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.
Matt Urmy is the CEO and co-Founder – along with Jonathan Sexton – of Artist Growth, a mobile software platform that helps artists manage the many intricate pieces of their music careers. Matt got his start in the music industry as a songwriter, a touring musician and recording artist, both with his bands and solo. Raised in Nashville, Tennessee, he is also a published writer with an MFA in poetry and has recorded three albums. Artist Growth is a platform that provides amateur musicians and pros a suite of tools to track daily tasks, coordinate projects and grow their music careers strategically. Through the software, users can manage finances, gig calendars, inventory, industry contacts, social media, performing rights organizations and get mentoring resources from top experts in the music business through the company’s AGtv channels. In addition to launching Artist Growth, Matt also teaches creative writing at Nashville State Community College, is developing his first Broadway musical and is working on an album with Cowboy Jack Clement.
I recently talked to Matt about the challenges he has encountered throughout his own career as a performing musician and how the Artist Growth platform directly addresses these challenges and can help artists interested in building sustainable careers within the music industry.
How did you find your way to the music business?
MU:
I came to the music business much like a lot of other people in it. When I was a kid, I started writing songs, and I wanted to be in a band. So, I started a band. And that turned into a high school band, then a college band. And then being out of college, I went solo and spent about a decade driving up and down the Eastern Seaboard playing gigs in bars and clubs.
Which bands were you in?
MU:
I was in two. I was in one called Telescope and then another band called The Whiskey Scars, which was a honky-tonk country band. It was by far the most successful band I was in. I was also in that band with Jonathan, the other founder of Artist Growth. He played bass. We founded it just as a way to pay the rent. We went and convinced this club owner in Knoxville and said, “Hey, if you pay our rent every month, we’ll put a band together and play here every Thursday night.” He went for it, so we got our rent paid for a couple years. We put this country band together, and it turned out to be this wildly successful, really fun honky-tonk band. The only problem with it – as you might imagine with a name like The Whiskey Scars – was that it was not a band that was in any way sustainable. You can’t live like that for very long before things start to go very wrong for you.
After a couple years, we packed it up. Both of us had children during that time, so Jonathan and I came off the road. We took a couple years off and stayed at home with our kids, worked day jobs and at about the same time came back to touring and hooked back up. So, we came back to our touring career really engaged in trying to move forward in the business. It wasn’t just about having fun and being on tour; it was about making money and understanding marketing. It was also the first time in my life I had ever worked with promoters and publishers who were actually professionals. I started learning all these things from them about how you’re supposed to do things and what the protocols are.
It was really one awakening after another. And having moved back to Nashville, I was meeting people who were veterans in the business. And all of that awakening and learning that happened coupled with the fact that Jonathan and I were completely dissatisfied with the online software tools available to independent musicians that we sat down and decided to design one ourselves. Once we did that, initially, we got such a positive response from people in the space here in Nashville that we kept going with it. And eventually, it turned into a product we were able to raise a million dollars to develop, implement and market.
As touring artists, we decided to build something for ourselves, and then we realized we had something everyone could use. So, now we’re not touring anymore once again and are instead going to be traveling around promoting this new product we built.
Obviously you had problems and experiences on the road that made you say, “I need to create something to fill this void.” And you built a product that solved these problems. Knowing what you know now, what would you have told yourself when you were just starting out playing music and touring that you’ve learned by building this solution?
MU:
The first thing I would’ve told myself is, “You need something that you can use to keep track of everything that’s easy to use and understandable.” That was my #1 problem. And each of the things I needed to keep track of was small, but they all added up to something big. For example, I needed to retain a list of every show I performed somewhere and have that accessible. And then, I needed to find a way to retain email addresses I collected at clubs. I also needed to have a way to put together a collection of every set list that I played at every club. They were all written down on pieces of paper, and I would lose them. Sometimes I would carry them around in my guitar case for a while and reuse them. But eventually, they’d get lost or I would spill a glass of wine on them. I would also lose receipts. I didn’t keep track of them, even though I had a glove box full of them. I also needed a list of how many records and how many t-shirts I sold at each show.
There was a lot of basic data keeping. And I didn’t have an understanding in my early 20s of how to use Microsoft Excel, FileMaker Pro or any of these file-keeping systems. They were tools that for me were really cumbersome and a pain in the ass to use. So, my solution was just not to keep track of anything. And it was so easy for me to justify it by saying, “That’s not what I do anyway. I’m just supposed to be an artist.” If I could talk to myself at 20 again and Artist Growth existed, I would say, “Yeah, you are an artist. And what you need is a tool that allows you to keep track of stuff and remain an artist and not have to learn how to use really fancy accounting software or a really fancy contact management system. You need a simple tool that’s easy to use and allows you to keep track of everything.”
