Posts Tagged ‘Music Business Plan’

David Rose from Knowthemusicbiz.com was kind enough to let me republish the article below that I wrote for him a while back.  If you haven’t already please check out his site.  I will have more new interviews and articles starting up again next week.

I was once told a story about Bill Murray and Hunter S. Thompson.  I can’t verify the specifics of the story but I suppose for the purposes of this article it doesn’t much matter.  During the production of the 1980 Film “Where the Buffalo Roam”, in which Murray was to play a young Hunter Thompson, he met Hunter poolside so he could get a good idea of what the famously eccentric writer was really like.  In response to the question “What is it like to be you?” Thompson tied Murray up to a deckchair and threw him in the pool.

Such is the position of most artists in the music business – floundering in the water and trying their damndest not to drown in spite of overwhelming circumstances.

I run a music business consultancy which is what this blog helps me promote – not that I don’t enjoy content creation.  This business was something I put together after having been a musician on and off for twenty years and having done A&R at Major labels for almost a decade.  As a result of actively promoting this business I get contacted by several strangers every day who are looking to make it in the music industry.  It never ceases to amaze me that in this day and age with all of the tools now available to artists that people are still looking for that one person, that one opportunity or a chance encounter that is going to propel them to superstardom.  That’s not to say that I mind being contacted – far from it!  It’s just that the type of questions I get can be really disturbing.  “Can you get me a record deal?” or  “Hey – I just need a manager and I’m going to make millions!  You need to introduce me to great managers.”

Really?  Last I checked it was 2010.

Chances are if you are reading this – it doesn’t apply to you but from what I have seen this is still the prevailing mindset of many aspiring artists.  I believe those with this mindset won’t make it – period.

In my opinion if you are going to make a living making music – let alone “making it”- you have to own the following:

·         There is no help coming for you

·         The age of the “big break” is all but over.

·         The one person who will help your career more than anyone is you.

Harsh? Yes.  Hopeless?  Not at all.

Let this empower you.  You no longer need to spend a great deal of time chasing management, booking agents or labels.   I am not suggesting that any of these types of strategic partners aren’t helpful but I do find that many artists seek to engage partners far too early in the trajectory of their careers.  Before you seek out someone to partner with you ask yourself the following questions:

·         Have you played out locally on a regular basis for at least six months?

·         Do you have a corporate entity and an intra-band agreement?

·          Have you trademarked your name?

·         Are you registered with a Performance Royalties Organization? (ASCAP, BMI, SEASAC)

·         Do you have a professional looking website for your project and a presence on social networks?

·         Have you made “no apology” recordings of your songs that you think are representative of your ability?

·         Do you have a bio on your musical career that doesn’t peak when you were eight years old and taking piano lessons?

·         Do you maintain an ongoing online and offline positive relationship with a large group of people you could call fans without feeling funny about it or including your parents and extended family?

If you answered no then your business is not yet off the ground.  You don’t yet have a viable and fully formed product.  In any business it is very difficult to get an investment for a blueprint concept or an idea.  Getting funding for a start up business becomes much easier the more time and effort (and money) the entrepreneur puts into it.  You have to remember that seeking out management, agents or labels is asking someone to invest in you.  It might not be financial investment but the amount of time a partner like this would need to devote to developing an artist’s career is usually a full time job.  What do you bring to the table other than your talent?

It’s true – people who interact with artists a great deal are often jaded (Yes, me too.  Couldn’t you tell?)  The failure rate in music and the arts in general is astounding.  If you really want to get the attention of competent and experienced handlers you have to be the one to get your career moving on your own.  If you make enough noise long enough people will find you.  Overnight successes that are examined closely are very rarely (as in go by lotto tickets instead) a case of someone being struck by the thunderbolt of fame whilst daydreaming and smoking dope in the parent’s basement.

What’s the good news?  There are now plenty of sites that provide information and insight and dozens of tools to help you get your music heard for low or no cost.  This makes it harder to rise above all of the noise (because everyone with a mic can be a singer in this day and age) but it is still a viable way to start.

Go find other artists and build a community.  Relationships with your peers when starting out are usually more valuable than industry relationships.  If you are able to surround yourself with several developing artists who are in your situation and perhaps even endear yourself to people who have put in a bit more legwork than you this will help a great deal.  Being able to market yourself to the fans of similar acts is almost the whole name of the game in the beginning so along those lines – go make friends!

