Category: Wisdom

Statistics tabulated by SoundScan, an independent research firm that monitors U.S. record sales, confirm the [recording] industry’s predicament. Of the 6,188 albums released [in 2000], only 50 sold more than a million copies. Sixty-five sold 500,000 units and 356 sold 100,000 or more. In other words, more than 90% of last year’s releases flopped. Generally, a major-label album needs to sell about 400,000 copies to reach profitability.

-Los Angeles Times

The statistics above are getting kind of old, but I hope they underscore the following point. Some people do make a lot of money playing music, but this group comprises a very small percentage of all musicians trying to make a living playing music (I’d guess that it’s less than one percent). In this regard, the music business is like a lot of desirable professions. It follows what economists call a Paretto optimized power law curve (see Figure 1 below). That’s a pretty fancy name, and there is a lot of math that backs it up. But in practical terms, a power law curve graphically represents something pretty simple: a situation where there are a few big winners and many losers.

If you look at Figure 1 below, you’ll see that the x-axis (up and down), measures how much of something somebody has (e.g., money, fame, etc.). The y-axis (left to right) measures how many people have that thing, starting at zero where x and y meet, and then getting bigger all the way to infinity, as you move to the right.

The big winners are in the top left corner of the graph, because they have the most of whatever is being measured. If it was record sales, people in that spot would have the most sales. But as you can also see, the number of people inhabiting that spot is quite small (like close to zero).

Conversely, as you move to the right across the y-axis of the curve, the number of people increases, but the amount of stuff being measured decreases, and it is a steep downward slope. You don’t have to move too far to the right before the amount of stuff is significantly smaller than it is in the upper left corner of the graph. So if the stuff being measured is record sales, the number of records sold gets smaller really fast as you move to the right, and the number of people with smaller and smaller record sales just keeps getting steadily bigger.

What’s the take away point here? Well, even within the group of “winners,” if you could look at the actual numbers, you might be surprised to find that a lot of these folks make less money than you think. Sure, they make a comfortable living. But it’s also a part of the game to look as successful as possible. So always remember that looks can be deceiving, image and reality aren’t always the same thing, and the average corporate executive makes a lot more money than the average successful musician.

What about everyone else? Out of the remaining 99% of musicians who aren’t rich, maybe 8-10 percent manage to make a living from teaching, composing, recording and playing music. To the extent that the music business has a middle class, it is comprised of these musicians. A lot of these folks are people you’ve never heard of. They teach at schools, do studio work, jingles, play in orchestras, jazz combos, wedding bands, cover bands, and all sorts of other relatively anonymous situations.

Of course there are also quite a few familiar names in this group too: People you’ve read articles about in the press. People you’ve heard on the radio. People who might be some of your favorite artists. People you might even think of as “famous.” Indeed, the fact that some of these people are famous might lead you to believe that they make a really comfortable living too. But this is a bad assumption to make. Fame and wealth are not always the same thing.

The number of people making in excess of $90,000 a year (after expenses) from music is a lot smaller than you think. And there are some notable performers who struggle to reach even this income level. If a musician succeeds in making this kind of money, it is a lot more of an accomplishment than most people will ever realize. Indeed, if one were to reach a similar level of accomplishment in most other industries, one would probably be making 2 to 5 times as much money each year.

Other than the two groups of musicians discussed above, no other musicians make a living solely from making music. Instead, they are able to play music because they have a day job, a trust fund, supportive parents, an understanding spouse, or some other sort of subsidy. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not pointing this out to get down on the people in this group. There’s nothing wrong with being in this group. Most people in the other two groups were in this group at one time or another. And a lot of folks bounce back and forth between this group and the other two groups.

I just point this out, because I think a lot of people get confused about it. They feel bad about themselves, because they are not making a living from music. Don’t feel bad. Most people don’t make a living from music. Moreover, if you meet someone who seems like they are making a living from playing music, scrutinize them carefully (especially if they are lording it over you and making you feel bad about yourself). You may find that they are actually just giving off the illusion of making a living from music, because they think it will help them get ahead (or because they are insecure). But as I said above, appearances can be deceiving, and they usually are.

Nevertheless, if you scrutinize a fellow musician and they actually are making a living from music, give them their due. They deserve your respect. They have attained a goal most musicians never reach. If you aspire to some day make a living solely from music, they are worthy of careful study,. For they undoubtedly have some important lessons to teach you.

This is a critical call to make, especially early on when you’re likely to be spending your own money. Unfortunately, most people never think very consciously about it. To a certain extent, this is understandable, because art and commerce are always intertwined in the music business. Nevertheless, it still helps to be clear about these issues.

I define a business as follows: an undertaking that hopes to pay for itself some day, make a profit, and support the people who run it. In a business, it’s not enough to make a good product. You need to make money too. One invests in a business.

