Now it is definitely. It wasn’t so much back then when I was doing it, but now it’s definitely important. Musicians that don’t know their business have a very hard time staying, you know – competing with people that do. When Snoop says, “Keep your mind on your money and your money on your mind,” he’s not kidding. You know what I mean? You have to really know what’s going on or you get lost in the shuffle. And I could tell you, like, the clients that I have at my own firm, the ones that know a lot about their business make a lot more money than the ones that don’t. And, you know, they have the same level of success, so it’s interesting.
I think that you need to really understand the music business to be able to compete. You don’t have to know the intricacies of your recording agreement and what the specific deal points are, but I think the more you know about the business of music, the more you’re gonna be able to compete on that level. It’s just, you know, back – way back when when guys used to show up at the Whiskey with contracts in their briefcase, those days are over. It’s a very competitive, very consolidated market and those that know how to get around – just knowing where the bodies are buried, you know, allows you to move forward at a quicker pace than someone who doesn’t know a lot about the business.
I don’t necessarily thing the best strategy is to go with a record label today. A lot of the artists that are doing it themselves end up making money just doing their own CDs, touring on their own, selling their own merchandise, really doing it themselves. And then when it comes to a point where they have achieved a certain level of success, they then end up going to a record company because the record company has become this humongous marketing and media group. I mean, you don’t need a record company anymore to exploit your records, you know? You just – it’s like this huge – you could do that on your own. They just take you from selling 10,000 CDs to 1,000,000 CDs.
And those artists that I find that have done it themselves for a number of years, whether it’s rap, rock, R&B, whatever, country, those record deals are so much more favorable to the artist than the ones that are given to artists that have nothing. You know, it’s hard to negotiate, you know, on behalf of someone when they have no, you know – what the record company calls, you know, commercial or viable success. You can’t quantify it. So it’s hard to, like, negotiate, you know, big advances for them or favorable mechanical royalty rates and things like that. You know, but if you have an artist that’s been touring in a van for four years and have sold, you know, 50,000 CDs and has been on the Warped Tour four times and, you know, and has their music in, you know, the American Pie soundtrack and things like that, I mean, those types of record deals are very favorable to the artists.
Yes, that the music business is really a business. People don’t understand it. In the first three hours of my class I see people leave white as a ghost because they know – you don’t know what you don’t know and the bottom line is we sell records and songs. You know, and – but it’s no different than selling green cars. I mean, today the green car is hot. Today green cars – 1995, I’m gonna sell 25 green cars today so I can make the chart and I can be the top green car seller in today’s music market and I got this guy helping me and this guy. It’s the same business. You know, it’s the same business model. We’re in the business of selling music, you know, and it’s a business. And if you don’t make money in the business, nobody wants to deal with that.
So people might have great music, great songs, you know, great persona, great attitude, but if they don’t know how the business works, they’re gonna get lost in the shuffle because it’s about making money and music. And once you learn how to make money and music, then everybody wants to work with you. It’s that easy. You know, I have film composers – television film composers, one in particular – this guy is so business savvy. You know, he writes music for all the reality shows. You know, he’s got a lock-in on that because he’s attuned to what they need. So if they’re doing, like, the big loser or whatever, he knows kind of what little things and the knows, like, what the producers want. So he composes things on his computer and e-mails them to them, you know, before they’re even ready to ask for music. But he understands how the business works and he understands who the producers are and he has relationships with them. So before producers are even looking for music, he’s already got it in his head what they need. So it makes their job so much easier and they have this music and he works all the time. He works constantly ‘cause he’s got it down. He knows who to talk to, how to get to them and what they wanna hear.
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