Long story short (too late?) – before you spend time and effort chasing big league help, make sure you have maxed out your ability to do everything within your reach to convert strangers to friends, friends to fans and fans to fans who will actually purchase your products.  If you do that long enough and well enough even in a small town – industry will find you.

Good luck out there…

David Garrison is the Chief Marketing officer at Indaba Music which is a…well, it’s sort of a …

Musician Coaching:
What is Indaba Music?

DG: Indaba Music is  the leading online collaboration tool for musicians.  We make it possible for musicians in different places to find each other and then make studio quality music together all online. No download necessary.  We have a variety of tools, so there’s a community side to the site, which is 300,000 members right now, 185 countries, growing double digits each month.  That’s where you find people who you discuss things with. That community is pretty robust – it’s everybody from 13-year old garage bands who are just learning their first chords all the way up to Grammy Award winners. The common element of them all is that they’re all serious musicians and they are passionate about the music they’re making. The community piece is the lifeblood of Indaba that makes it work. On the flip side, there’s the technology piece, which is the suite of tools to enable a musician to manage their digital life online. And that’s primarily on the music creation side right now.

Musician Coaching:
What is the feedback you’re getting from your community?

DG: We have success stories.  For example, recently we ran a campaign with the Derek Trucks Band, which is a bunch of musicians’ musicians, an awesome group.  Derek Trucks is an amazing guitarist. One of the people who entered the contest was a guy named Mike Gannon who just graduated from university, was a guitar player and had always loved Derek Trucks.  He entered the contest and did a cover of the song. At the end of it, Derek and the band chose him. They thought it was a really awesome version of the song that they’d made, really different, unique, good sound and so they gave him the prize, which was to go up and meet the band backstage during a concert. So he went up to Boston, met the band and hung out with them for a while and they had a bunch of great talks, went backstage with them as they got ready. The band went out on stage and the sound check guy said, “So, Mike, did you bring your guitar?” And the sound check guy gave him Derek’s Les Paul ’59 and pushed him out on stage, and the band started playing in front of a large crowd. And this young guy that had just graduated from undergrad whose hero was onstage just started playing with the band. And everyone took a solo, and he ended up getting a solo in front of a big live audience and got a standing ovation.

Musician Coaching:
There are a lot of good success stories like that?

DG: There are definitely success stories through the contest, but each campaign is different. When we dealt with Mariah Carey, she wanted to retain all the rights to the song so people when they submitted gave up their rights to the music. Other artists like Carmen and Camille —  this little unknown duo from Canada – used a Creative Commons license that was basically just attribution. So you could actually go out and sell your remix of their song and make a profit off it as long as you just said it was their vocals. It runs the whole gamut. Depending on the artist, you give up some of your rights, but that’s the price you pay for participating in a really cool collaboration and getting a lot of exposure and getting noticed. There are lots of A&R people hanging around the site and paying attention to the contest.

Musician Coaching: Are there things that people are using the site for that are getting them exposure?

DG: Yes. There are things we intended for them to do with it. But what’s always surprising to us is how people take a platform we’ve created and use it in a way we hadn’t expected. The things we intended for people to do are to find someone to make a piece of music with, collaborate, promote it on the site, and people hear it and more people collaborate on it and it becomes this big thing. A good example of that is Peace Partners, which is a group of musicians who got together, founded by a guy in Quebec who wanted to donate music to the cause of peace and freedom. He got together what’s now a group of over 150 musicians from across the world who are donating songs to an album the proceeds from which will go towards organizations that have a demonstrable impact on peace in the world. Amnesty International Canada Francophone signed on. There are some interesting stories about how people use the idea of coming together to collaborate to do really interesting things.

Musician Coaching: So you’ve started to garner brand attention, and I’m guessing someone participating in a community has a better chance of getting the attention of a brand or a strategic partner and ultimately getting a shot on their own. Have you seen people use this community to procure strategic partners?

DG: That’s another way people have used it. For example, there’s a duo out of the UK called -Felsite-. -Felsite- is this pair of guys who had never met. They met on Indaba and created a song on Indaba and then created a whole album on Indaba and had never met. And then they were heard by a small UK label who really liked the sound and signed the album and the duo. They’re on their second album now. There are absolutely stories of people getting exposure that leads to commercial success through the site. The thing I like about that one is that it’s not like a major artist came out and said, “I’m going to use this site to do something really cool and get exposure for my stuff on it” when he already had a world of listeners. These are two people who had never met each other, didn’t know each other.