I define an art project as follows: an undertaking where cost calculations do not figure into one’s assessment of whether the undertaking is a success or a failure. In an art project, only the finished product matters. It is the end in itself. It doesn’t matter that it didn’t break even or make a profit. And the people involved in it don’t expect to support themselves with it. One subsidizes an art project.

Especially if you are spending your own money on your music, it’s worth being honest with yourself about what you’re doing at any given time. Sometimes, the distinction may be kind of blurry: Many a would-be art project has turned into a music-related business. Many a would-be music business has turned out to be more of an art project. And this is okay.

But asking the question still encourages you to think about what you are doing. If you hope to make money from your music at some point, it helps to start thinking about it as a business. Will this shift in mindset change the nature of your undertaking? Yes. Will this change be for the worse? Possibly. But it could also be a change for the better.

Could you not think about any business stuff and one day make money from your art project? Maybe. But in my experience, there is usually someone with a little business sense lurking behind most of the projects that one-day make money. Someone finally has to say, “if we spend more than this much, we won’t be able to cover our costs. And if we don’t at least cover our costs, we can’t keep doing this, because we can’t afford to keep subsidizing it.”

Given that this is the case, ask yourself the following: If someone is going to have this knowledge and apply it, why shouldn’t it be you? The person with this knowledge will ultimately wield important power. The person with knowledge will also have a much clearer view of where the project stands. And the person with this knowledge will probably also be in a better position to avoid many heartbreaking situations along the way.

The music business is filled with dreamers. That’s part of its charm. At some level, anything is possible. But too often people aren’t clear about what they want from the music business. All they know is that they want to be a “star” or a “success” or “a respected artist”.

But what do all these words mean to you? That’s the real question. Obviously, their meanings will differ from person to person and from context to context (see Why Indie Why Not above). But if your definition of stardom, success, or respect includes selling lots of music and making loads of money, take a minute to consider what that is about. Don’t just focus on the dream and the fantasy of endless fun. Think about the reality of doing this work. For it is work, much harder work than most people imagine. The hours are long. The travel becomes very unpleasant. If you have a family or loved ones, you are separated from them for long stretches of time.

Until you’ve done this work yourself or you have known people who have done it, it’s impossible to understand all the levels of sacrifice people make to pursue this particular career. But once you’ve seen it up close, you start to realize that there are much easier ways to earn a comfortable living. No matter how successful you become, the drill of the traveling musician doesn’t change very much. And at a certain point, the people who keep doing it don’t just do it because they want to. They do it because they have to. Otherwise, they go broke (or worse insane).

So try to be honest with yourself about who you are. Different people have different temperaments. Not everyone has the right temperament to front a rock band. In fact, most people don’t have the right temperament. And most people aren’t cut out to be on the road all the time as a touring musician. The sooner you get clarity about whether you have the temperament for this sort of stuff, the sooner you’ll save yourself a lot of difficulty and unpleasantness.

Nevertheless, if you’re like a lot of people, you’ll have to play the touring musician/rock star game for a while to get this clarity. But if it turns out you don’t have the temperament for it don’t despair. It doesn’t mean you can’t still make music seriously. Indeed, it doesn’t even mean that you can’t make a living from music. It just means you’ll have to change the way you look at the game.

Before we move on to talking more about you and what you want, let’s take a little closer look at the landscape you’ll be operating in. I’m going to start with some pretty obvious stuff here, so pardon me if you already know it. I just want to make sure everyone is on the same page.

At some level, there are really two relatively separate but interrelated music business worlds: (1) the so called “Indie” or “Independent” world and (2) the major label, corporate funded world. What’s the big difference between these two? Well, to me “indie” means that a venture is not funded by a multi-national entertainment conglomerate. So it means independently capitalized. Often, it also means independently distributed too (but not always).

What is an independent capital source? It could be the $2000 your band saved from gigs to record and release a record. It could also be $2,000,000 invested by a dot.com billionaire to fund an on-line distribution company. It’s pretty wide open.

The relationship between these two worlds is also pretty wide open and fluctuates over time.

Sometimes both the indie and major label worlds are strong. Sometimes neither one is strong. Sometimes it seems like the indie world is nothing but a farm system for the major label world and everything the indie world does is aimed at pleasing major label folks. Sometimes it seems like the major label world is nothing but a really bad co-opted and compromised version of the indie world. And sometimes the major label world funds indie looking ventures in an effort obtain so called “indie street credibility.”

Clear as mud? That’s life in the fog.

