” and I proceeded to book a few shows locally. The band recommended me to Mercury Records for a summer internship in the A&R department there in 1992, which was how I got my first gig in the music industry. I got to understand a little bit about how the A&R process worked and organize their tape collection.
I took some additional classes in North Carolina to get credit for the internship and learned a little bit more about recording from some guys at Reflection Studios down there. I also worked in receiving at Barnes & Noble, so I got to know the ordering process very well. I moved back to New York trying to look for other work in A&R. Through my interest in recording, I got more and more savvy about computers and how they were used and learned of a Santa Monica-based company called Voyager, which had just started publishing CD-ROMs with music-related content. I sent my resume there and eventually got an interview. Funnily enough, Michael Nash who is now the Executive Vice President of Strategy and Development at Warner was actually at Voyager at that time. Michael had been working with the Residents at the time to do a CD-ROM project called Freak Show that Voyager published. It ended up that Michael actually did that first Residents title and then split off to form his own CD-ROM publisher.
In New York, I also worked on the floor and was managing the fiction section at the Barnes & Noble on the Upper East Side. I knew inside and out at this point how Barnes & Noble ordered and merchandised books. Voyager at the time was trying to figure out a way to sell its CD-ROMs in bookstores. Because of my experience, they hired me to run a pilot project with Apple, where they put a computer and CD-ROM titles in eight bookstores across the country, two of which were in New York and the others were some bigger independent bookstores scattered throughout the country. It was a very successful project that got attention for CD-ROMs in bookstores. I ended up being hired full time after the pilot project by Voyager as the Director of Retail Sales and Marketing there, and was specifically focused on the book channel and getting CD-ROMs in as books. Voyager had a number of great music titles. In addition to that Residents title they had The Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night on CD-ROM and went onto do a Spinal Tap CD-ROM. We also worked with Laurie Anderson on a CD-ROM project called Puppet Motel. And we sponsored Laurie’s 1995 tour in conjunction with publishing that CD-ROM, so I got to work very closely with her and went on the entire European leg of the Nerve Bible tour.
I started to work on web projects as the internet began to push CD-ROMs aside in 1995 as a really viable way to experience multi-media. I worked on a companion site to the Nerve Bible tour called The Green Room, which was one of the very first music tour companions on the web. We did some webcam video of Brian Eno backstage in Dublin and uploaded it. Voyager also had an interesting product called CDLink, which allowed you to click on a link on a webpage and play an audio CD that was in your CD-ROM drive. But in 1995, the quality of the audio with the newly-debuted RealAudio was not good, and it was kind of painful to listen to music, so multi-media experiences were few and far between on the web. With CDLink, you basically authored a webpage – it could be an online enhancement of the CD. And anyone with that CD could come on that webpage and get it. We worked with journalists to write pieces about music. We did a number of showcase pieces using the technology, and I tried to call folks at the various New York-based major labels to pitch the product. But they couldn’t figure out why in the world they would actually want to produce web pages for products they’d already sold to their customer base.
I was ultimately rewarded when the people at Atlantic Records – to whom I had pitched the idea – were so impressed with either how crazy I was or the amount of gumption that I had to actually ask for a licensing fee for this nefarious technology that when an opening came there to run the technology for their fledgling new media department, they asked me to come and join there as an Associate Director. I stayed at Atlantic and the Warner Music Group for about 13 years, until the end of 2009.
We’re certainly going to circle around to what your position is at Billboard. But you were really one of a dozen people on the planet – or at least in the States – who had a real say-so and was a real gatekeeper into the way that a major music content company was liaising with technology. You must’ve seen so much. Is there any lesson to be gleaned about the way that’s all headed? Obviously it’s a lot more complicated when you’re in the middle of it, but what is going on with evolving technology and music at this point?
GW:
I guess the lesson I would draw and that I would then apply to the state of the industry today is that you should really not worry as much as perhaps people are and have been worrying about displacing your sacred cows. If something is really going to destroy the business you already have, it will do it with or without your complicity.