What ends up happening is that after a certain amount of time, you do end up in a meeting with somebody who starts asking you questions: “How many records did you sell last quarter? How many did you sell in the last two years? How much merchandise are you moving? How big is your mailing list?”
How do you think things would’ve gone differently if you had these tools? Would The Whiskey Scars have gone somewhere else if you had access to that data?
MU:
I think we would’ve had the option to go somewhere different. There are always so many components that factor into whether or not a band is going to take the leap from being a concept that’s getting its feet wet on stage and in the studio to an actual act that’s invested in and becomes a business. That could be a lack of data or a lack of understanding, so you never get the meeting or the chance to meet with people who can take your career to the next level. But it could also be that your lifestyle isn’t sustainable or that you hate your drummer and it’s doomed from the beginning, or that you have a child.
It’s hard to say if The Whiskey Scars or any of my other bands, or even I as a solo artist in my mid 20s had been able to have access to Artist Growth, that I would’ve been the next John Prine. And of course, ultimately, you have to have the quality art to back it up.
I find it interesting, because you guys are collecting data I never even thought of. How would somebody use every set list they ever had?
MU:
What there is now is live performance royalty registration, which is a real revenue stream for somebody just starting out. You can get $200 or $500 every quarter in the mail from your performing rights organization (PRO) for performing. But you have to submit those set lists. And you have to submit those set lists with venue data. Artist Growth has over 30,000 venues in the system already. So, there’s the venue data. Now you just need a set list and a way to submit it. And that’s what we built.
We’ve tried to take all the ways there exist to have a revenue stream and have created a data tracking and data entry system that will be really easy for people to use. And we want it to actually turn into money for people or to help them leverage a meeting or get to the next meeting with people. Of course, the art has to be there.
It all goes back to the art. All the producers and managers we talk to say over and over again, “It’s all about the song.” And it is all about the song, the record and the art. If that’s there, the data just reinforces that. You can have all the data in the world. But if the music is terrible and makes people want to turn their radio off, and you can’t sing, then the data doesn’t matter. But if you really have something, and you really believe in what you do and are on a journey to discover your voice and get better, and if the feedback you’re getting is positive and it’s something you love to do and that you are passionate about, Artist Growth’s tools can help you. Artist Growth helps that kind of person start to put together the information that’s necessary to jump from the concept band or the concept artist who might have an independent record and has played locally, to somebody who is actually able to make music their career and have a team of people that are going to support that career. All that data matters now, because the landscape has changed.
You pretty much had me at “$200-$500 per quarter.” That’s pretty impressive. Explain to me how that works.
MU:
Live performance royalties are relatively new. But PROs collect these blanket licenses. They call it “licensing a venue.” They go out to all these venues – restaurants, bars, theaters, any establishment that plays music. They say, “You’re a business and you’re playing music in here, and entertaining your customers and guests is part of what brings in music and helps you make money. We represent the artists that make the music that helps you get business into your establishment. And since you’re using their art, which we represent, you need to pay us a fee to be able to do that.” So, the PROs collect all that money and distribute it out to the artists they represent.
BMI, for example, has over 400,000 artists that are affiliated with them. They collect money for all these licenses all year long from venues, big and small – restaurants, diners, coffee shops, as well as theaters, stadiums, etc. And now, with live performance royalties, what an artist that is affiliated with BMI does is send them the set lists they played at the venues that pay the licensing fees to BMI every year.
And you guys have taken this to the point where all an artist’s songs are registered with Artist Growth, and that process is fairly automated?
MU:
Yes. What you do with Artist Growth is upload your catalog. You put your registered work catalog into Artist Growth, and from that, you’re able to create set lists from the songs. You just drag and drop, make a set list and the system automatically connects it to a date, a gig and a venue. And we have the venue data built into our system. So at the end of the night when the show’s done and you’re doing your close out, you just hit “submit.” It’s kind of like sending an email. But we take all that information and you can send it off to your PRO. Once you register your set lists this way, every quarter, you get paid by the PRO for these performances. Part of the money the venue has paid the PRO is to cover the cost of the performance you did the night you performed there, so you’re entitled to some of that money. They send you a check in the mail. It’s not a ton of money. But a couple hundred bucks here and there really matters when you’re at the beginning of your career and trying to make it.