As I write this, the corporate major label sector has been in a protracted downturn. Due to a variety of pressures, this sector has been consolidating, which means there are fewer players. Those that remain are very scared and focused on the bottom line. So presently, a narrower and narrower range of music is represented in this sector, because the focus is on immediate results and big selling blockbusters. The same is true of commercial radio. And that doesn’t help to stimulate diversity either.

The indie sector is also a little bit of a muddle. The Internet is the big wild card here. Everyone is trying to figure that out. There’s been some big money pumped into Internet music ventures. A little bit has trickled to the artist. But most of these companies are slowly going out of business or being consolidated into bigger corporate parents as the venture capital runs out.

Because the major label sector is so narrow right now, there seems to be less incentive for indie labels to focus on being farm teams to major labels. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that this function will ever go away completely. And it’s an important function to understand. Indeed, a lot of the information in this series is aimed at people who have some hope that a well-capitalized player might one day want to work with them.

Why is this? Well, as I explain in more detail later in this series, most people playing music have a hard time making a living doing it, especially those that are trying to perform original material. And while it is certainly possible to make a living from music without being signed to a big label, big labels do generally have the most money, which is a big part of why the major label deal remains alluring. For even if you get signed to a big label and then dropped, with the right perspective on it, the experience can still help you get closer to making a living from music.

This remains true even in the face of all the talk about the so-called “Long Tail,” the idea that the internet will lead to more sales of non-blockbuster artists. While there is a decent argument to made that this is true, there’s still not a lot of tangible data to demonstrate just how it will turn out to be true. Moreover, even if it is true, it’s by no means clear how the artist will really benefit from it. It’s great that the internet allows Amazon.com to sell 5 copies of every artist’s CD and that collectively these sales can equal a nice profit for the company. But to have a sustainable career, you need to sell more than 5 CDs. Whether the “Long Tail” helps an artist do that is by no means certain.

The important thing is to remain clear about what’s going on and what world you are in, because even when the two worlds overlap, the rules of survival in each world are somewhat different. And if you fail to learn these different rules, you may suffer unnecessarily. So look at the landscape carefully as you try to figure out where your goals fit into it.

Now let’s take a quick look at these two worlds.

The World of the Majors:  The major label scenario is often a much more top down model. It can be like trying to get venture capital funding for your dot.com start-up. It’s about shopping tapes, taking meetings, playing showcases, and spending time in places like L.A., NYC, or Nashville, trying to show the power brokers that you already have what it takes to be a salable commodity. An unknown person trying to penetrate this system is a lot like someone off the street trying to step up to the plate and hit a home run off of major league pitching. It’s not impossible to imagine it happening, but it’s not very likely either.

There’s also not a lot of artist development going on in the major label world anymore. It’s more about trying to grab something that is already showing signs of being popular and trying to magnify that. These labels aren’t signing potential. If a band like Fall Out Boy is becoming really popular, the major labels are likely to want to sign some other bands like Fall Out Boy too. So if you are in a band that sounds like Fall out Boy, has a really slick, coherent look, and has no real interest in being anything but that, it might make sense to try and shop your thing straight to the majors. But understand that your odds of success are going to be even lower doing this than they would be trying to build something from the grass roots.

The World of Indie:  The indie scenario is typically more grass roots. It’s more like borrowing a bit of money from a buddy and trying to bootstrap something in your garage. The audition isn’t with just one big investor. Instead, you are auditioning with every person you meet.

It’s not about trying to hit major league pitching right out of the shoot. It’s about trying to to get a base hit off of one of your friends in a neighborhood pick-up game. If your friend is a good pitcher, you may still strike out. But your odds of getting a hit are a lot better. And if you keep playing against that sort of pitching for awhile, there’s a good chance you’ll get to the point where you can hit it more consistently. By that time, you may be ready to hit some better pitchers too. But if you strike out, it’s not that big of deal, because there’s almost always a game going on somewhere, and while there might not be a huge crowd in the stands, you can still get into that game and keep working on getting better.

The Moral of the Story: Probably, I’ve painted these two worlds as being a bit more mutually exclusive than they really are. There isn’t one straight line path. Some people make their way through the indie world and eventually cross over into the world of the majors. Some people manage to hit that home run right out of the gate and start on a major, but at some point they move into the indie world. But I don’t think it’s completely unfair to state that one world (the majors) has become increasingly all or nothing, while the other world (indie) remains more about one day at a time.

I won’t even try to hide it. I do have an indie bias, at least when it comes to where I think most people starting out should put their energy. In my experience, interesting and innovative stuff doesn’t typically get developed in an all or nothing environment. It needs to happen one day at a time, because that’s where the learning and growth usually happens. If you’re not already a pretty good hitter when you go up and strike out against the major league pitching, you probably won’t learn very much from the experience, except that it is fast and you aren’t good enough to hit it. Even if the pitcher himself wanted to try and help you get better, they probably wouldn’t be able to offer you much useful feedback, because you probably don’t even understand your fundamentals enough to process whatever feedback they might give.