During the first four years of my time at Atlantic, the company was very bold and experimental with doing tons of promotional stuff. The label would really invest quite a lot in doing things that would create more awareness, interest and engagement with fans in the interest of getting folks to go out and buy a CD. In the early days, however, there was a great deal of reticence about licensing digitally, particularly the unbundling of CDs and the ability to buy individual tracks. Despite the fact that by the end of the decade Napster was there, and people could download a single track readily, there was still a lot of hand wringing, which would result in three more years before there was a significant licensed service in the iTunes service. If you remember when iTunes was originally licensed and the licensing discussions began, that was a Mac-only service. It made it a good place to experiment because there was little risk: There weren’t many people with Macs and there were even fewer people that had an iPod and a Mac. Of course, by the time the service launched, they had begun to sell iPods that were compatible with PCs and were shipping iTunes for the PC.
It’s amazing to think how differently things might have come about had we been really pushed to aggressively license and develop services very early on. The first people approached us for licenses in 1997-1998. And had those services been licensed aggressively, and had there been a lot of experimentation, there might be quite a few players in the digital download marketplace today. I tend to think – although Apple has done an incredible job – that having quite a few solid players that had been out there for a long time would have been a very healthy thing and probably would’ve resulted in a lot more early experimentation. The direct application to today’s marketplace would be looking at ad-supported free streaming services as a way to really sell subscription services, and the embrace by the industry of an online streaming product instead of a promotional vehicle.
As someone who has been closely involved in the process of developing internet music technology, do you think something like Spotify possible? Do you think it’s headed towards non-ownership streaming music in the cloud? Every time I turn around, it seems like there are giant fatal flaws in these cloud services that are coming out.
GW:
I think ultimately, the consumers will decide. And I think there’s a lot that points to the cloud models. But there is going to have to be a lot more innovation and focus by labels and the creative side in general on what it means to release your music into the cloud. There are clearly lots of problems with the cloud, one of which is the question, “Are individual artists going to be able to be successfully compensated?” And the answer may be, “No.” But it doesn’t mean that services will not get created and will not exist. There are problems to be solved. But I don’t think the problems are going to get solved by not offering services that clearly, from the results of Spotify’s research in the markets where it is licensed for free, are in demand. You don’t see an absolute collapse of physical sales in those markets. I think it’s important to look at those lessons, experiment and really work to develop compelling services and then work on fixing the problems with the services.
What was your role at Warner, and what did you notice about the direction of music on the internet when you were working on projects there?
GW:
I really focused on developing new products. At the time I left, we were really looking at the locker models and the streaming subscription models. I was working on a project called The Connected Music Experience (CME). It is an interesting idea in that it’s a package format for digital media that allows you to basically have a cloud component that is related to any piece of media you own. Let’s say you want a single from the new Lady Gaga record. After you download it, you get the track and some associated content that looks very much like what an iTunes LP looks like today. There’s a menu, a way to represent lyrics and liner notes. Basically, it’s a way to communicate to the person who has downloaded that track where it came from, who made it, and then for the artist to the have an on-going connection to the person that downloaded it. It is agnostic as to whether that happens in a purchase environment (someone just purchases that track in iTunes) or downloads it through a service like Spotify. The service you use doesn’t particularly matter. Any of those services can take the assets that are associated with that release in the cloud and create a compelling experience for legitimate users. But it is an interesting way to reward people who have acquired the music legitimately. If you got that same track as part of a download of the most popular tracks this month on a bit torrent site somewhere, you would actually have to go out and find all the associated content from some other place, and then you would have to continuously keep track of new content as it is released.
There are some initiatives like CME that are underway that would create much more compelling experiences out of cloud-based initiatives. They could use a lot more investment, both on the creative side and on the business side. Artists, record companies and publishers alike would do well to look at embracing new models and figuring out how to make them more compelling to consumers, because that’s going to be the way to drive that marketplace forward.
The position of General Manager of Billboard Digital sounds extremely fun. I’ve watched the magazine become more and more online based. And in the past few years especially, I’ve watched Billboard’s online presence escalate exponentially. What does your position there entail?
GW:
The big project that I was brought on board for is something called Billboard Pro, which is a subscription service for artists. It combines a couple different things. One is what Billboard is traditionally known for, which is great editorial – great writing and access to information from the most important people in the industry. But Billboard Pro is geared specifically towards new and emerging artists, artists who may not be subscribing to Billboard Magazine today. There is information specifically for those artists about which new services are out there, what they should be investing in to grow their careers, etc. There is a piece that a lot of artists have liked and that has been a major driver of traffic for us from Amy Klein of Titus Andronicus on how to develop your stage presence. The idea for Billboard Pro is to be a version of the Wall Street Journal for artists. If you’re an artist trying to drive your career forward, we want it to be the first thing you sit down to in the morning to see what’s going on in the industry.
