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.

In his book, Future Hit.DNA, author Jay Frank establishes that:

The rock fan that likes some country is more apt to like country that tends to have a hint of rock to it.  This could be a country based artist who produces his songs with a bit more electric guitar, such as Keith Urban, or it could be a rock artist who tiptoes into country waters, like Bon Jovi.  A traditional country fan may like these artists, but he might not readily acknowledge them as bona-fide country performers.  Yet to a rock fan, they become as country as Garth Brooks.

Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” is the perfect example of a song that really went out of its way to contain elements of multiple genres.  At its heart, it is a clear and simple pop song.  The rhythms, however, are club oriented, and lean toward Latin beats, specifically a light version of Reggaeton.  Producer Wyclef Jean’s intro and brief raps, accented with a sample from the classic hip-hop anthem “Déjà Vu” (Uptown Baby),” tie her neatly into the hip-hop world.  Put it all together, and you no longer hit just one element of Shakira’s fan base, but nearly every potential fan.  With no other songs exploiting these relationships to this degree, “Hips Don’t Lie” easily became the most-played song of 2006.

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In his book Songwriting: Essential Guide to Rhyming, author Pat Pattison writes:

Occasionally when I’ve asked writers what rhyming dictionary they use, some have been indignant, as though to say, “I do not cheat.  I am self-sufficient.”  Others have looked at me sadly, as if hoping that someday I will abandon my artificial crutch and get in touch with my creative inner self.

Use a rhyming dictionary.  This is one place where self-reliance and rugged individualism is silly.  Finding rhymes is almost never a creative act.  It is purely mechanical search.  On those few occasions where it is creative (finding mosaic rhymes, for example), a rhyming dictionary can still stimulate the creative process.

The self reliant writer who thinks  rhyming is a spontaneous expression of personal creativity can usually be seen gazing into space, lost somewhere in the alphabet song, “discovering” one-syllable words.  This “alphabet process” is certainly at least as artificial as a rhyming dictionary.  Nothing about it is creative or pure, nor is it spontaneous.  The worst part of it is its inefficiency.

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I’d delighted to announce the addition of Kristen Cifelli to the We Are Listening team.

A schooled musician and seasoned performing songwriter, Kristin will be joining our Artist Development division and heading our song critique service.

Kristin took the music scene by storm in 1999 with the release of her debut album, Silver Bowl, to critical acclaim, earning her a Boston Music Award Nomination.  Her second release, So Long My Love, brought her increased notoriety, with a Nomination for Best Album and a win for Best Song (“Show Them”) in the Independent Music Awards in 2006.  Early in 2002, Kristin contributed her song, “Martyr”, on the Sony/Heavy Rotation Records compilation, Shekinah 13 Artists, which celebrates the diverse female alumni of Berklee College of Music. The compilation is being distributed by Sony/Epic Records, with part of the proceeds going to help young artists at Berklee College of Music. Upon the release of Shekinah 13 Artists, Kristin was featured on the Oxygen Network’s Daily Remix, VH1’s Jump Start, Billboard Magazine, Boston Globe and the Associated Press.

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We Are Listening have teamed up with StudioPros.com for the Lyric Writer Awards, a lyric writing contest with a 360-degree approach to turning the winners’ lyrics into publishable, radio-ready soundtracks.  Learn more…

StudioPros.com brings the studio recording experience, production value, and LA’s finest session musicians and audio professionals to your home at a price you can afford. From quick songwriter demos to radio-ready masters, the entire tracking, mixing, and mastering schedule is managed by you, online and in real-time, from the comfort of your desktop. The StudioPros.com team comprises of session players who have performed with Seal, Jessica Simpson, Miley Cyrus, Jesse McCartney, among others, and Grammy nominated mixing engineers credited by Wyclef Jean, Leona Lewis, Kelly Clarkson, OneRepublic, Beyonce, and more.

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Since the release of his debut album, “The Living Room Sessions”, in April 2008, Andrew Allen has toured and played live in more than 200 venues throughout Western Canada and the UK, secured airtime on the UK’s BBC Radio 1 as well as on Canada’s own CBC radio, and, most recently, won Round 1 of The 2009 Singer/Songwriter Awards from We Are Listening.  His winning entry, “Not Loving You”, draws striking resemblance to “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz, while other tracks from his setlist gravitate toward the sound and songwriting style of Maroon 5, John Mayer and Jack Johnson.  Congratulations Andrew, we look forward to working with you!

Andrew Allen on MySpace

As an artist, getting your ass on stage and performing to as many people as often as possible is key.  In the US, SXSW is arguably the largest draw of both music fans and artists, certainly independent artists.  Should you get on a SXSW stage?  Of course you should.  However, assuming that you are not yet well known, playing live at an over-crowded and super competitive event has its limitations.  Sometimes, you have to get off the stage in order to truly make an impact and, year after year, I’m seeing more independent artists attending music conferences, on their own behalf, and with their business hat on.  Although the largest of the lot, Midem in Cannes and Popkomm in Berlin, also offer a variety of live performance opportunities to acts big and small, the true event value is in the aimless wondering between the booths and random handshakes with industry professionals.  I’m not joking.  You’ll meet a lot more people on the floor than on stage.  If you meet someone who wants to hear you play, both Midem and Popkomm have listening rooms big enough for you to perform acoustically.  If nothing else, attending these events will teach you a lot about the current music market and provide you with the confidence to approach prospective partners who may [or may not] invest in your next recording, touring, licensing, or writing initiative.  You never know.

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Los Angeles native, Alana Grace, was selected as the winner of Round 6 of The 2008 Singer/Songwriter Awards songwriting contest by We Are Listening’s panel of judges last month.  Having spent most of her childhood in Nashville, today she splits her time between the two cities and just completed a five month recording session in LA with producers Don Gilmore (Linkin Park, Good Charlotte, Eve 6) and John Fields (Switchfoot, Pink, Andrew WK).  She is now gearing up to promote the concerted musical effort: her debut album titled “Break the Silence” from which her winning song, “Words Escape Me”, was selected.  The album was mixed by industry legends Bob Clearmountain (The Rolling Stones, The Cure, Aerosmith) and Chris Lord-Alge (Green Day, Hoobastank, Alanis Morissette).

Visit Alana at www.alanagrace.com

Songness, launched last summer, provides a platform for songwriters and performing artists to receive feedback from prospective fans.  Much like the SoundOut concept, Songness is geared toward populating relevant marketing reports through “virtual focus groups” that will help its music-making users identify potential fans and improve their craft through constructive criticism.  Songness has taken a unique approach to artist-to-fan interaction by focusing on the relationship between the artist and fan as the music is being created, rewritten and improved, rather than engaging the fan with the finished musical product, a strategy which OurStage and Sellaband have deployed with lots of financing and reasonable traction (see The Next Big Sound also).  With Songness, the idea is to test your songs before you go to market.  There is also the promise of turning new fans into paying customers but here, I think, Songness may be getting carried away.  I haven’t signed-up yet but the site looks good and the concept relevant.