MUSIC INDUSTRY BLOG

This is a guest post by Dave Kusek

Again and again, I have heard this sage advice when asking producers, label executives, and publishers about artist development.  Take your time.  The first and most important thing to do is to get the music right: love your music, immerse yourself in it, and live it.

As an artist/writer, your coin of the realm is your songs, and they need to be great, polished, and professional.  The worst thing you can do is go to market too soon.  Without careful preparation, practice, understanding, listening to others, testing your material, developing its quality, and crafting and articulating a unique story to tell, you will probably enter the marketplace too early and will most likely fail.  Start out slowly.  Practice.  A lot.

Another critical component of artist development is live performance.  Any venue will do to get started.  Play the smallest clubs to get used to performing and being in front of an audience.  Everybody gets better over time, and live performance in front of a crowd does many positive things for your career.  When you play live, you develop sets of songs that you play and expand your repertoire.  Don’t be afraid to play other people’s material mixed in with your own.  Covers create a sense of familiarity that you can use to build your audience.  You are also learning by playing the songs of other great artists.

Performing live helps you build your confidence and song quality, lets you interact with an audience, and experience their reactions to your songs.  Also, when you play live, you can test out different material and approaches to your songs.  You can experiment and find out new things about the song, tempo, bridge, chorus, lyric, etc.  You can see which songs are the most popular, what should be the rhythm of your set, where the audience loses its attention, and how best to open and close a show.

Live performance and touring is a major cornerstone to any artist’s career and is one of the best ways to develop an audience.  Over time, your audience will grow with you as you refine your art.  Superstars Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, James Taylor, Paul Simon, and countless others all played small clubs for very minimal dollars at first, refining their approach, music, and brands to small audiences that grew over time.  Just look at the size of their audiences now.

Many successful executives have told me that good music finds an audience and is very difficult to keep under wraps.  If you want to have a long career in the music business, take a good look at yourself, who are you, and the package that you bring to the table.  Do you have the songs, do you have the talent, do you have the charisma, and are you really ready to go to market?  Develop, refine, write, practice, play live, listen, and collaborate.

Listen To Others

Great artists and writers take the time to develop, but they also listen to people around them who they can trust to give them feedback and keep them honest about what they are trying to do and how well they are accomplishing it.  This is role of the A&R person, record producer, publisher, and artist manager.  You simply cannot believe your own press and expect to be successful.  You also cannot rely on your mother or family to be objective about what you are doing. You need to get honest opinions from a lot of different people who will tell you the truth.  Listen carefully to them as a sounding board for your career and ask hard questions like the following: Do you like my songs?  How do I look on stage?  What do I need to do to improve?  What advice can you give me?

Your fans are the ultimate source of feedback.  Set up a blog or some other means of creating two-way communication. Encourage people to tell you what they think.  Hand out postcards at your gigs, collect your fans email and cell phone numbers, and ask them what they think of your set, your songs, your performance, etc.  Don’t be afraid of what you might hear, and use the feedback to learn, refine, and further develop your brand and music.

Collaborate

Having a band is a great way to collaborate, and hopefully you will find other musicians to play and write with at various points in your career.  Another hallmark of great artists and writers is that they work with different musicians to write songs, perform together, cover each other’s songs, and most importantly learn from one another. Collaboration and the exchange of ideas are the life-blood of creative artistry.

Collaboration does not mean that you are joined at the hip with another artist forever.  You can move in and out of collaborative partnerships when you need something new to spark the creative juices or just get you going in another direction.  Working with other talented musicians can be a challenge.  Quincy Jones has great advice for when you walk into the studio to work with other artists.  He says, “Check your ego at the door.”  Find people you can work with, who you enjoy being around, and who make you feel good.

There are many examples of great songwriting collaborations, including Holland, Holland & Dozier, Lennon and McCartney, and Elton John and Bernie Taupin.  The list is long.  Don’t be afraid to cowrite with other people or to record other songwriter’s material.  This can help you reach a broader audience, develop your talents in new directions, and potentially open up your brand by association with other great artists.

One of the most successful songwriters of the last 30 years is Don Henley of the Eagles.  He talks about identifying your strengths and weaknesses through collaboration with great writers like Jackson Brown and Glen Frey, and being willing to put someone else’s songs on your record if they are better than your own.  Seems to have worked for him.

Many of the most successful songs of all time have come out of collaborative partnerships that were organized on a formal level at some of the songwriting factories of the past, including the Brill Building, Motown, and Philadelphia International.  Collaboration helps you to stand on the shoulders of others and to peer over a horizon that you might not be able to see on your own.

About The Author
Dave Kusek is the Founder and CEO of Music Power Network and Vice President at Berklee College of Music.  He is also the co-author of the best selling music business book, The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution.