The second part of Billboard Pro is a dashboard that allows you to see where you are with fan engagement as an artist. You can track all your page views, plays and new fans on any of 16 different services across the web, plus you can get SoundScan sales data for an album and a few tracks. You can also get alerts if a song of yours happens to have been played on any U.S. radio station for the first time or the tenth time. And you can see if you’ve been mentioned by anyone on Twitter or by any blog out there. Basically, it’s a very simple one-stop dashboard to see where you are with online engagement, which is a new product for Billboard. Obviously, as the music industry is evolving and artists themselves are becoming key economic decision makers rather than labels, publishers, managers and agents, it’s important for artists to have the best information possible when making career decisions. And that involves having the quality of access to information that the historical business entities in the industry have had. We think it’s a great product, and it’s clearly an important audience for Billboard to address. And it’s an important product in the state of Billboard’s evolution, starting from the magazine’s rich history going back over a century, focused for the past 60 years on the music industry.
Two years ago, Billboard.com was re-launched as a consumer site, which has been incredibly successful. At the time the re-launch was undertaken, Billboard.com reached three million unique users each month. We’re now, two years later closing in on almost nine million monthly uniques. Later this year, we should, if the site continues its current trajectory, cross 10 million monthly uniques (For May, we actually ended up surpassing 10M uniques). The Billboard brand is now not just one that’s meaningful to the music industry and people who work in the music industry, but clearly one that is very meaningful to the consumers. A huge amount of traffic to the site consists of people coming to look at charts. The Monday after the Billboard Music Awards we had 800,000 visits to Billboard.com, which was our largest single traffic day. It’s a hugely meaningful brand to consumers now, and we hope it’s going to be a hugely meaningful brand to artists.
After Billboard Pro, I think the next important project that we’ll be looking at is expanding on that reach to consumers. Now that we have this big reach to consumers, how do we take Billboard.biz and also reinvigorate it in the same way? We’re looking to do a redesign and an update of the Billboard.biz site later this year.
The other interesting opportunity we have is at Billboard.com. Part of the redesign of that site several years ago was a deal with Lala to do streaming as an accompaniment to the site. Since Apple bought Lala and closed down the Lala service once and for all in September, we have integrated streams from Myspace.com onto our charts. I think looking at the services that are out there today, there are a lot of interesting opportunities to do a lot more. We’re looking at things like chart radio – the ability to see a song on the chart and immediately launch a station based on that song and that chart. We want to continue to be very discovery focused. It’s an interesting niche for Billboard. You don’t really think of charts as being a driver for artist discovery. But I think clearly that’s what you see a lot of people doing when you look at the traffic and the way people use Billboard.com: They are coming there, looking to see what’s most popular, checking it out and clicking on purchase links.
Musician Coaching:
Along those lines, as a guy who is re-branding, re-launching and setting up Billboard Pro for real growth, what have you found that artists most want? What are the most popular topics that are coming up on Billboard Pro?
GW:
The Amy Klein/Titus Andronicus piece was I think our most popular piece of editorial since launching the site last month. It’s still very early on, but I think clearly the “how-to” category/tips from industry pros about how artists can build their careers have been very popular. We did a promotion with Chevrolet in association with the Billboard Music Awards last month. We took new and developing artists – some that came from Pro and some that came from the “uncharted chart” we launched at the beginning of the year. The “uncharted chart” is a chart of artists who have never charted on a major Billboard chart/artists that don’t have retail or radio stories yet but do have online fan engagement. It ranks them by their online fan engagement. And we had a battle of the bands contest. A lot of people ended up checking out the profiles for these bands that were part of the contest.
I had no idea you guys would be so artist discovery driven. That’s wild to me. I didn’t see that coming.
GW:
A major goal for Billboard Pro is to find out how we can use these great platforms we built: Billboard.com, which reaches a really broad consumer audience; Billboard.biz, the magazine, and our conferences which reach the entire industry. We want to figure out how to take these platforms and connect new and developing artists with the people that matter in the industry and fans to help them grow to the next phase of their careers. That was the initial impetus for the site. And I think if we’re successful in doing that, we’re going to have a very successful product.
To learn more about George White, visit the Billboard website or follow him on Twitter. Also be sure to check out Billboard Pro.