Part of the spirit behind the platform is also helping artists understand the business they’re in. That’s why we have AGtv and a mentoring portal. We have experts that the general public has never had access to before providing information on a wide variety of subjects, including legal issues, contract negotiation, songwriting, production, engineering, etc. Artists can go to these people whose expertise has previously been under lock and key within the business for decades and watch videos with information on their phones or tablets from some of the best minds in the business. These industry people talk to them about how to position themselves and get ready to really go for it. They tell musicians how to sidestep landmines, make a call to a radio station that doesn’t know who they are – and to navigate a lot of other challenges like that. This information really matters to artists in the beginning, because they don’t know the protocol. So, we provide career management and career mentoring.
I’m not even sure I would know how to call a radio station cold other than winging it, so that’s promising information.
MU:
Yes. And it’s not just information we put in there. You watch the channel and get one of the top radio promoters in the country telling you how to do it and how to follow up and when. And then the system will send you reminders saying, “Don’t forget to call that radio station back today,” so you don’t have to remember to do it yourself.
And people can check all this out on the Artist Growth website?
MU:
Yes. You can sign up for everything right there. And once you have your account, you go to the Apple App store or the Android Market – depending on which mobile device you have – download the apps, and you’re off to the races.
I don’t want to throw anybody under the bus, but there are a ton of artist services companies. The problem I think that’s most unanswered that you solve is the one attached to live performance royalty registration. Are there any other problems out there that your application solves that aren’t solved by the other sites out there – Nimbit, ReverbNation, etc.?
MU:
I think the main differentiator between our platform and those platforms is that those platforms mostly help with the distribution of content and the marketing and promotion of that content. I’ve personally used ReverbNation, and then I moved onto Nimbit. I’ve gone through several of these companies for my own personal career. And all reporting metrics that were available to me were based around the response to my marketing efforts. So, I had metrics for my email campaigns, metrics for my social media, metrics for the sales of the content that they digitally distributed for me. From a business and even a marketing standpoint, all this information was relevant. But what they didn’t have is a really integrated, streamlined system that allowed me to track my own personal data from my career on the road and details like royalties, licensing deals that I would do with a TV show, etc. They also didn’t offer me access to expertise that taught me how to get those opportunities, or once I had that opportunity, expertise that showed me how to leverage it into actual income. These services were just there to help me let people know I had a record or that I was going to go on tour and track the responses I got back.
And the information these other services provide is valuable and important. That’s why we don’t have digital distribution as part of Artist Growth or direct-to-fan marketing or widgets to put on your website. We don’t have website templates or an email client like ReverbNation has, because there’s already so much of it out there. What artists really need is to learn how to participate in the business side for their own career and then actually interact with the industry. They don’t need just another way to reach out to the fans. It’s very important to interact with fans, but artists also need to understand how to have a career in music and how to get in touch with people that can help them take that career to another level.
I think that’s solid advice whether you’re using Artist Growth or not. Obviously you’ve provided a solution to help carry all this advice out – keep tabs on things, make sure everything is orderly, be aware of your time expenditures and where your money is coming from, etc.
MU:
Yeah. And there are a lot of people out there that don’t even know what a performing rights organization is. I talked to some friends of mine back in Knoxville that were asking about Artist Growth, and I was talking about live performance royalty registration, and I was rattling off PROs like BMI, etc. They didn’t even know what those were. And they didn’t know it was free for them to go affiliate with them or that all they had to do was pay a $25 registration fee and they could start getting checks. That blew their minds. It’s easy for me to know about it because I grew up in Nashville, which is a Mecca for the music business. But when you’re living in a suburb of Decatur, Georgia, or out there in some of those places on the West Coast you don’t necessarily know what an organization like BMI can do for you.
And that’s part of what we really wanted to do with the Artist Growth tools. We wanted people to really understand what all the opportunities are, even when you’re at the level where you’re technically an unknown artist. There are still opportunities for you to grow a business, way beyond just Facebook and YouTube. Quantifying where your career is at is so important. It’s important to artists, but it’s also important to record companies, publishers and managers. If you have the right information, they don’t have to guess what 10,000 YouTube views means in terms of a revenue stream. They can look at your revenue stream for the past six months or two years and say, “Look at this growth. I can take this to another level.”
It’s about hard data. And that’s where we’re headed in the entertainment industry. The Internet and technology has taken us to a world and a paradigm where data are so readily available that there’s no reason to not include them in the process.
