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.
Shele Sondheim is an accomplished producer, songwriter and guitarist and the president/CEO of CSM Words and Music, a Los Angeles-based music production and publishing company focused on the development of competitive materials and artists in pop, R&B, rock and dance music, worldwide. Shele got his start in the music business as a guitarist playing in bands throughout junior high and high school. He eventually found his way to Berklee School of Music, where he co-founded Berklee’s flagship jazz fusion band Catharsis. After graduating with honors with a degree in guitar performance and jazz composition, he moved to Las Vegas where he became an in-demand guitarist working with cabaret superstars like Lola Falana, Wayne Newton, Paul Anka and Flip Wilson. Soon, he began producing corporate music events with the Las Vegas Convention Trade Bureau while performing nightly in mainroom orchestras and producing TV and radio music spots. He also appeared on HBO and Showtime concert specials with major artists and in arena concerts with Catharsis alongside Spyro Gyra. Shele toured worldwide juggling multiple roles of music director, guitarist, writer/producer and arranger. As a session musician in L.A., he worked with artists like Natalie Cole and Little Richard on commercial jingles, TV and film dates. He trained at competitive studios on both coasts to fine-tune his skills as a lyricist, songwriter, vocal arranger and music producer working in the digital landscape and is the originator of the electronic dance music (edm) remix brand westcoasteuro. He recently wrote the hit song “Donne Le Moi” for the record of the EMI-affiliated project started by Phil Collins called The Little Dreams Band. Through CSM Words and Music, he is also collaborating with Collins, Brian Ferry and Lara Fabian on the upcoming single, which he wrote and produced, from emerging artist Lica de Guzman and working with brothers 2 Kuel from Belize of Georgia, who have been building a name for themselves across Eastern Europe.
I had the opportunity to talk to Shele about his incredibly diverse experiences during his more than 30 years in the industry and how they have helped him evolve. He also shared some valuable tips for aspiring artists, producers and music industry professionals hoping to build successful and personally-rewarding careers in music.
Thanks so much for taking some time to talk to me, Shele. Tell me a bit about how you got started in the music industry.
SS:
It all started on guitar. I was playing guitar and had a band throughout junior high school and high school. I liked to emulate my heroes: Carlos Santana; George Benson; John McLaughlin; Jimi Hendrix – all the great guitar players. I enjoyed playing guitar and the camaraderie of a band. In those days, it was very peaceful for me. We’d be in the garage or at somebody’s party on a Friday night playing.
Guitar came into my life in that way. And I was very lucky because I gained some early teachers and mentors that really helped to shape my views about music. One was Jorge Strunz of Strunz & Farah. Another was Les McCann, a famous jazz musician. One was John Handy at San Francisco State. I had the fortune to have a lesson with Mike Bloomfield of the original Electric Flag.
There were a lot of other fantastic guitarists/teachers that came into my life. And those experiences really got me quite connected to the guitar. I didn’t really aspire to be the Van Halen or the ultimate shredder guy. I just loved guitar. I particularly loved funk music, like Herbie Hancock and that Bay Area sound.
Well, and Sly and the Family Stone is my absolute favorite.
SS:
And, I grew up on that music. I lived a lot of places and moved a lot because of my family’s dynamic. My father was in the television business, so we had a chance to move a lot. I lived on the East Coast, West Coast, in the Bay Area and in the Pacific Northwest. And I also had a lot of musical influences. My brother was a huge influence on me. He turned me onto the whole CTI Jazz and George Benson and Herbie Hancock. I got into that stuff very early.
Eventually, I went to San Francisco State, which was fantastic for me. I got to have John Handy as my teacher and mentor. I played in a lot of funk bands and knew the Tower of Power guys. Cold Blood played at my high school. I traveled in that circle. But the problem was that I really didn’t know music theory. And I was very apparent and evident to anybody who did – other musicians or teachers. I could jam, but I had no idea what I was doing.
It was John Handy who suggested I go to Berklee College of Music. He talked to my parents. I was failing miserably at San Francisco State University and just wasn’t happy there. We’d go study classical music, and then I’d go back to my dorm room and put on Weather Report. There was a real disconnect.
The summer of ’76 changed it all. I went to Boston as a California kid. And I went to my first couple classes. It was James Taylor analyzing his lyrics, and Tower of Power analyzing their horn chart. And then, we got to work with Chicago. And I knew I had found home. I got into that school and locked myself up for five years.
Wow. So, how did you wind up making a living after Berklee, and at what point did you get into production?
SS:
Berklee was really transformational for me. I’ve always done things a little bit differently. “Success in my own way” has been my mantra, which is a more mature way of saying what I was back then, which was a “rebel with a cause.”
So, at Berklee I had a jazz fusion band that incorporated vocals called Catharsis, which had a Gino Fanelli or Santana kind of vibe. It became Berklee’s flagship band. We played at the Village Gate in New York and Patrick Rains who was then handling Al Jarreau was our manager. We represented Berklee on television and at all the city events and on radio. We became the “big thing” at Berklee and were the first band that ever played on the Berklee Performance Center stage. We sold it out at 1226 seats, which is kind of a proud memory of mine.
I was really deeply into jazz fusion. And come graduation time, I thought, “Where do I go?” I didn’t know about having a jazz fusion career so to speak. So, my mom lived in Vegas, where it was warm. And I had a constant cold/flu from September, to May for five years living in Boston and freezing. I would go see my mom sometimes on the break, it was always warm, and there were showgirls and casinos. I thought, “I’m moving to Vegas.”