Terry McBride’s Nettwerk Music Group, (home to Jamiroquai, Barenaked Ladies, and Sarah McLachlan), live music and media behemoth Mama Group Plc, and Brian Message’s ATC Management (manager of Radiohead, Faithless, and Kate Nash), combined forces to create Polyphonic, a new artist investment and development company embracing the 360-degree model, Music Week announced yesterday.  The company has committed more than $20m for its first year of operation, marking significant additional capital thereafter, to provide “an important funding option for artists” asserted Brian Message adding “ATC and Mama have co-invested in a number of new artists over the last three years and Polyphonic marks the next iteration of that business. Now, together with Nettwerk, we want to be working with a much bigger group of artists and managers and the capital we have available makes that achievable.”

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I’m delighted to announce the release of a landmark music industry resource co-authored by one of our very own panelists, Don Grierson.  It All Begins With The Music: Developing Successful Artists and Careers for the New Music Business is a practical guide and music business blueprint for artists, managers, agents and executives competing for a share of the ever-evolving music market.  Providing an in-depth view of the mechanics of artist development, music production, retail distribution, publishing, PR and marketing, Don Grierson and co-author Dan Kimpel, two industry veterans, have compiled a series of pertinent artist and executive interviews, insider tips, and autobiographical accounts to help budding and established music professionals navigate through the increasingly chaotic music landscape.

Available on Amazon and Barnes&Noble

Audiolife is an LA-based artist services company founded in 2005 by three USC graduates.  Their mission is “to create a middle-class in the music industry by giving all artists simple tools to generate revenue so they can spend time on what they love and do best – make music!”.  Currently in public beta, the company announced this week that it will be accepting submissions for its “Artist Advancement Scholarship”, an initiative geared toward college level music school students, artists and otherwise, in pursuit of a professional career in the music industry.  Don’t let the inclusion of the word “scholarship” fool you though; this is a writing exercise where $500 cash is on the table for one winner, not a scholarship application to potentially finance your future academic studies.  I imagine that Audiolife is seeking to achieve two things with this campaign, the first is to establish the company’s perceived value and, the second, to  draw more users to learn about their offering by writing competitively about it.  Personally, I would prefer to reward the best ten applications with $50 each and use their essays as original content on the site to raise Audiolife’s natural search ranking…

Applications must be received no later than 11:59 p.m. PST on April 1, 2009, in the form of an essay addressing the question, “How do you see Audiolife affecting the music industry in the next two or three years?”, in 1000 words or less.  Students in any accredited academic university or music institution enrolled at least part-time during the 2009 academic school year are eligible.  A winner will be selected by Audiolife’s management team and announced by April 20th, 2009.  Essays should be emailed to Travis Dean at travis[at]audiolife.com

In the point of view of the booking agent, you – the artist – must be in place in your career that you can attract enough paying gig-goers to your show, do so frequently, and with consistent growth to justify the booking agent’s efforts in exchange for his 10% (sometimes 15%) cut.  Unfortunately, most developing artists, even those with a small but loyal following, are not attractive enough for the reputable booking agents to pursue.  Much like talent scouts, booking agents will sometimes take a chance on an act that they believe will develop successfully and provide a handsome financial return in the future, but this is a relationship that is both difficult to pursue and cultivate and its terms will be strongly in the favor of the booking agent.

If you’re not a savvy manager yourself, find an artist manager before looking for a booking agent.  Keeping in mind that your manager sees a cut of everything you do whereas the booking agent only sees a cut of your live performances, statistically, a manager should be easier to sign with because he is spreading his risk on all of your musical assets.  Your manager should already have music industry connections and a way in to discuss tour scheduling opportunities face to face with an established booking agent, rather than making cold calls yourself.  However, if this is not the case, at least the booking agent can see that you were talented enough to attract an artist manager in the first place and, therefore, worth attending your next show.

The multi-national booking and management agencies such as The Agency Group and William Morris Agency prefer to see that you have financial backing, usually in the form of a label contract.  This, if nothing else, ensures that the label can afford to finance your tour and even take a loss for the privilege of ‘breaking’ you.

Whatever the arrangement may be, everyone involved wants to make money.  As such, it’s your responsibility (or, better yet, your manager’s responsibility) to show that you are a great investment.

Live Nation, the world’s largest producer of live concerts and the leading purveyor of the mega-deal (or 360 music deal), has become a music industry powerhouse and, as result, drawing and signing the most lucrative artists in today’s live music market , a la Nickelback and Madonna.  The LA-based live music behemoth sells more than 45 million concert tickets each year and, in music industry standards, considered a promotional sure-fire.  In many respects, the company operates as a music label should: developing professional artists of every caliber by providing a financial pipeline into every aspect of the artist’s ‘portfolio’.   In 2008, Live Nation organized and produced 16,000 concerts for 1,500 in 57 countries.