And how does it work for you guys on a business level? How do you make money as a business, and how much do you charge artists?
MU:
This was the biggest challenge for us when we were designing the platform, because for me, it was very important that this platform could scale. I wanted it go be valuable to a 12-year old sitting on his bed after doing homework with an iPad and his first acoustic guitar and trying to learn what it means to write a song. But I also wanted it to be valuable and useful for someone planning a large enterprise tour with multiple people on a team, multiple road teams out there working simultaneously. How do you build a software platform that scales all the way across the industry like that?
That’s how it got broken down into mentoring and management. A 12-year old doesn’t have much need for a financial and inventory and accounting management system, but he does have a need for mentoring and AGtv. What we’ve done is designed the system so that as your career grows, you can access bigger parts of the system. You can download the app from the Apple App Store for free. If you have an account with Artist Growth, you can just watch AGtv and just get the mentoring. And those channels can be 99 cents per month or $1.99 per month to subscribe to the library, where you can go in and access al the content.
If you want to buy into the whole system and subscribe to the entire thing and have the accounting, gig management and the smart scheduling management that has all the push-note integration, the search database, the AGtv, the quick sale and all that, it’s $4.99 per month flat for everyone. We wanted to keep it really cheap.
The way it scales from there is, depending on how big your team is, you can add other members to the account. You can do it in two ways. You can add members who are “read only” and don’t have access to all the financial and inventory data and contract details but can get set lists, schedules, tasks and to-do lists assigned to them and can report back with project details. Those accounts are 99 cents per member. Then, you can have an admin account added on. The way it works is that anyone else inside the system that has their own $4.99 account can be invited to be an admin of another account. So, if I was a manager and had ten bands, I would buy myself an account and all of them an account, then make myself an admin of all ten of them. Then I can manage all ten of them from a single place on my dashboard on my mobile device or computer. And then those bands can have those individual smaller members. You scale it out as much as you need. A whole management company could admin 600 artists from one account if they wanted to.
But if you’re a small band just starting out, you can pay $4.99 per month and have all members use the same login info to get in and out, as long as everyone is cool with everyone seeing all the information. Then as the business grows, and you’re hiring other people but don’t want them to have their finger in all your data, you can start adding on team members that have different permissions.
We didn’t want people spending money on features they didn’t need. So, if you don’t need accounting and inventory, you can just watch AGtv. As soon as you’re selling records and playing shows, get the $4.99 per month service and start giving people access so you can be a team. Then if you get signed to a management deal, add on an admin and let them have access. If you have to add on a road crew, you can add on some read-only members and distribute tasks for them.
Again, use it to help you manage only where you are, then as you grow, the account can grow. The hope is that it’s cheap enough that anybody can use it.
For more information about Matt Urmy and his new platform for artists, visit the Artist Growth website. You can also follow the company on Twitter and Facebook.
This week marked big news for the business side of the industry as Citigroup suggested it would break up EMI and Google Music eyed the MP3 store space. And Björk made music history by releasing the very first “app” album.
Will Citigroup Sell EMI in Pieces?
Artists and music industry professionals have been awaiting the fate of EMI Group Ltd., home of Katy Perry, Colplay, the Beastie Boys and many others. Citigroup has been deliberating over what to do with the company since they took it over in February. And after final bids came in last week, reports suggested the owner will sell it off as two separate businesses – a label and a publisher.
EMI’s Chief Executive Roger Faxon and former head of EMI publishing has been very opposed to cutting the business in two, saying that the publishing arm and the label arm have a symbiotic relationship, which is what has made the company work for so many years. Since he took over leadership, he has tried to integrate both divisions to make a split more difficult.
Two companies have submitted the highest bids on EMI Publishing: BMG Music, a company run by Bertelsmann and the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Sony/ATV, a partnership between Sony Corp. and the estate of Michael Jackson.
As for the EMI’s recorded music business, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group are both trying to seize it. Warner Music has also expressed interest in purchasing all of EMI; however, anti-trust issues on the publishing side and an inability to line up solid financing with the economy and the music industry in particular in flux will likely prevent that deal from closing.
EMI is considered to be one of the last attractive assets in the rapidly-changing music business. In June, the company was exploring alternatives to being sold, running an auction code named “Project Nile.”
Citigroup will also get more money out of EMI if they cut it in half – as much as $4 billion. Winning bidders will be selected by the end of next week.
