Do You Hate the Music Business?

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“I hate the music business.” That’s what he said to me. My friend, Joe, just signed to a new label and will be putting out his first national release this fall. Turns out he is going through the early stages of “Music Business Grief” (not to be confused with the normal human stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.)

I’m sharing the “Music Biz” stages of grief just in case you ever find yourself in a contractual relationship with a record label.

STAGES OF MUSIC BUSINESS GRIEF

Stage 1–Elation

I include this as a stage, even though it’s not really the grief part at all. This is that beautiful feeling–the honeymoon, if you will. What can I say? If you are going to have a rug pulled out from under you, you’ll first have to stand on it and get comfortable.

This stage’s feelings spring from just KNOWING that you will win the music lottery. It happens up to and including the actual “signing” process. I remember being “wined and dined” by my record company execs. There were lots of mentions of how rich we would all be. I just had a memory of that scene out of “Chitty chitty Bang Bang” where the child catcher is waving lollypops.

This stage includes activities such as counting money you don’t have, borrowing money in the anticipation of money that will flood into your account, and spending the borrowed money. I loved this stage.

Stage 2–Hurry Up and Wait

This stage begins the morning after you sign the deal. For the singing artist, this deal is your life! For the record company, this is one of many, many projects that will be put through the system. It’s one experiment in a large laboratory full of experiments.

Consequently, it doesn’t often happen as quick as it seemed it would. You must find, or write songs for the project. This takes T I M E if you do it right. Unless you are a one-man, super-music machine who produces your own stuff in your own studio, an entire team will have to be assembled just to make your CD.

There’s the producer (who is in charge of how to make the record sound great with the available
budget.) There’s the studio (it’s manager, the engineers, and any extra equipment rentals all have to be lined up and scheduled.) There’s the whole A & R food-chain at the actual record label. They all have to hear all the songs and give them their ok. They have other things on their plate, so this can take a while. This group can include, A&R reps, A&R execs, upper execs, and the wives and teenage children of any and all of these.

The upshot is…you’ll get a bit of leg fatigue if you stay in the “starting position” waiting on the go signal.

Stage 3–Work Your Butt Off

This begins the week before you start recording. You have your producer, engineers, songs, other musicians (band-members hired for the recording). You are now well into long meetings with the producer and A&R people, deciding on songs and now figuring out arrangements. Who plays what? What will this song feel like?

Then the first morning of tracking comes and you are so high on adrenaline that if feels like stage 1 again. “This could be heaven or this could be hell,” to quote The Eagles. If the songs sound wonderful to you, it’s as good as any experience you’ll ever have in life. You’ve been listening to rough demos or even your own work-tapes and in about 1 hour, the song blossoms into something amazing.

If the songs aren’t feeling good with this group of musicians, it can be a life-sucking experience. I’ve been to studio heaven and studio hell. Either way, you will work harder and pour more of your soul out than you ever have before. If the record company is doing its job, you’ll be getting up at 6 or 7 am to do drive-time radio interviews during this stage. You’ll be up late in the studio for several weeks, getting this CD sounding just right. There will be photo shoots, radio interviews, studio hours, and of course continuing to run your life so you can pay off the debts you ran up in the last stage.

Stage 4–Touring for No Money

What they don’t tell you when they promise that they’ll put you on tour with “Such-and-Such- Mega-Artist” is that those gigs are normally “pay-to-play.” That means you or the record company will literally have to pay some cash to be on stage before the mega-artist. You get a shot at winning over their audience and selling some of your merchandise to them, but you won’t be getting rich.

This is swimming upstream like a salmon, but if you make it there’s a reward. You win over the masses and gain an audience. I’ve become a fan of at least 2 artists this way. I heard The Corrs warming up for Michael Bolton and immediately went and bought their CD (and I’ve bought many more of theirs.) I heard Jonny Lang for the first time, warming up for Sting.

Stage 5–Reading Them and Weeping

After all the time and effort, with great expectations, you find out if you made enough sales for the label to justify doing another CD with you. A GREAT MAJORITY of new artists do only ONE CD with a label and then get dropped.

The first thing they do is blame the label.

These are the people who put in all the money, all their connections, and dedicated their best thoughts to making the artist a success. In a standard recording contract, the label takes ALL the risk on the venture. If the artist didn’t sell enough to make it worth the label’s investment, they walk away with only their personal debts to pay off. The label eats the rest of production, marketing, and promotional costs.

CONCLUSION

If you DO make the grade, impressing your audiences enough to drive them into iTunes or a music store to buy your stuff, you have a much better situation than you did pre-label. If you are in the early stages of this whole process, open your eyes and enjoy it, knowing that there are roses to smell despite the few thorns.

STILL, it ALWAYS boils down to the connection you can build with a real audience on stage. So get prepared and blow them away EVERY time you sing.