The day I graduated, I got into a one-way truck that the lead singer of my band and I rented, and we drove out to Vegas. I started my career in music. Part of that career was about unlearning a lot of the things I’d learned at Berklee. Because, Las Vegas was not a sophisticated jazz fusion place. It was a cabaret show place, where you play the same five songs over and over again. It depends on which star you’re playing with or which lounge gig you get. Work started for me as a guitar guy for hire in Las Vegas.
I really struggled for the first year or year and a half I was in Vegas, but then I got a break, which means I created a break through all the work, sitting in and hustling, making friendships, networking and doing what I’d known I needed to do in the music business since junior high school.
A friend helped me, and I got in with a wonderful performer named Lola Falana. She worked with people like Sammy Davis, Jr. and Wayne Newton and was named First Lady of Las Vegas. I toured all around the world with Lola, first as her guitar player. Then I worked my way up to being her music director. That door opened up a tremendous amount of doors working with people like Roy Clark, Flip Wilson and Paul Anka. And I was doing all kinds of corporate gigs and what we called showcase gigs. I had things like “A Night at the Dunes” and “A Night at the Maxim.” I became the constant on-call guitar guy and got to travel around the world, which was really an incredible period of my life.
Sounds like it. Obviously, you knew theory, because you went to Berklee and studied it and you had a love for your instrument, so you spent quality time with it and honed your craft. But from a business standpoint, what were some of the things you did as a guitar player, that other people weren’t doing, that got you a gig with Lola Falana?
SS:
I think we can call it inspiration/desperation. I think I did more than most, because I really wanted a job. It was a very confusing time for me in my life, because I was so well trained, had my equipment constantly by the door and a tuxedo rented; I was ready to go, but I had no fortune in my life. I couldn’t even get a bad graveyard shift country/western duo gig. So, I did everything. I sat in at the Musicians’ Union. I started at the top of the Strip, and worked my way all the way down. I went into every club, lounge and got to know the musicians. I made really good friends (who are still some of my best friends today). I constantly stayed on it. I called, worked, sat in and did whatever I possible could to put myself out there and never gave up.
For me, those were the specific strategies. It was basically the “never give up” approach. Philosophically at that time, I also needed some extra spiritual power. So, I got into Buddhism and started chanting. And I linked that spiritual program with my professional goals. I decided I would chant and take action, based on those solid prayers to actually show proof in my life, which was at the time sorely lacking, much to my parents’ discontent. They said, “Hey, I just paid all this for Berklee, and you can’t even get a job.” It was a tough one. So, when I finally broke through, I felt a rainfall of benefit and victory.
But, you know the career. It’s the music business, and once you get into it, the rollercoaster starts. Sometimes, you’re really working and making money, and you’re booked back to back. Other times, you have nothing.
That’s very true.
SS:
The real crossroads came when, as I was succeeding at this, I wasn’t happy. I had conquered the call of being one of the top-three guitar guys in Vegas, was making money, and everything was amazing in that way. But I wasn’t happy, because I was always a writer. I wrote all the music in Catharsis, even though it was jazz fusion/instrumental. The whole explosion of U2, Police, Echo and the Bunnymen and Berlin all happened, and here I was playing “I Love the Nightlife” and “New York, New York” in another lounge band or with a celebrity. And I came to a big fork in the road and decided I just couldn’t do it anymore.
I decided to go back to Los Angeles, where I was raised and become a songwriter. That was a really big turning point in my life, to have that kind of courage to leave it all behind and go to a place to find another area that I could excel in.
And what was that reinvention like? It must’ve been about taking a few steps back, and a few steps forward.
SS:
Absolutely. And when I came into L.A., my natural default was “guitar guy.” I got fortunate and started doing sessions around L.A., casuals, Bar Mitzvahs and club gigs. And I managed to start working with Natalie Cole, Little Richard and Billy Preston. I became a guitar guy again, but it was far more competitive than it had been in Vegas. There were great guys here, and I knew I wasn’t going to be the guy that had the cart with 30 AXes and all that. I could read, I could play, but I was not going to be someone like Tommy Tedesco or Joe DiBlasi – people who were really controlling the session work.
Also, the truth in my heart was that I didn’t want to be that guy. I wanted to be on the other side of the glass – the producer and the writer side – not sitting there as a session musician. If I was going to do that, I might as well just go back to Las Vegas where it’s an easier community, I was kind of famous and made really good money. So, I knew at that time I had to stop thinking about doing things like going on the road with people like The Pointer Sisters or Diana Ross. I just didn’t want to do that work anymore.
My tradeoff was that I knew I had to get a job to fund my demo habit and fund the development of my songwriting classes. I joined every group in Los Angeles, like the Songwriters’ Guild, etc. And I went to all the classes and networking events, doing my demos. And I got a job driving a limousine and started to build a business in the transportation industry. And this was a real left turn for me, because I was working outside of music to make money to fund my music career, which really consisted of just doing demos. I did that for almost a decade.
Wow. I didn’t know that about you.
SS:
I appreciate being able to share that side of it, because there’s a message in there. It’s one that I was reminded of by Johnny K, a Grammy® Award-winning producer who came into Columbia College in Chicago last year when I did my residency there. As I interviewed Johnny, we talked about this part of your career as a musician – when you work outside of music. And he talked about his job at restaurants, and how he got some of his first gigs through working in those restaurants.
The point is, I knew a lot of musicians and a lot of studios. So, it was very normal for me to be able to call all the cool musicians to do my demos. And my songs got better, though it took a while. My first songs were seven-minute, lava-lamp/Jethro Tull jams on a minor, and I’d say, “That’s perfect for Whitney Houston.”
I got better when I started to really study the songwriters, like Diane Warren, Glen Ballard and Babyface. I just really dug into learn about writing songs.