Google Music Poised to Move into the MP3 Space
Google will likely open its first MP3 store, possibly as soon as in the next few weeks, says a report published in the New York Times. Five months ago, the company launched its first cloud music service – Music Beta, which allows users to back up songs on remote servers and stream them trough mobile and other devices – and is in negotiations with major labels to build a marketplace that will be an iTunes and Amazon competitor.
Music executives say that Google is pushing to open the store – which will be connected directly to the cloud service – as soon as possible. Google seems to be pushing up the launch date of the store in hopes of getting in ahead of Apple, who will open its own cloud music program, iTunes Match by the end of October. However, Google must establish partnerships with labels and publishers before it can have a full-service store.
Earlier attempts to begin a “smart locker service” – a storage system that lets people link their personal digital music collections to a large central database – failed when Google could not convince music companies it was installing anti-piracy features. Many labels and publishers have said they still are not convinced that Google has addressed their concerns regarding piracy, and Google’s ability to license their MP3 store is uncertain. If Google opens an unlicensed service, users will have to upload each song individually, which could take hours, or days depending on the size of the collection.
Björk’s Biophilia is Released as the First App Album
Björk released the first-ever “app” album last week, opening up new possibilities for artists that want to further integrate music with technology and add new dimensions to recorded music releases. Biophilia features a “set of ten apps contained within a mother app” and was made partly on an iPad. It is available as a CD and is being additionally released as a set of apps – one for each track – so listeners can enjoy a fully-interactive experience. The album represents work of Björk herself as well as work from a team of engineers, scientists, writers and artists/filmmakers, including Sir David Attenborough. App designer/filmmaker/media artist Scott Snibb headed the app design process.
Many believe this album could revolutionize how artists, industry professionals and fans have traditionally defined “music album.” The apps – depicted through images in Wired – are filled with links to reading materials and many interactive features. Interacting with the apps is incredibly comprehensive for those that take time to immerse themselves and even go beyond artistic to become educational. However, some critics worry that all these extra features detract from the main focus of any album – the music itself.
However, Biophilia, which explores music through the themes of science, paganism, nature, love and technology is clearly about the music; two entirely new instruments were even created for it. As the music industry experiences a continued decline in album sales and struggles with piracy, many artists have gone the DIY route. Björk’s latest endeavor could represent an interesting new direction for artists that want to get creative about recorded music and find new ways to embrace and leverage the growing technology side of the industry.
Steven Masur is an entertainment and technology lawyer by way of being a drummer in several rock bands and a lawyer in the cable and TV industries. He currently has his own firm called Masur Law based in New York and his clientele range from musicians to mobile companies to Media based technology firms. I wanted to speak with him because his world view as someone who works in both music and tech was bound to be interesting.
I know you wanted to pursue being a music lawyer, but it didn’t take immediately. What was the career path that got you to be a guy that was doing both music law and being the guy who represents media oriented tech companies.
SM:
After law school I worked at Sabin, Bermant and Gould, which is a firm that does a lot of work in the cable TV industry. I did corporate and cable TV type work at Sabin. When I left Sabin I thought I would start a music law practice; and I did have a music law practice the way almost every new lawyer does, where I picked up a few acts and tried to get deals for them. This is how it worked in the early 90’s. Ultimately this didn’t make as much as working with Internet companies, because in ’94, around the time of Mosaic, people who worked in a few of the sort of feeder companies that started Internet business – especially the Internet content business – started to form their own companies. It was a very heady time. They basically were going out and saying, “Well, we think we do some cool stuff with this media. We’re not sure what it is yet, but we want to start a company.” I was one of a very few lawyers in that milieu who knew how to do corporate formation work and early financing, and also the independent contractor agreement and all the company documents that were needed. So, I ended up picking up a bunch of those early companies, and that’s really what led me into that. I was very interested in the Internet, I was technologically savvy, and I ended up doing a lot of early stage company work for Internet companies in the early 90’s.
Tell me about how things started to shake out for you there. You were probably one of the few, again, established people, but all of a sudden you had a lot of deals under your belt. That must’ve been a really high time for you.
SM:
Yes, it was a really interesting time. 1995 was around the time when internet companies started getting funded. What was happening at the beginning was the healthy growth of an early-stage industry in which management teams were building real companies. They were thinking about, “How is this company going to make money, and how do we get to that point?” And then they started to look for venture finance, because they saw that as the best way to fund the companies because the most similar analogous company was a software company. So everyone looked at that the way software companies in Silicon Valley had formed. They said, “That looks like an Internet company, so those are the guys we’ll ask for money to do this business idea.”