Thom Russo is a 13-time Grammy® Award-winning engineer, producer and mixer. He first developed an interest in audio production as a conservatory student at Northwestern University studying percussion and theory, when he spent as much time as he could in recording studios around Chicago learning the ins and outs of different technologies and production tools. He started his professional career working on everything from jingles to classical, jazz and R&B projects at River North Studios in Chicago, eventually accepting a staff position at Larrabee Sound, one of L.A.’s largest recording studios. After he had built up a repertoire of experience, he branched out on his own and got picked up by Nettwerk Producer Management. During the past two decades, he has worked with major artists such as Michael Jackson, Babyface, Prince, Audioslave, Eric Clapton, Ke$ha and Johnny Cash, songwriters including Rhett Lawrence (Kelly Clarkson, Mariah Carey) and producers such as Teddy Riley, Bruce Swedien and Rick Rubin.
Recently, I got to sit down with Thom and talk about his career in the music industry, some advice he has for those that want to get into professional audio production and a few tips for artists trying to choose the right engineers, producers and mixers for their projects.
Thanks for taking some time to talk to me, Thom. Tell me a little bit about how you got started in the music industry?
TR:
I was a musician for a very long time. The short of it is, I decided to take the path of studying music at a higher level. I was conservatory trained at Northwestern University. I realized that I was gravitating towards modern music production. That was something I randomly started to be attracted to, which I guess isn’t any different from any kid who is listening to a lot of music when they’re growing up. It was convenient for me to get a heavy music education while going into something that was more modern technical musical production.
I entered Northwestern in percussion and theory. I was a keyboard player my entire life, but my major was in theory. It happens in the arts a lot of times, where people say their education was wasted. But I can gladly say that was not the case for me. Just as I think actors will go and learn Shakespeare and then never use it when they are out in the working world, there is something of that language in the delivery of that that they use, and it’s the same with me. There’s something of the language I learned while I was an 18-year old kid that I use daily, if not consciously then subconsciously.
I know a lot of people that don’t believe in a formal music education. But I think you need to know the rules before you insist on breaking them.
TR:
It’s exactly that. I think it’s certainly something where you should know them and then should break them. That said, I don’t think it’s for everybody. But a lot of times it can be, specifically for a guy like me. I knew I loved the art form, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. After I started to educate myself more and hang out with different types of people in different genres. Through that I found myself stumbling into a recording studio when I was 20-years old in Chicago. That was the first time I’d had an experience with it, and it was like the Holy Grail seeing everything happen. My head exploded, because at that point I thought, “Wow, this is how things are made.”
This was before I was working. I was just a kid playing in bands and spending a lot of time in headphones listening to everything. My choice of styles was always very diverse. I listened to Pink Floyd, Steely Dan and Prince and sometimes heavier stuff like AC/DC. But I didn’t know how stuff was made until I started hanging out in the studios and started being a fly on the wall as much as I could. I started completely from the bottom, up, which kids still do today. I recommend it highly. I was getting tea and running errands for folks just so I could hang out and see how things were made by professionals and semi-professionals.
What was the first studio that gave you your shot at being a working engineer?
TR:
It was in Chicago. I started an intern program at a big studio in downtown Chicago called River North Recorders. While I was finishing up my education I was spending three or four days a week for four or five hours a pop down there, not only getting tea for folks but really learning the ropes. My days were easily 15-16-hour days between going to class and riding the subway to get there. But it was great. I was super hungry, and it made all the difference in the world, because immediately I took a job there as a staff engineer when I got out of school at 21-years old. It was great. I didn’t know anything. The studio is no longer in existence. But I was working on as high-profile projects as could be done in Chicago, which consisted of a lot of commercial and advertising work like jingles, etc.. It was buttered up next to whatever was going on in the Chicago scene then, which was a lot of industrial, house and some R&B. It was very interesting, because my education in terms of modern music production was getting a huge bath there, because the work was so variable. One day we’d be doing a full band for a McDonald’s commercial, and then I’d be working with some crazy music project. It was very interesting and diverse, which is great.