It’s a funny thing: A lot of musicians are of the opinion that songwriting is not something you practice or can learn. A lot of people have this notion that it’s an inborn thing, which clearly by your story proves that is not the case, at least for you.
SS:
And that’s a good point. I practice yoga now. And as the yoga teachers will say, “It’s your practice on your mat … not what someone is doing next to you. It’s not a ‘one size fits all’ practice.” And that’s so true, because you’re all at different levels of being able to stretch and do the moves. Everybody has their way of doing this.
When I had Les McCann as a close friend and teacher, I knew that he was not of the “schooled” approach. Whereas John Handy as a teacher was a hard bop, reading saxophone man. That was why he really pushed me into a music college – to learn the craft of music.
Everybody in the songwriting world has their own way. But I had no other way to learn it except the way that I handled my guitar work at Berklee, which was, “Dig in and study.” And I started to discover that all the clues were on the table. I studied all these great writers and listened to a lot of cool songs throughout the ‘90s, like Teddy Riley writing New Jack Swing, and Rodney Jerkins before he was so massive. I listened to the material produced by all these teams, and the more I studied, the more I realized what a “Three Minute Picasso” means, with the hooks and the verses and the keys and the lyrics. I really took it seriously.
Could you distill some of the pieces of advice that you think were the most valuable to you that you learned from all the classes and seminars you attended and all the studying you did? What moments changed you the most?
SS:
One of my major “a-ha” moments was MIDI. When that came along, the whole concept of music changed. My orientation around doing music had been five or six guys in a room: a bassist; guitar player; drummer; keyboard player; sax player. That’s how you did music. Then came the whole idea of electronic music production and the ability to have things like Band in a Box.
Because that was one of the biggest moments for me, and I ended up going back to school at the Grove School of Music here in L.A., which doesn’t exist anymore. I took a four-year class in one year: electronic music production. I met guys who were brilliant at sequencing. Back then, it was Q-Bass on the Atari and some of the very early programs before what is now Pro Tools HD where you can make a barking dog sound like Whitney Houston. You can basically make anything sound like anything these days. And I like that freedom. But it wasn’t that when it first started.
When I went back to school, I started to try to understand how to harness the power of electronic music production. I tried to understand Band in the Box and having two guys in front of a computer be the whole band. That really changed my concept of writing songs as well, because the teams and pros I got to see out there doing it and getting serious cuts were just two guys doing this incredible music with a singer. I knew that was going to be the future of how I would travel as a songwriter. And I knew my skills as a guitar player and my developing skills as a lyricist and vocal producer would be valuable in this electronic music world.
My route was to find collaborators – people who were really good at the technical side, at mixing, mastering, computer, MIDI, programming. I buddied up with them as writer/producer friends, and that’s when it started for me.
I think of you as a producer. Was that the point at which you became more of a producer than just a songwriter?
SS:
Absolutely. For me, at that point, the production and the writing were seamless and the same thing. We could produce the same song with different vibes, different beats and in different genres. Because of the technology that was available to us, we could do it in so many different ways. That’s when I truly began to believe that production and songwriting were the same animal.
Again, I was faced with the difficulty of wanting to turn this into a career and monetize these skills. Nobody was buying my songs. I wasn’t becoming a famous songwriter or getting cuts on big records or any records at all. No publishers were investing in me. I wondered, “What do I do?”
So, I reinvented what my own game was. How many times can you hear, “No” on Sunset Boulevard? I started to look at the entire world as my playing field. I thought, “There has to be a Christina Aguilera, a Nickelback and a Leeann Rimes in The Netherlands, Belgium, Korea and Sweden. I’m going to go find them and convince them to hire me to write and produce songs for them.” That was when I first started traveling internationally – in 2000. And I got a client, which changed everything for me. And, one became three, three became six, six became 12.
I can now state that in the last 12 years, I’ve established my reputation and name with a substantial international clientele of artists, companies, investors and people who come to me to write and produce songs for them and help them build their career identity through the production of my original music. It’s a very proud thing to be able to share.
Now with American Idol, The Voice and the plethora of obvious talent around the world, we see that in every country there are artists that are seeking professional development opportunities. Not everyone gets to be the American Idol winner, because they only choose one. But what about the 400,000 who tried out? Certainly within that group, there is a pool of serious artists that want to have careers and great material. And they need someone like me. I’ve made it my business to go out into the world and find them.
For those wanting to be successful musicians, producers or songwriters, what very practical, simple advice would you give, if you had to give a bullet-point list of five things to do?
SS:
I think there are one or two or three things to do and not to do that I can put simply. When I worked at Columbia College as their master producer and artist in residence, I got in front of several thousands of young people. I did this last year, the year before, and I was hired again this upcoming year. It’s been this really wonderful and prestigious opportunity. Aside from me, it’s been people like Mike Stern, Benny Goldman, Paula Cole, Kevin Eubanks. It’s really a neat thing. My particular programming is very unique. I’m combining four different areas: recording; the music department; the music business management people and their record label. So, we’re doing the master classes, sessions, songwriting and performance. It’s a really comprehensive 10-day program that everyone’s been thrilled with.
When I’m in front of those young people talking about my experience, and this same question will be asked, I will say that the three things on the to-do list are, #1, “It’s a lifelong campaign.” It’s a never-give-up campaign. You constantly have to be at this. The people who are serious and are winning at whatever they are doing are at it full on. If music is to be a hobby, or something to enjoy in the church or in your family or in the community, that’s a great place to leave your music. Be a veterinarian or a brain surgeon – something else. But if the goal is to have a professional career in the music industry, it requires that you must be 100% full on.