ARTISTS THAT HAVE USED THE SITE:  Mariah Carey, Yo-Yo Ma, The Roots, N.A.S.A., Third Eye Blind, K-OS,  John Legend, Rivers Quomo (Weezer), Marcy Playground, Kennedy, The Crystal Method, Erik Truffaz, Deerhoof, Alkaline Trio, The Derek Trucks Band, Coallesce.

Using Indaba as a marketing tool for them and getting extra exposure is leveraging a bunch of assets they already have. What I like about the -Felsite- example is that it’s creating a reputation from something that really didn’t exist before they met on Indaba. So it’s starting from scratch. That’s the stuff we imagined would happen. And then there are a lot of people using it for things we never would’ve thought of that make total sense.  For example, a middle school music teacher in Seattle uses it as a practice mechanism for his choir to look at how the different parts go together, they can use it for homework because it’s taking a rehearsal session that they can record directly into Indaba and then review on their own time and you can comment on specific points in the wave form. It’s really useful as a pedagogical tool.  Does it make sense? Of course it does. Would we have thought of that as an application immediately? Maybe not. I think there are a lot of cool things that happen because this exists and there’s a really strong community around it.

Musician Coaching: You’re an MBA, chief marketing officer and have been in the music space for quite a while. Do you have any parting advice for a musician pursuing a career?

DG: If you’re a musician – especially a rising musician – right now, you should be on Indaba, largely because it’s growing so fast, it’s an easy, untapped source of inspiration, exposure, tools to support your creative process.  More broadly than that, I think one of the things a lot of musicians don’t recognize is the degree to which their fans want to be involved in their creative process, even at their infancy. There is immense appetite for understanding how music is made. We don’t just listen to recorded music because it’s a cool sound. We listen to recorded music because for us it represents insight into the recording process, in the same way that the live music industry is still big. People like to be around created music. What that means is that Indaba is a creative tool and a forum where you can talk about it and actually watch people create. I think with all the social media that artists have at their fingertips – Myspace, Facebook, Twitter – a lot of artists forget that what’s interesting to audiences about those is this constant insight into what you’re thinking about as an artist, into how you’re making the music, into your life as a musician – things that don’t necessarily occur to the artist. We were talking before about how few people actually do things on a regular basis. Someone said to me once that the thing that defines a blog that’s worth following and will be popular is that you may not know what topic they are going to talk about, but you know what stance they are going to take on it. That’s something that social media gives people the capability to do – just talk about a range of topics and then engage fans. Being in touch with people on a regular basis feeds itself. And it doesn’t have to be big, it doesn’t have to be hard to be involved, it doesn’t have to be a big deal, but I think a lot of these tools are built for, but not necessarily used for, this pinging.

My advice is, particularly for rising musicians, to create a relationship with your audience – no matter how big or small it is – by creating a persona so they know what your opinion is going to be. And give them a sense of when you’re going to talk to them – whether it’s once a week, once a month or once a day.

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Please check out Indaba Music, it is a very cool collaboration tool.

I recently stumbled across the YouTube clip below. It is old footage of Frank Zappa discussing the music business of several years ago. Having a music career does seem to be different today then when this was recorded but there is still some great truth to his words.

Artist / Executive Interview: July 09’ Alex Lasarenko

Recently I had the pleasure of sitting down with a friend and client of mine Alex Lasarenko. Alex has been making his living at writing and recording music for over twenty years and now runs his own studio making music for commercials, film and TV. You may or may not have heard of Alex but you have heard his music as it has been featured in dozens of films and national TV commercials. I thought I would sit down and ask him a bit about how he built his business and started making a living in music.

I met Alex in his studio Tonal in the West 20s… I sat down and started the tape recorder just after explaining what my artist coaching service was about and that I was looking for him to offer helpful advice to the struggling musician. Without having really started the interview he said:

Alex: “you have to believe that what you are doing is the right thing to do. Because there will be a ton of people telling you what you do is just shit… It really is a rollercoaster ride…which is a problem if you don’t like rollercoasters”

Music Coaching Question: So I guess bring me back to the beginning to how your career in music started…

Alex: Well I’m from Ohio from a family of working class immigrants so there was nothing in my background that suggested that moving to New York was the right thing to do. I was getting a degree in piano performance. There was nothing in my cards that said I should move to New York and start a band.

