I wrote a book called “All You Need to Know About the Music Business” and I wrote it because I had a lot of people asking me, “I want to get into the music business and I just don’t know how to get started.” And I thought there ought to be an easy to read, easy to understand overview of the music business becuase it was a difficult thing for me to get a concept on. It took me a lot of years to sort of get the big picture put together in my head. I could get a lot of little pieces and I could get some of the parts – to see how they fit together took me a lot of years to do it. and I thought I wonder if I could save people a lot of time by giving them this sort of broad outline and a framework and then as they begin to have experiences they can fill it and know where to plug it so that it fits into a matrix as opposed to just sort of being a bunch of disconnected little experiences.

People who read “All You Need to Know About the Music Business” tend to be young musicians who are trying to get into the business, people who are executives, film company people read it becuase they want to understand it, internet company people read it becuase they’re trying to figure out how to work music into their lives. It’s really anybody that has an interest in the music business either as profession or because they’ve got to deal with it as part of their lives.

Artists don’t always want to know about all the technicalities of the business side of their field. That’s the reason they’re artists and not business people. And it is not necessary to understand every little bit of it. The more you know the better off you’re going to be because nobody ever takes as good care of business as you do. But at the same time it’s not the best use of your time to spend all of it on the business side. So my sense is that an artist ought to know enough to be able to make intelligent decisions about the major issues in their lives or even the smaller ones to the extent it’s necessary it has to be made by the artist. And then beyond that know enough to be able to pick a team around them who can take care of the technical parts of it and support them and help them get through their lives and leave them free to do what they do best which is to be creative.

As I update “All You Need to Know About the Music Business” each time I would say the changes from the last edition are getting greater and greater, accelerating at a greater pace. We’re in a time of enormous upheaval in the music business as we’re recording this. We’re going from CD’s which are disappearing on to something digital that doesn’t yet exist and we’re fighting piracy that every week or two – sorry – transfers and has pirated more songs than Apple iTunes has had since they were in existence. So we’re dealing with enormous forces that have turned the business around and the companies don’t know how to deal with it and we’re also coming up with new revenue streams all the time such as, for example, streaming on demand or streaming videos on demand. All these things that didn’t exist before are now part of the fabric and yet none of them are yet as significant or any where close to making up what’s been lost on the CD sales and the piracies. So during this upheaval while we’re still trying to find our footing for the next step in the business things have gotten enormously complex, not particularly clear and that always makes for a challenge when I’m trying to write a book that explains what the landscape looks like.

When I’m revising “All You Need to Know About the Music Business” as much as I would like to say that I have familiarity with everything going on the reality is that I have to go out and talk to a lot of people in the industry in order to find out what exactly is going on because it changes so rapidly. I tend to deal with specific issues but there are issues that I don’t deal with that can affect things that are going on and I need to get myself educated. So I spend quite a lot of time doing research, calling people, reading articles and trying to figure out exactly what’s the most current state of affairs when I’m writing a new edition.
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