Now, for #2: What 100% full on means is, “Create success in your own lane.” That means not everybody will be famous. Not everybody will be a celebrity or win a Grammy®. That’s not the point, truthfully. The point is that for you to have a career in music means that you have to be great at what you do and create your own niche and your own sound. For a musician, that means create your own sound and network that sound where that sound fits. If you’re a monster funk guitar player, you should know all the Princes and the R. Kellys in the world. There’s no need to take that funk sound to Toby Keith or Vince Gill, because that’s not their thing. If you’re a singer, are you going to be an artist, a session singer, a voice over, a touring singer? You have to create success in your own lane and then really pursue that lane.
I think #3, if anything, is, “Be very, very flexible and moldable enough to enjoy life’s process.” As I told you, I had jobs outside of the music industry, and they were very rewarding. I made money, I made a new set of contacts and developed a new set of business skills that translate into my core career as a music entrepreneur.
And what should people who want to find success in the music industry not do?
SS:
As we are all artists and aspiring entrepreneurs, #1 is, “Don’t compare yourself to other people.” It’s degrading and ridiculous to compare what you’re doing to what somebody else has or hasn’t. So, put no energy whatsoever into comparing your worth to the worth of somebody bigger, or the worth of someone who is struggling. Base your worth on yourself each day, in front of the mirror, God, whoever. Account for yourself to yourself each day.
And #2 is, “Don’t underestimate the importance of building relationships.” You hear this, and it sounds very over used. But what I am specifically talking about is networking and building a reputation, a name, a brand and credentials that come to people’s minds when your name is mentioned. I’m hoping – and I’m very determined and dedicated – that at this time in my life, when my name is being mentioned, it is being mentioned with a certain level of competitive product, a level of communication, availability and accessibility, and a certain responsibility to other people. The gap for slander and negativity has been closed through my own hard efforts to build my brand.
That goes with #3, which is, “Don’t be that miserable, negative, slanderous person.” Because, it attracts nothing except more misery. This is a punching-bag business, like many are. If you have two Quiznos sandwich shops on opposite corners, they’re punching each other out. Business can be about that, but there is a way to do it so you’re always choosing the high road. That doesn’t mean not being tough and strict, or not negotiating hard and getting things done. But there’s a way to do it and still foster the humanism and the heart in it. I think everybody responds to that in every country. Everybody understands sincerity.
To learn more about Shele Sondheim and the work he does globally, visit the CSM Words and Music website.
MING (a.k.a. Aaron Albano) is a New York City-based DJ, producer, remixer and owner of Hood Famous Music, Habitat Music and co-owner of Afire Music. Starting at the age of nine, he trained as a classical and jazz guitarist and played in hair metal bands throughout high school. Because of his passion for production and interest in building a solid career in the music industry, he decided to pursue a degree in electrical engineering with a focus on audio at the University of Miami. While in college, he continued to fine-tune his production and DJ’ing skills and upon graduation, looking for a way to fund the development of his home studio, MING found work in the burgeoning Internet industry. During this time, MING met renowned musician and DJ FS and together they formed the duo Ming+FS, a collaboration which went onto produce four studio albums and over 30 singles. Eventually, he founded the record label Hood Famous Music. As an artist, MING is managed by Stephanie Lafera at Atom Empire, which counts huge artists such as Lady Gaga among its talent.
MING talked to me about his multi-faceted experience in the music business and delivered some “sound” advice for artists looking to market themselves, hone their craft, grow their fan bases, achieve balance and build long-lasting careers.
How did you first get into the music industry?
MING:
I have basically been involved in music since I was nine. I was a classically- and jazz-trained guitar player. I always wanted to be in the music business. I played in an all-star hair metal band coming out of high school and thought I was going to make it big. That’s when hair metal got killed by grunge.
My parents were great, you know, those Jewish parents from the suburbs who wanted me to have something to fall back on. And I was really good at math and science and interested in designing recording consoles. So, I went to school at the University of Miami for electrical engineering with an emphasis in audio. Because electrical engineering is a very serious course of study, it really gave me the view that everything in life has a process. And it’s not just about the dream, rather about whether or not you can live the reality of the dream. For example, if you want to build websites, you learn how to build websites. You don’t just talk about building them. You get the books, learn the code, etc. It was the same sort of thing for me when it came to production.
When I graduated, I moved back to New York and wanted to focus on production. The money I was making money in the Internet business went right into my home studio. I was playing in a bunch of different bands when I met Fred – FS – through some other friends and eventually joined his band, Millis. I heard some of the hip hop he was producing on the side, and said, “Wow. This sounds like British trip hop. We should make some music together. I bet I can get this signed.” So, we made a bunch of tracks and totally by chance, I found myself meeting with a label to talk about working on their website (this was in the early days of the Web). To show themlabel that I understood the music they were doing, I played them some of the music Fred and I had been producing, and they signed it on the spot. I was really just trying to get the Web gig. But that was the start of our electronic music career.
From there, we did a bunch of singles deals. That first project was with Brooklyn Music Limited (BML). We did some stuff for Ubiquity in San Francisco, then a few singles for Om Records which led to a three-album deal.
People often talk about the deals they do. And our deal with Om was probably really bad. This is a point that I try to drive home to people: Putting out your own record is all fine and good if you understand the business – if you have your social marketing down, have good networks and a good fan base, if you understand business and can manage money. You know what it’s like to run a record label, a touring business and a merch business. There’s a lot to understand. And most young musicians at 22 do not know how to do all that. They play to 50 people in their home town, have 100 Twitter followers, 50 people following them on Facebook and think people know who they are. From a global business perspective, you’re basically invisible at that point. So, if you look at doing deals with labels – be they good or bad – as promotion, you get the marketing power that a label has behind you. You may do a record and get absolutely nothing for it, or get stuck in a deal where you do two or three records basically for free. But if you gain the followers and fans and are able to have a live touring career, then you actually have a real career.