Music Coaching Question: But that’s what you did?

Alex: Yes I moved to New York and started off paying keys and writing all the music with a partner Chris Ocasek who would write all the lyrics. We started in a band around age 21 and got signed to EMI / Manhattan records by Bruce Lundevall. Bruce was probably the nicest gentleman and a great first person to meet in the music business. It was an excellent experience. Someone must have thought something of what we were writing. I think it was partly that and partly that EMI was looking to exploit Chris’ lineage (Chris is Rick Ocasek’s son).

Music Coaching Question: What did you guys do up until the point of getting signed?

Alex: We were always writing music and playing out locally. Since I was classically trained and Chris wasn’t it was an interesting combination. Performing live was never my favorite I used to get very nervous or sick.

Music Coaching Question: So Touring musician was never your first pick of careers?

Alex: No, and the band was never set up to be like that it anyway, it was more like a studio project. The label wound up trying to take away what the band was and wound up trying to promote the record we made as the Chris Ocasek project. I wound up suing the label. So very early on I learned how to stand up for myself. I wound up winning and got the courts to prevent the record from being released as something that it wasn’t.

Music Coaching Question: Wow, I didn’t realize that.

Alex: It was an interesting experience that uh…you can be this kind of flakey creative artist but it is the business of art and the art of business…the two are intertwined no matter what you think, whether you like it or not.

Music Coaching Question: So you were in your early 20s and you were signed for a year or a year and a half and I am guessing the lawsuit ended that?

Alex: Yea

Music Coaching Question: And the left you with a degree in Piano Performance and living in New York.

Alex: Yes, the producer of the record that Chris and I made was Jonathan Elias and he got so sick of the whole label’s behavior he left so I wound up doing the whole record myself with an engineer

Music Coaching Question: Was that your first time behind the board?

Alex: Yes – Jonathan left to do a Duran Duran record after the problems started to surface with the label and I wound up producing the EMI record myself. You know, sometimes you get thrown into the deep end of the pool and you either sink or you swim. I always knew what I wanted to do musically, that came naturally so it was easy for me to get it done. When the lawsuit happened I wound up broke and I had a half an onion and I would literally sit in the lobby at Elias studios twelve hours a day waiting on their client meetings to be done so I could go in an eat something that was left over- that was how I ate for 4-5 months

Music Coaching Question: So tell me about Elias studios-

Alex: Elias was a large commercial music house, at that time it was on its way down as Jonathan has lost some interest in it. Jonathan’s brother told me if I was going to sit there all day I might as well write something so I did and it wound up winning some business for the studio. I wound up writing several pieces of music that won business for the studio and after six months they made him the creative director of the company.

Music Coaching Question: From Eating leftover food in the conference room to creative director in six months, not bad…

Alex: (laughs) yea it was $25,000 a year. For me, that was Huge! It was amazing I could afford socks; I could afford to eat and get a shared apartment. And I just worked my ass off…
Music Coaching Question: So for you it was your songwriting and the production and engineering skills you picked up along the way?

Alex: Yep, working on and producing commercials was a great lesson because I would do that from 9:30 in the morning until nine at night and then I would work on an album until early in the morning.

Music Coaching Question: Did you ever have any thoughts of going back to band life?

Alex: No after the lawsuit it was kind of over…but it was a great experience to learn that you can’t let people take advantage of you. And every time I have let me guard down or didn’t go with my gut instinct on that I have gotten burned.

Music Coaching Question: Gothca. So one of the reasons I wanted to interview you Alex is one of the questions I get most often doing what I do is “can you get my music into film and TV and video games?” Now you are someone who makes you living on creating custom pieces of music for those kinds of things. Do you have any advice for people on how to get their music placed in those kinds of situations?

Alex: Well it’s a different kind of a business (creating custom music vs. licensing tracks off of an existing album)…Making an album is a full time job, marketing it is a full time job…and it’s usually a thankless and unappreciated job…but I think it would be hard I don’t know what to tell you if you have one album’s worth of material…. Most people respond better to a body of work unless you have a hit- that makes it easier. When we license music it is because we have a library of material to choose from…

Music Coaching Question: Does having more material help do you think?

Alex: … I think content is king. If you have great success with a band and get traction then whoever you are working with will be able to get it in front of music supervisors…if you ant a long term relationship with music in movies and TV then you have to meet and talk to as many music supervisors you can and get to know them and what kind of music they use…I’ll talk to anyone, it’s interesting what you can learn when you are willing to talk to anybody.