I worked there for a good three or four years before I wanted to gravitate towards one specific side of music production, which was really records. I was mostly interested in making records and going into that actual field. So, I started to visit L.A. and poke my nose into different people’s business in recording studios out here. Luckily I had made enough professional connections while I was in Chicago that folks hooked me up with different individuals at different studios here in L.A. My resume was stacked up enough that for some reason, it was the right place right time. I got job offers from Larrabbee Sound and Ocean Way Recording, which were both big studios that needed help at that time. And my education had been one where I had my chops together. I chose Larrabee, and before I knew it, I was 25 or 26 and had a job at an enormous recording studio in L.A., and I made the move.
And was there a specific record that really jump-started your career?
TR:
Within the first two or three months I was at Larrabee, there was a guy working in the studio next door to me named Michael Jackson. And he was working on a record called Dangerous. It’s laughable how lucky this was, and it would’ve been lucky for anyone. I bumped into him in the hallways along with all the other cats that had been working on it, which was Bruce Swedien and Teddy Riley. Everybody was already on the gig, because he had been working on the record for three years at that point. It was something where we just got to talking, and he just said, “Why don’t you come on board to help us out, because we have more than enough to do right now. I got pulled into that boat and worked on that record for about a year and a half. And that even turned into something that was more bizarre for a young guy that had just come to town. Not only was I part of the engineering team on it, but then Sony Records was getting super frustrated that the record wasn’t getting done, and there was a huge deadline, and it had to be put out in September. And it was June, and everybody was saying, “We have to finish these mixes and these vocals.” And Michael was still writing lyrics on at least three quarters of the record. So Bruce, the executive producer said, “You have to go with Michael to this other studio, which is Record One in Sherman Oaks and sit with him for the next month and a half and record all the vocals.” And that’s what I did. Again, I had been in L.A. for about four or five months at that point. It was certainly one of the most bizarre things that had ever happened to me, but in a good way.
And after you had a Michael Jackson credit, I assume doors started opening left and right.
TR:
They really did. And I was young, didn’t know anything about the business, but I definitely had my technical chops completely in line. I was nervous. But I was more nervous about how I was going to interact on a personal level. I knew that whichever format we were recording to – and we were on tape at that time – whichever console, etc., I was going to be okay. Truth of it is, and this is certainly something kids should know about: Getting your technical chops together should be a primary focus; because that’s something you learn, and then you just forget. It doesn’t matter where you are or how you are; as long as your chops are really together in every genre and format, you’re going to be ahead of the game for sure. You should never be thinking about, “How or why or when do I do this?” It should be something that is rote.
When did you make the leap from house engineer to being out on your own?
TR:
It was a very natural thing where so much work started to come my way that I decided to go on my own. This was about 15 years ago, and now it’s a little different. There are now such a small number of people that are staff engineers, doing what I did in house. Now when artists are making big records, they’re usually seeking out individuals who are independent contractors. After realizing that being on staff was holding me back, I went out on my own. I started mentoring under a lot of great people, like Rhett Lawrence. I worked with him for a lot of years and started to co-produce with him and work on his tracks. He was spending a lot more time songwriting and working on melodies and lyrics, and I’d be working on beats for him and mixing. It became a lot more of that than it was spending time working with anybody that would show up at the door.
Once I was an independent contractor for long enough, I started to seek management, and they were seeking me out at the same time. I started working with Netwerk Music Group; I’ve been with that company for about eight or nine years. And the first project they recommended me for was with Macy Gray, who I ended up completely hitting it off with. We worked on a couple of projects together.
You’ve had a phenomenal run and have bounced through word of mouth from being a kid in a studio, to a studio engineer, to a guy that has now been running his own business for a lot of years and has serious professional management. You alluded earlier in your story to the fact that you knew nothing about the business. We all start in this business with a lot of other people at the starting line. The numbers end up being significantly thinned out as time goes on. What is the difference between someone like you, who has carved out a career – other than chops, which are a given – and someone who fell by the wayside?
TR:
After you learn all the stuff that is pretty obvious – the technical skills and musical skills – you have to get around something that is less obvious, but needs to be learned: the people skills. On a day-to-day basis, I have to deal with this entity called “artists.” Beyond just dealing with this entity called “artists,” I have to deal with this entity called “music business people.” A lot of times I’m in the middle, and a lot of times I just have to play good cop/bad cop. It’s a balancing act.
I think the most important thing is always keeping your eye on the finish line. That means that one day when the artist isn’t feeling something and doesn’t want to sing, you have to find something else to push the project along to get it ready for a strict June 1st release.
So, to be successful, you need to be able to deliver, regardless of obstacles or excuses.