I’m always telling young musicians that it’s not enough to make your own record and put it out on your own label. You haven’t been put through the system, and you haven’t been validated by fans or the other people who are going to help sell your records. You’re an army of one. Some of these deals you do in the beginning won’t be good. Make sure the deals you do in the beginning are short term or limited to a certain number of years. But it’s valuable to do records on larger labels and have other people validate your music.
How many deals did you wind up doing with Ming+FS?
MING:
We had a lot of singles deals and that three-album deal with Om. Then, we had a one-album deal with Spun Records, which is defunct. So, we did a total of four full-length albums, probably about 20-30 12” records and lots of remixing for other labels. Since then, I’ve done a ton of stuff.
So, you did all that stuff as Ming+FS, and now you have a music licensing company, your own label and are managed by the same management company as Lady Gaga. All of that is pretty phenomenal.
Then, of course, you’re also a DJ. I don’t get to talk to DJs that often, and I’m kind of an outsider when it comes to electronic music. Can you speak a little bit about what it’s taken for you to become a regularly-working DJ?
MING:
When I started DJ’ing in college, I didn’t have any of my production equipment. I sold all my production equipment when I went off to school. And I started DJ’ing because I wanted to get back into it. The electronic music community was really tight, and there was no such thing as being a touring DJ. You played your local parties, traded mixtapes. There were a few people like Josh Wink, Frankie Bones, Adam X, Heather Heart who were big in the early days. But you never saw yourself as being a famous DJ in the same way you would see yourself as being a famous rock star. So, it was really for the love of the music. And when you were making electronic music back in those days, you didn’t really bring all your gear out with you. You played the records you made to support the music you were making.
I think the distinction for me is that there are some DJs that just play records – other people’s music – to be a DJ. And that’s really never what I was about. I was always a producer first and playing other records that helped support the music that I was making, so when I put out music, I could surround my music with other records that would help rock a party and keep people interested in dancing. Being a DJ for me was always about promoting my own music.
To make a living being a DJ, you start out hand to mouth. You play any local party you can, throw your own parties, do promotion so you can open up for other DJs. You go on the road taking the terrible slot so a couple years later, you have a following and can actually make money being a DJ. I think this goes for any part of the music world: You have to really be willing to put it all on the line.
I always ask young musicians, “If I gave you $50,000 today, would you put that $50,000 into what you’re doing? Would you put it behind the record we just made? Would you put it into a publicist? What would you do with that money?” Often people say, “I’d buy myself a house” or something like that. My answer to that is, “Well, then, you haven’t made good music yet.” It’s not until you’re willing to put the money behind your music that other people will put money behind your music.
That’s the thing about the music business: You have to spend a lot of money in order to make money.
There’s no doubt about that.
As a guy who played in hair metal bands – which by the way is a new revelation for me about you – how is promotion of that kind of thing different from the electronic scene? You just said if you’re an aspiring DJ, you should play any way and anywhere you can and do a lot of promotion and pound the pavement.
MING:
I don’t think it’s that much different. I think the difference for me, being a New Yorker, is that I’ll play New York a lot less than I’ll play other places. Being local to New York can make it overly convenient for promoters not to book you or pay you. And if you want to get paid, it’s better to go somewhere else and become a named person so people want to pay you for what you did.
In the first half of my Ming+FS career, New York promoters would rarely want to book or pay us. It wasn’t until we broke nationally that all those same guys were trying to cut deals to get better rates for us in New York City. When you’re a New York DJ playing across the country, it means something. Being from New York City carries a lot of weight when you’re playing in Iowa. I really exploited my locale and the rest of the country’s perception of New York City as a hot spot. No one from New York cares if you’re from Ohio and come to New York to play a show: “Yo, Ohio hip hop.” Nobody cares. You’re fooling yourself if you think you’re going to bring Iowa’s next rap star to New York City. The only way you’re going to break as that person is to become big in your area so people can’t ignore you anymore. Certain areas just don’t have credibility. If you’re doing hip hop and are from Atlanta, L.A., New York or Chicago there’s cachet there.
I think people need to be honest about what it is they’re bringing with them, who they are as a musician and what their marketable aspects are – what they bring to the table.
The other thing about being a DJ that’s really important and a little different from being in a rock band is, when you’re in a rock band playing only your original music, you’re locked into playing the music that you’ve written and the songs you may cover. A rock band might play a couple covers to extend their repertoire and help the audiences see a connection between the bands they’re covering and their own music. If you’re Jet, you might do a David Bowie cover, because you want people to see your band in that artistic light. Or, if you’re Green Day and want everyone to know that you were influenced by the Sex Pistols, you do a Sex Pistols cover.
In the dance community, you play your tracks, but you have to do a lot of other people’s music. And you also have to play music that makes people have a good time, because they’re not just there to see you. It’s a bi-directional community. As a DJ you can’t say, “I’m on stage and I’m a god, so everybody look at me.” It’s more, “I’m on stage providing an opportunity for people to have a really good time.” And every once in a while, I have connection points with the crowd through my own songs or other big songs I’m playing. And I share those points with the crowd, saying, “We’re doing this together.” I learned how to read the crowd and say, “Oh, this song didn’t work for these people. Maybe I should go this other direction.” I’m reading the crowd constantly and trying to figure out where the particular sweet point is, so I can bring them up to a certain level and then bring them back down again. And I don’t want to wear people out, so I can’t keep playing the same types of songs over and over again. I have to keep it diverse enough so people’s ears get a sonic break from each track I play. It’s like conducting a large audience of people that are also the musicians, whether they know it or not.