So the moral of the story is that you need to be honest about what dues you have already paid. If you are a relatively new artist who has accomplished little or nothing in the indie world, think twice before investing a lot of time and money in trying to shop your project in the word of the Majors. You can burn up a lot of time and money doing that with very little benefit from the standpoint of learning and developing your fundamentals. As often as not, it mostly ends up being an exercise in learning how to be more like what is popular now, rather than trying to figure out who your are and then working to sell that to a fan base (the actual process by which most cool and popular stuff ends up happening).

So the Fog Machine is spewing it out in a thick cloud. Lots of folks are stumbling around in it. They’re all trying to make something happen. Maybe you’re one of them. What do you do?

First, take a quick breather and clear your mind. Then consider this: By the time you figure out what’s going on, it could be too late for this knowledge to help you. But this outcome is not preordained.

Along the way, you get to choose what details you’ll pay attention to.  You determine what your consciousness level will be. Aware? Ignorant? Somewhere in between? The answer is actually less obvious than it seems.

Some people do really well operating in a haze of ignorance and then dealing with the bitter fallout when it all invariably comes down. They don’t think much about the sort of stuff I’ll be addressing in this series, and I can’t say that’s an inherently bad strategy.

Truth is, callowness can be very appealing to certain segments of the music business, especially when the person in question also possesses an intuitive gift for music making, is attractive, has charisma, etc. It’s a pretty irresistible combo: so pure, so genuine, so easy to manipulate…

If you want to take the Mr. Ignorance approach, more power to you. Roll the dice. Go for it. Good luck. You can stop reading now. You probably won’t find my other thoughts on any of this stuff very useful anyway.

Of course, if you were a person who didn’t like to think about things, you probably wouldn’t have even started reading this. So as you read the remainder of this series, think about this.

In the fog, experience will be your best guide. And if you don’t already have it, you’re going to take some lumps getting it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t also let other people’s experience work for you. Be smart. Look for maps and guidebooks to help you on your journey.

The remaining posts in this series are intended to be such a guidebook. You might say they’re about a philosophy as much as they are about facts. I don’t make any claims that they’re the be all and end all. I’m just trying to provide a summary of my thoughts based on my years of participation and observation in the music business.

You may decide my thoughts are bunk. But if you read the rest of this series, I’m confident it will get you thinking about a lot of important stuff. This, in turn, will enhance your ability to puzzle through the judgment calls. And this is a very valuable skill to have, because most important stuff in the fog hinges on these sorts of calls.

Do I use this producer or that one? Is this the right label for me? Should I take part in this promotional opportunity? Shall I tour with this particular band? Spend money on this area of promotion? These are all questions that don’t necessarily have a clear “right” answer. But you’ll still need to have an answer.

So the real question is what process will you use to get there? Will you punt and let a so-called “expert” make all the tough decisions for you? There are certainly plenty of people in the fog ready and willing to give you advice (including me). So it’s easy enough to just defer to them. But this approach usually doesn’t improve the likelihood of a good outcome. It mostly just gives you someone to blame when things don’t work out.

Advisers aren’t there to do it for you. They exist to help you analyze and frame your own decision-making process. You need to have your own sense of direction. You need to have a plan and point of view about how you will utilize the advice various people offer. You need to take responsibility for yourself and your choices. If you don’t, it’s very difficult to navigate effectively in the fog.

Back in the 1980s, Jeff Calder played in a band called the “Swimming Pool Qs.” The band built a regional following in the southeast, and eventually spent some time on a major label. After the band was dropped, Calder wrote an essay about the experience for Atlanta’s alt-weekly, Creative Loafing. He titled it  “Living By Night in the Land of Opportunity: Observations on Life in a Rock & Roll Band.”

Throughout the essay, Calder refers to the music business as the “Fog Machine.”  He likens it to an “impenetrable fog, a place where nobody really knows where they are going or what they are doing, a place where confusion generally reigns supreme, and things happen that seemingly defy logic (yet in hindsight fit into a set of patterns that is distressingly logical).”

Calder nails it. Appearances can be deceiving. People who seem to know a lot often don’t. People who seem ignorant sometimes know quite a bit (they just aren’t telling anyone). An aura of unreality surrounds just about everything. And nobody wants to be exposed as a fraud.

But ultimately, everyone faces the same reality. The market is fickle. Things change constantly, while always staying kind of the same. And it’s easy to feel like a fraud sometimes, as you fumble around in the fog.

So don’t let insecurity stop you from getting out there and doing it, even if you feel like you don’t always know what you’re doing. Trust me, you’re in good company.