Music Coaching Question: How did you cope with the jaded attitudes you likely encountered when meeting music supervisors as a composer just getting in to the business? Is there any advice you can give about getting heard by these people?

Alex: I made a decision that I was going to devote five years to scoring a movie. What I had to do was create music that was worth being in a movie. I think that nobody would take me seriously unless I had music that they could hear visually – music that they could see being part of their project. Our studio tends to score entire films rather than just portions of films, which is rare. What I have noticed that music supervisors tend to work within a certain budget. Some do 25-50 million dollar budget films

Music Coaching Question: Of course the music budgets for those films is considerably less…

Alex: Oh, considerably less…and then there are other music supervisors that do 1-10 million dollar films. I’ve noticed that when these music supervisors step up into the next category up they tend not to return your calls (laughs)…I guess their feeling is that they are now at a higher level…
When it comes to licensing and music supervisors I think that anytime that you can talk to somebody and get your music in front of them I mean what’s the worst thing that could happen- they say no? I mean you are going to hear no a lot in this business… And you have to be dumb enough to believe that they are wrong (when they say no)…I know that sounds stupid but when someone says no you have to believe that they are wrong and you are right.

Music Coaching Question: I am sure that you know a ton of people who you came up with and played with who are no longer in the business- they either heard no too many times or couldn’t hack it and got straight gigs…

Alex: Well some of them actually went on to be pretty big too…

Music Coaching Question: Sure…but from what you have seen from those who made it who have either continued to make a living at music or have gone on to be hugely successful is there a defining quality that leads to that enduring success?

Alex: I never chased the glamorous portions of the business so it was easier for me to stay in the business…but the people I know who fell away were not able to adapt they were unable to move past their niche. I know a woman who was one of the best oboe players in the world in my opinion and she no longer plays, she takes botanical photographs now.

Music Coaching Question: So the ability to adapt…?

Alex: If you are the best oboe player in the world and all of a sudden there are 3,000 plugins with great oboe sounds that don’t require a real person to come in for a session then…you’re in trouble. Ten years ago I used to file 300 AFM contracts per year. Last year we did two… I’ve had to adapt to, you have to make do what you have these days.

Music Coaching Question: Any other advice…

Alex: Well, while I everyone was out doing coke in the 80s I was in the studio doing work during the day and making time for my own songwriting at night…it’s a lot of work to make a living this way… You can always write music on your own but if you want it to blossom into something epic or beautiful or cinematic you have to keep the hamster wheel going… I would get Pneumonia and I would still go to work, work has to get done…

Music Coaching Question: How did you know you were doing the right thing?

Alex: The best thing that happened to me was a corporate coach came into Elias and asked me with no one else around – “what do you want?”… I gave him the corporate line but he asked again- no – “what do you want”…. What I wanted was to win an academy award for bet original score… all this shit fell away when I realized what I wanted.

Music Coaching Question: you are lucky that your day job supports you in your goal
Alex: absolutely…you know someone is always throwing shit at you but you have to always believe that what you are doing is worthwhile…

Music Coaching Question: Your skill that kept you in the game has been your songwriting and applying that to corporate needs- how did some of your peers use their skills to stay in the game, was it session work or waiting tables or…?

Alex: Yes, Session work, people that do custom studio work like I do… I mean everyone is having trouble but…I don’t really know, I do know some great players. We all have to do the odd job here and there. The motto at tonal is we will talk to anyone, we will do anything…

Music Coaching Question: Do you get calls for sound a-likes?
Alex: no, we don’t much anymore, rates have come down most people can afford the originals…you also have tons of small studios looking to break in who will work for free.

Music Coaching Question: would you warn someone against doing tracks for free?

Alex: My feeling is if you are doing music for free, what do you think of yourself? It’s a business, we provide a service. This whole notion that you have to demo for free for an online free when agencies are still charging their clients a lot of money. People often ask me “should I do this track for free?” and I always say – “do you think you are worth nothing?”

Music Coaching Question: Enough said about that…

Alex: it’s a nerve wracking moment in business right now…everyone is walking around like a zombie…in the end if you believe what you are writing is great it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks

Music Coaching Question: One final question- Would you do anything different?

Alex: No, no regrets.
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You can check out Alex’s work @ http://www.tonalsound.com