Rock bands could probably take a cue from that if they had the repertoire to be that flexible.
MING:
I think really good rock bands do do that. You might laugh at this, but there is a similarity between a hair metal band and a DJ. The hair metal bands love the big, in-your face tunes. And then for a hair metal band, the ballad is like a DJ putting on a track that brings the energy down. It gives their audience a moment to breathe. It gives someone’s girlfriend a moment to relate to a song, so both men and women can feel connected to what you’re doing. So, a good band can rock out, but also be sensitive. And in a lot of ways, that dichotomy is also sort of like what you find on country records.
That’s what a DJ needs to do: rock hard, but also play a tune that will clear the dance floor and not worry they’re clearing the dance floor. They need to give people a moment to breathe, get a drink and talk to each other. And then they need to be able to bring everyone back out and reconnect. And if you’re skilled enough to do that, you’ll be able to be have a career as a DJ. I’ve been a professional DJ since ’96, so it’s been almost 16 years.
Most people don’t even get to the point in music where they say, “We broke national.” So, I can’t imagine you didn’t have some idea of where you were in the marketplace. During your career as a producer, DJ, and everything else you’ve done, were there specific branding decisions above and beyond which music you played, who you played with and where you played?
MING:
I managed Ming+FS for about half the time we were together, before we had a manager. I always had an aesthetic and a concept for Ming+FS: I knew if I pushed it the right way, we would give the media something to play with. For us, it was the combination of hip hop and drum and bass. Nobody in America was really doing those two things at once. We were the first artists to be able to take the double-time feel of drum and bass – which was the new and exciting art form – and hip hop – which we both had grown up with and fuse those two things together.
And this was a time when magazines were still king. It wasn’t blogs, etc. We really gave the media something to work with in terms of having a point of view. I was very political and spoke out about a lot of stuff. I did most of our interviews, so I always really thought ahead of time about my talking points for interviews. I always tried to give much more than what was in our bio that our publicist had sent.
Also, we tried to connect with the areas we were going to and not just compare every place we had been to the next place. Each place was special. For example, Lawrence, Kansas was the first city to have a gay mayor. So, there was a really interesting pocket of culture in a city that most people in New York didn’t identify with as being culturally significant.
The first place we broke in the States was Seattle. We got to Seattle, and it was like we were rock stars. From Seattle, we grew it to Portland, then San Francisco. Being from New York and on a San Francisco-based label helped greatly, because we were covering the East coast, and they were covering the West coast.
Then, we worked the mid-states. We did everything from raves, to clubs, hip hop venues, tours – you name it. We did stickers and a couple of mixtapes that ended up being classic mixtapes for the time. I got other companies to give us money to sponsor those mixtapes and put their branding on it. We got 10,000 mixtapes made by the clothing label 33 Degrees. At that time, copying CDs was big. So, we put out 30,000-40,000 copies of our CDs. They got copied again and again, and hundreds of thousands of CDs later, we were national.
We had our own label to fill in releases, so we would take boxes of records and mixtapes and throw them into the crowd in the middle of a show. We gave away so much free stuff. And I learned that from being a promoter. If you give something to someone for free when they’re walking in the door, the show will already have a good vibe to it. We took that mentality with Ming+FS as well.
From a visual branding standpoint, we had a look to match our sound. We were careful about the artwork we selected.
We also had a street team that we built in every town where we toured. We would give the street team free product. We would give them first look at the shows and reduced admission. We did all kinds of stuff.
You’re back out as an artist now. What is your take on marketing and promotion in the modern market now that the landscape has changed?
MING:
I’m speaking with blogs on a regular basis. I do a ton of promotion on several social media platforms. I put out releases on my label to mix with those I’m putting out on other labels, so I constantly have new products coming out. I have new singles all the time. The old format was to put out full albums, but I think that format is dead for a while. So, I’m putting out singles and EPs and plan to stay focused on that for the next few years until I see we’ve reached a critical mass where people want a full body of work from me again.
I’m also doing a lot of remixing for other artists. Some of it’s paid and some of it’s free. I’m doing a podcast on a monthly basis and do live video streams from my studio. I was writing for Electronic Musician magazine for a while doing tech blog pieces and also a video blog on different production techniques.
I’m out doing tour dates again and opening up for other artists. I’m doing local dates and national dates. I recently played for 4,000 people opening up for Bass Nectar followed by a show in Brooklyn for 400 people.
And how does social media and your website play into your strategy?
MING:
I have 24k+ people following my MING page on Facebook and am also in the process of building my Twitter presence. I do a lot of music promotion through SoundCloud. And we have a mailing list where we send out music to blogs for free and a contest I use Headliner.fm a little bit. I basically dabble in all sorts of social media.
What I try to do is maintain my message and let people discover me, but also talk about the music that turns me on. I found out that with social media, when you give away things for free but also talk about other bands and musicians, you help turn the camera back around onto you.
It sounds like you’ve positioned yourself not only as an artist, but also as a tastemaker.
Do you have any other parting words of advice for people who want to have a successful career in production, DJ’ing, or both?
MING:
I think they’re separate. But, as with anything, you always need to be working to get better at your craft. Try to work with as many people as possible. Have a point of view and a unique sound. Bring something new to the table.
And learn how to collaborate. Just because you can do everything by yourself now doesn’t mean you should. I still collaborate with a ton of people. If I do work with another band, I’m getting access to their audience. This audience is going to find out who I am because that artist is going to mention what I’ve done with them. The more people you can collaborate with, the better you will be as a musician, and the larger your fan base will be.