What was fun about that era – the earlier era before it got ridiculous – was that we began doing the legal structures that allowed these businesses to exist. So we did digital distribution agreements for music, film distribution agreements, television deals, episodic online interactive show deals, advertising – the whole basis for advertising on the Internet. We worked on things like if you click a mouse, does that actually represent a signature, like a signed document, which we all know now it does, but at the time that was an unanswered question. So we did, from a legal perspective, answer a lot of unanswered questions.
That brings us to 1999 and 2000, when things really got ridiculous. For me it was summed up in one quote. At the time I was working with a client that was raising money, and they had a really good business plan that I had helped write. I had introduced them to a few people that might invest. They basically said to me, “The VC’s need this to be worth X amount.” And I said, “For it to be worth X amount, you have to make $100,000 a day for the next year, and you only have two people in your company.” And he said, “I don’t care. Just make it say that.” And that’s when I knew that we were in a terrible world of businesses that were unable to live up to their business model.
You’ve already seen the unwinding of one industry, and now the traditional music industry has started to unwind. As a guy who’s done content deals for mobile and content deals for all kinds of online streaming, and as a guy who has along the way developed a music practice – I realize you have other areas of interest as well – what do you think is next? What do you think artists should be looking for? You’re developing all these companies and doing legal work for companies, some of which are going to be the future. Where do you think artists should be focusing their attention?
SM:
It’s a really interesting question. I think we basically stalled after Napster. There was an opportunity to move to the new way of distributing music during the Napster era, and the labels and the content owners did not take that opportunity then. So we had a painful ten years during which a lot of money was left on the table, and now we’re doing it. So now distribution is moving to digital, and many would say it has moved to digital. The business model experimentation that should’ve happened ten years ago is now happening. And this year, 2010, will be a very big year for music services. There are a lot of mobile music services that are launching this year or that have already launched, that will compete for market dominance. In that environment, what an independent artist should do is to focus on writing the best songs they know how to write, doing their shows and then try to get themselves onto these music services. That’s my best advice for independent artists now.
Do you think that mobile and streaming companies still viable? You still saw a company like Nokia Comes with Music kind of underperformed given all expectations, and we have Spotify coming over from the UK. Do you really think that some of these companies will rise in 2010?
SM:
Well I forgot to say the most important thing, which is promote. You must promote your music. You must promote, or else nobody will want your music and nobody will want to distribute your music. Distributing music that is not promoted does not lead to money. Promotion is the most important thing. To answer the question about whether any of these mobile music services will fly, I believe they will. And the reason is, the technology is now there. It is now sufficient enough to distribute a music service, and the promotional money to launch these new music services is now there. It was a little nascent before. The marketing of the services was a little odd. For example, Nokia Comes with music, right out of the gate, just the name of the service indicates that the service is an ancillary side by-product of buying a mobile phone, whereas a music service that launches itself as a music service and says, “This is the business we’re in, if you like music, come here,” has a much better chance.
What about other products? Are you seeing any of these tech companies you’re working with developing possibilities for other streams of income for artists?
SM:
I don’t. I know that there are some old ideas which are gaining new life now. The business of licensing music to commercials and films and television is gaining new life through the use of some technology platforms and also because of the formation of some new sales ideas. I think the sales ideas are much more important than the technology. If there’s a way to assist the sales process great. But I think it is the sales process that is what allows the music to get sold. So, I have seen some new music licensing organizations start whose sole purpose is to try to sell music into television and commercials. I think that is starting to create more sales in that area. I wish I could say it is creating a Renaissance of sales, but I haven’t seen that. I have seen more and better sales and more creativity with regard to the music that is in movies and television shows.
Changing gears a little bit, are there common mistakes from your perspective that you think most artists don’t do that they should be doing?
SM:
I think I’m actually seeing most artists going back to basics, which I think is a really good thing for them to do. And back to basics is that they’re going back to the bedroom to write good songs, and then to test those songs out on a live audience and to not look at what they’re doing as a get-rich-quick scheme but as something but they can’t do anything else but to play music and to work on their skill and their art of making the best music they can make and then see how it plays against audiences. That’s really where the rubber hits the road. You can write the best song you think you’ve ever written, but the way the audience sees it could be completely different. The more you address your songs to a particular audience, the better likelihood you will have to develop better songs and songs that will play to the audience you are seeking. Once you have that, you have a good product; and selling a good product is always easy.