TR:
And that’s only one side of it. The other thing is, you have to be very patient. And this is a rule in life too, but you have to try not to take things personally. Very frequently I’ll be in a circumstance where I’ll hand a mix, song, track, etc. over, and it’s great, and I think it’s going to change the face of modern music. But it’s not received for whatever reason. Or I’ll go for a gig that I don’t get. If you take everything personally, it’s a very difficult industry to be in. That’s the truth about the entertainment industry in general. It can be very fickle. The most important thing you have to realize is that it’s not about you; it’s about the music.
What advice do you give to young engineers, since there aren’t as many big studios anymore? It seems like a lot of stuff is happening in home studios now, and the educational opportunities in the last 10-15 years have diminished significantly for a lot of reasons.
TR:
A lot of guys I’m running across now seem to have the same problem/shortcoming. First and foremost, it is good for any young person out there to have a good education of just audio. It sounds boring, but it is integral to understand the way things worked way back when, when there were big consoles and when there was tape – the way things worked in Motown and even before that. You even need to know how things were made when the Beatles made Abbey Road. To understand that makes our world of computers that much clearer and better. I do meet a lot of guys now that have never really set foot in an actual recording studio. For me, that is such a strange thing. I consider myself lucky, because I was coming up when I got to see all old school stuff. And then the old school stuff went away, and now it’s the new school stuff, which isn’t really going to go anywhere. I really believe that this is how records are going to be made ad infinitum, for the rest of history. I can also say it’s impossible to say that the big studios will all go away, because technically that is impossible. There will always be a need for super high-end, class A, high-fi environments of that nature; because obviously, audio needs to be captured, be it an orchestra, rock band or solo vocalist. My sweeping comment is that you need to have an education to understand the history of the technology that you’re using.
To get very specific with an example, say you’re in your Digital Audio Workstation and you pull up an equalizer or compressor, and you know how that plug-in works. But do you really know how the original worked? You can learn what the model does in the computer, but you have to understand that it’s just a model. And it’s a great-sounding model. And it’s fascinating and unbelievable, especially for a guy like me, that stuff like this sounds as good as it does. And it’s also extremely convenient, hence the nature of the business right now. It’s great for me, because I can be working on three or four things at a time.
You also have a lot of perspective on the musician side of things. What should artists have already prepared before they even start knocking on doors of engineers, producers or mixers?
TR:
Preparation is a broad topic, but I tell a lot of young bands the same thing. And a lot of times they don’t believe it. Very frequently folks are shy about playing me their very rough, sonically trashed-out demos. And I can say with a resounding scream that it’s never something I’m looking for. I’m not looking for something that sounds like a record already, because that’s the easiest thing for me to work on. I can make something like that sound great in a matter of hours. But for musicians, the best thing to do is have your best foot forward in terms of songwriting and be as specific as you can be about your goals. I don’t care if you’re a solo artist or a band. The most important thing is to know what you want to be. Not that you need to necessarily categorize yourself, but put what you’re going for in your mind. And that can be a million things with a million different influences. I think the artists I gravitate towards the most when it comes to people I want to work for are the ones that really know what they’re about, and have done their homework in terms of being an artist. You should have an established identity and a goal, and you should be able to present a bunch of records you like the sound of.
And you don’t want to have to turn around to a band and tell them what they want, especially in the age of the internet where all this information is readily available.
TR:
Absolutely. If you’re a big, thick rock band, but you want a record that sounds like Gnarls Barkley, then cool. That’s what you should be going for. But you need to have that in your mind and your language when you talk about what you’re looking for.
What advice would you give to artists that are trying to select an engineer, producer or mixer? How do they find people of quality like you?
TR:
They really just inquire. I like that in the past couple years, bands are just starting to inquire to me. What I can tell anyone is, don’t be afraid to approach veterans. We’re just out there looking for great music, just like everyone else. Sure it happens sometimes that the labels call me and say, “Hey, I’d like you to work with this person.” But 50% of my work now is bands and artists that contact me and say, “Hi, I heard your stuff. I really want to work with you.” And that’s great. I can also tell you that all my compatriots that have been in the industry a long time feel the same. They’ll tell me, “This artist approached me and is great, and I’m going to start working with them.”
If you want to learn more about Thom Russo and his many projects, check out his website. You can also go find him at Nettwerk Producer Management.