The other thing is to be honest with the music you’re making. It’s okay to make music that is not successful. But if you want to make music that you’re going to make your money from, you have to find the line between art and commerce and be able to ride that line comfortably. You have to be able to carve out a career where you’re making money from the art that you make. Otherwise, you can call yourself a professional musician, but you’re really just a hobbyist with an addiction.
To learn more about MING and his work, check out his label, HoodFamousMusic.com or his artist page, Mingsmusic.com.
Mike Flannery is a composer, producer, engineer and children’s recording artist in New York City. A classically-trained musician since childhood, he got his start in rock playing in the NJ underground scene in the ‘90s. As a major label artist with LAVA/Atlantic in the early 2000s, he toured alongside major artists including Outkast, My Morning Jacket, LL Cool J and Ludacris. Around this time he also opened his own recording studio in Maine and started honing his craft as a producer, engineer and mixer. Eventually, Mike branched out into advertising and began to compose custom music for several high-profile national campaigns. In early 2012 he opened a new studio in New York City and continues to compose for brands, record with artists and also share his expertise on various music-industry-related topics through speaking engagements.
I recently got to talk to Mike about his background as an artist and producer and how artists can prepare to do high-quality work in the studio. He also shared some really solid tips for those who want to build long-lasting, fulfilling careers in music.
Thanks so much for taking some time to talk. First of all, how did you get started in music, and what led you to want to make a career out of it?
MF:
My aunt was friends with Loretta Long, who played the character of Susan on Sesame Street. She got my folks and me onto the set to watch a taping when I was four years old. There was a segment in which “Bob” McGrath talked with some young Suzuki students and had them play violin on the show. I asked my parents if I could play violin too, and they took me out the next day and got me a tiny fiddle and some lessons.
I decided to make a career of music not when I got a record deal back in 2001, but when we got dropped and I went back to school to become a lawyer in 2004. I will always remember when a bunch of great lawyers at a non-profit for which I volunteered sat me down and listed all of the reasons why I should not be a lawyer. The intervention worked. Thanks again, LSNJ-LAW hotline!
You’ve produced and played and collaborated with a lot of big-name artists and have enjoyed a lot of your own success as a composer and recording artist. How did your career as a musician segue into and then fit in with your career in recording/engineering/producing?
MF:
I’ve approached music from a recording standpoint ever since I installed Digital Orchestrator Pro on my PC in high school. The first Little T and One-Track Mike recordings were all done DIY on that PC. And when we signed with LAVA/Atlantic in 2001, I asked the label to give me the recording budget so that I could piece together a studio and they let me do my thing. The first record that we did was almost entirely tracked in Little T’s grandparents’ beach house on Long Beach Island in New Jersey. Being self taught works out a lot better when you’re learning on your own material.
You ran a successful recording studio for seven years in Maine. Who are some of the artists you worked with there?
MF:
Most of the money I made in Maine came from New-York-based firms. I did a ton of stuff for the mobile media industry that included TV ads, bulk processing of ring tones and a bunch of video tones that, for a moment, seemed to be the next big thing. But what I really loved about having a studio on Main Street in Bangor was recording the local folks who just came in off the street. There were a bunch of really memorable sessions: One guy was a real estate lawyer in his sixties who came in with his guitar and recorded some incredibly beautiful original songs in this great gravelly voice. Another was an awesome Irish bar band called the Bar Stewards. And then I worked with a Franciscan Friar, who was also a great magician, and wanted sound effects for a few of his tricks. I also recorded a wicked-good blues harpist named Merlan who would stop by when he was in town, and an incredibly charming woman from Quebec who plays accordion and sings old songs from Quebec. (I think she once paid me with a delicious rum cake.)
Some notable cats who came through were Nigel Hall, Mark Tipton, Sara Richardson, Ryan Zoidis, The Bay State and Andrew Clifford, all of who have roots in Maine.
That’s a pretty interesting mix of folks. What led you to make the decision to get a recording space in New York City this year? Which type of artists do you work with, and what are some of your goals for the studio?
MF:
Aside from my workload getting to be too much for a home recording set up, I think that working on ads and other corporate music projects from my apartment became too insular a lifestyle. I want to work with as many different people in as many different genres as possible and be consistently involved in that great symbiosis between artist and producer that gets me so jazzed about my work. A professional atmosphere is vital to facilitating that type of interaction.
That said, being able to crank the subwoofers doesn’t hurt either. Eventually, I’d like to expand out from one room and have a small suite of rooms that I can keep booked.
Because you’ve had a lot of experience composing music for the advertising space and have built brands through music and have also been a major label artist who has worked in a lot of other parts of the industry, you have a pretty unique perspective. What are some of the things you think composers and artists need to be doing to get people in the advertising space to be receptive to their work? What have you seen that has worked and has not worked for those interested in marketing their music in that particular space?
MF:
It’s important to show that what you do is more valuable than what, say, a music library does. I find that for me this has taken the form of a trust between my clients and myself built over years of working together. They know that when they call me for a job, I will respond immediately. I will not only be open to any and all ideas that they have for a piece, but will also be able to translate those ideas into a musical composition that we can then change and tweak together until it is perfectly aligned to their vision. When I get a call from a client, I’m not just ready to jump when they say, “jump” – I’m already in the air when I pick up the phone. I try to anticipate my clients‘ needs and be ready to meet them as close to the word “go” as possible. Not only that, but the answer is always “yes” no matter what the request. I know that I’ll be able to figure it out after the fact, but during that conversation, I can do anything I’m asked to do and sooner than they actually need it done.
What doesn’t work for people who decide to make it in a creative field is a lack of confidence. If you are not totally self-confident and if you tend to question whether you are the right person for the job, well, the next guy is going to get it. Creative directors have absolutely no time, and they definitely have no time for your insecurities.
That’s pretty solid advice. You’ve obviously worked with a lot of artists in the studio on the production side of things and have done a lot of recording as an artist. I know a lot of bands and artists go into the studio not having a clue what they’re doing. What do you think bands should be doing before starting to work with a producer? Are there specific elements they should have planned out in advance?
MF:
Artists need to know who they are. I know this sounds obvious, but unless an artist comes to me with a clear vision of who they are and what they want to express, they might end up feeling as though their producer has imposed a vision onto their work that will be hard for them to feel good about owning. It’s important to always have that ideal to fall back on, like a core mission statement.
For instance, my kid’s music group, the Flannery Brothers, has a goal in mind when we write and record songs. We are always honest; we only write about things that we actually think about and do as adults. As soon as we start to tread on ground that comes from a place of remembrance – for instance singing about getting a “boo-boo” at recess (ugh) – we throw that right out the window. Since we have this simple axiom against which we can hold up all of our artistic decisions, we always sense when something isn’t right. We will even look at each other in the studio, say, “Is this honest?” and if the answer is “no” for either one of us, the idea gets squashed immediately.
As far as the mechanics are concerned – like planning things out or figuring out your ensemble – I find that the process is different for everyone. I do tend to think that it’s important to play songs live before recording them, because they will change and evolve in front of an audience. Also, it’s important to know what your budget is and understand how much you can actually afford to do. If you can’t splurge for renting that 1965 Rickenbacker 12-string, maybe you don’t need that one song to sound exactly like “A Hard Day’s Night.”
What should bands/artists be looking for when they are trying to find a producer that’s a good fit?
MF:
Give me a call, I’ll let you know.
Seriously though, I think it’s all about personality. Sure you want someone you can trust to give you a great product within your budget – that’s a given. But really, you’re hiring someone to sit in a tiny room with you for days or weeks. If you don’t dig each other, why would you put yourself in that position? There’s one example that comes to mind of the lead singer of a very popular band who needed to get incredibly drunk before singing. If his producer had had a problem with that, the record wouldn’t have been nearly as good.
Undoubtedly, you’ve witnessed some changes on the production side of the music business in the past 10-15 years. What are some of the specific changes you’ve seen as an engineer/producer? Do you feel it’s more challenging to be a producer than it was 10-15 years ago?
MF:
I think the main difference between right now and the turn of the millennium is the quality of production that you’re seeing from home studios. You used to have to be pretty savvy to get a great recording out of your living room. My ProTools Mix Plus rig would have been prohibitively expensive if I hadn’t had label backing, and now my current rig – although probably about one-third of the cost – is much more beautiful sounding and powerful. Also, the options that we now have for soft synths and samplers are just incredible. I’m in love with the new Native Instruments Komplete bundle and find that I use something from it on almost every session.
The accessibility of these new levels of processing power coupled with the new way that music is distributed has been a total game changer. A lot of great studios have suffered because of it.
That said, nothing can really take the place of a solid understanding of audio. A common complaint that I hear from my friends who work on records is that the quality of the recordings they receive for mixing and mastering has gone way downhill – sometimes to the point of being almost unworkable. Here’s a tip: When you record digital audio, do it at a high bit rate and record at low levels. Your mix engineer will thank you for it.
As far as how challenging it is to produce music, it really hasn’t gotten any easier or any more difficult, and it never will. No matter which equipment you have at your disposal, it will always be about what you do with it not what it can do. The job will always be creating the vision that the artist or creative director, or modern dance choreographer or whoever has in their mind. They don’t care what equipment you have. In fact, most of my clients in advertising have never seen my rig. They just want something that sounds good.
That’s all really helpful stuff for people to know. Thanks for sharing all that.
You’ve experienced being an artist on a major label. What was that experience like for you? If you could go back – knowing what you know now – is there any advice you would’ve given to yourself prior to getting a record deal that you think would’ve helped you?
MF:
“Mike! Save your damn money and try to sleep with more hot girls while you still have all your hair!” Hindsight is 20/20, Ooh La La…
I’ve definitely never gotten that response before, but I bet a lot of people who have been in the label system might agree with that if they were being honest!
Just one more question, also likely related to hindsight. The fact that you have been consistently working on both the recording side and the performing side of the music industry throughout your entire career gives you a unique perspective. Do you have any parting words of advice for artists trying to build successful careers in the current market? What about advice for those trying to build careers as producers/engineers?
MF:
There are audiences for everyone- it’s just a matter of finding them. One of my favorite articles on this subject is called “1,000 True Fans,” by Kevin Kelly. The article describes an excellent way to approach any career in the Arts and is always on my mind in all of my business dealings.
Most importantly though, it’s vital to remember how lucky you are to be struggling to make ends meet as an artist or working crazy hours in a studio. We don’t do this to make huge amounts of money or for the fame. That’s a long shot that not many people ever get to live. We do this for the love of the music, and for the great experiences that come out of doing what we love. I’ve met so many bitter, failed rock star types who now teach guitar, work as engineers, work as managers, or book clubs. Every time I have some negative interaction with one of these types, I am reminded of what an awesome thing it is to always create, and to enjoy what I do on such a deep level. If music is your compulsion, then first and foremost, you’d better enjoy it.
For more information about Mike Flannery and the work he does, you can visit his website. Also be sure to check out the Flannery Brothers, an original, kid-friendly band he started with his brother, Dan.
It’s just about perfect. Go buy a cracked Magazine.
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.
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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.
