The Truth About the Music Industry, or "those grapes were probably sour, anyway"

This blog posting is inspired by my reading of the life of Kevin Gilbert and also by an acquaintance who is a talented musician who asked about the wisdom of staying in school or striking out on a music career.

I never was, or am, much of a musician.  I started learning too late in life to ever really be any good.  However, there was a pretty big chunk of my life where being a professional musician was something I truly wanted to pursue.  I studied music in college (sight singing, ear training, music theory, applied classical guitar, etc.)  I taught music (both guitar and bass... if they had wanted, I was desperate enough I'd have taught accordion  too) at a couple of music stores in the Dallas Fort Worth area.

The last paying gig I had was getting $45 to accompany two sweet old ladies singing a Bobby Vinton song at a Seventh Day Adventist Church. I noodled around with a little band project with two of my best friends in college.   I sort of outgrew them and started working with some other bands here and there.  At a crossroads, I left Texas and came back home when my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer.

For years, I had pretty much daily regrets about that decision.  Music is something that will always be one of my greatest loves in life. Somebody once asked me how anybody could enjoy practicing an instrument.  I told them that if I had enough money, that is all I would ever do.  I would literally never do anything else.  I love it so much that, at an emotional level, I usually can't bring myself to take my guitar out of its case because I can't deal with the emotions of having to put it away after an hour or two, and the though of going a few days without playing again (because I have to earn a living), is too depressing to deal with.

Clearly I have some issues with regard to music.  Haha!

That having been said, yeah, I'm not much of a musician.  However, I am a businessperson, or at least somebody with some knowledge and experience in business.  I'm also a student of history and a guy who needs to know how things work.

So, here is what I know about the music industry.  Yeah, I'm not an industry insider.  If you really want to know the insider's perspective, the best one I ever read was written by Courtney Love.  This is a live link to it:

http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

That's the boots on the ground view.  I'll give you the 20,000 foot view.  This is something to consider if you're going to make major life changes or sacrifices to try and pursue a career in music.

First, the biggest and best way to get a huge career in the music industry will be based on your looks.  Yes, your physical appearance.  What?  You don't want to be in the market segment of Justin Bieber?  Look at the bands you like.  Not very many homely looking guys in those.  And the few that you can think of probably hit big prior to the 80s.  The 80s, in case that doesn't sound too far away, were 3 decades ago.  Video did, indeed, kill the radio star.  And even bands like Zeppelin, the Beatles and the Who had good looking members.

But you don't want to be big?  You just want to make music?  Here's the thing.  Thanks to modern technology, you can make phenomenal music in your home.

But you want to make money doing this?  Go back to the paragraph that starts with "First..."

So, you're good looking.  Can you sing?  It has literally never been more true that you don't need a great singing voice to sing pop.  Trouble is, it's very, very difficult to get anybody to take you seriously if you don't sing at least pretty well.

So, you can sing?  Then you need to be able to write songs.

The fun part sorta happens there.  Even bands that aren't very good can usually find places to play out.  And yes, if you're a guy who likes women, that's a great way to find some.

But what about the money aspect of the industry?  I am sure that people can make money in the music industry.  However, I'm equally sure that most of them make less money than accountants.

The music industry just needs a celebrity.  In much the same fashion as Kim Kardashian is on TV, a record label just needs a celebrity to sell records for them.

These days, the rest really doesn't have a lot to do with the "artist".  Most of the work of producing a hit is done by engineers and producers these days.  If you can't write songs, there are plenty of teams that will write one for you.

Now, here's the tough part to understand, mentally:  they don't need "the best" person to turn into a star.  They just need "a person".  It's not necessarily a meritocracy.  They just need somebody.  And thanks to autotune, being the best singer doesn't really give you a leg-up over other merely adequate singers.

Yes, if you blow up huge, you can gain some power over your career, but honestly, that is maybe 2 or 3 artists or bands a year who get to that point.  And then, the bad news is that with power comes responsibility.  Once you take control of your career, you have to keep it afloat.  Remember that Dixie Chicks album they released in the past 4 years?  Yeah, me neither.

This aspect of the music industry is unique.  In the movies, you have to be able to act, for the most part.  (To have a long career, anyway.)  In sports, with few exceptions, the best will continue to advance and the rest fall by the wayside.

In the music industry, they only need a person who appears to be singing.

Another reality is that the industry is largely driven by 14 year old girls.  If you don't appeal to them, it's nearly impossible to blow up big.  See previous paragraph that starts with "First..."

My friend Tom castigates me for being too lazy to go out and find the good bands that are recording and making great music, today.  The reason I don't is that I really don't have time to listen to 500 albums to see if one of them is good.

That used to be the role of the labels and of radio.  But now, what happens is that the label decides who they want to promote.  They go to these companies called "Independent Promotion" companies and pay those companies a few hundred thousand bucks to see if they can get the record a couple of spins at the various radio stations.

The radio stations will play stuff that's being independently promoted because the radio stations own the independent promotion companies.  Yes, you will only get your stuff played on the radio if somebody pays the radio station a few hundred thousand.  That person, or label, will only do it if they're pretty sure you're going to blow up huge.  They figure you're going to blow up huge if you're very good-looking and you made a record that appeals to 14 year old girls.

And contrary to appearances, there are only two radio stations in America:  Clearchannel and Cumulus.  The FCC changed the laws on radio station ownership.  Used to be every city had a bunch of radio stations that tried to get an edge on the other stations by discovering good music the other guys weren't playing.  That ceased to exist, at all, in the 90s.

That having been said, it's not all bad news.  Those are just things to consider if you have aspirations to blow up huge in the music industry.  It's an obstacle course to get there, and even if you fit the bill 100%, in the end, the record label will narrow it down to a handful of candidates and essentially chose one of them at random, with no rhyme or reason to why they picked one person over another.

If you want to make money in music, though, it isn't impossible to do.  I know a lot of folks who make money in areas not related to recording and performing.  I taught guitar at the same place that Chuck Rainey taught bass.  (If you don't know who he is, watch a Steeley Dan documentary on Netflix sometime.  The guy played with everybody.)

If the idea of teaching bass at a music store when you are 50 years old appeals to you, then hey, this is the industry for you.  He did make more money than me.  I think I made like $16 an hour and he probably made something like $25.

Other folks I know opened music stores.  Most of them made little to no money.  The employees stole from them.  The tax man had his way with them once a year.  It was a retail job selling cheap, crappy musical instruments.  The guys working at Guitar Center made more money.

Then, there are the guys I know who were very creative.  They opened up their own recording studios.  They came up with awesome tribute acts.  They did pretty well for themselves, actually.

However, those guys were organized, focused and very, very business-minded.  Personally, knowing what I know of them, if they'd started life as garbage men, they'd own waste disposal companies right now and be doing just as well if not better.

Then, there's the guy who wrote "code monkey" and he made like half a mil a year for a while.  Social media is pretty powerful and if you can go viral, you can make a decent pile until the next thing comes along.

It's not that I want to discourage anybody from pursuing anything.  Just that the reality of the music industry is very, very far removed from the glamorous surface.  When I think of people like Kevin Gilbert, I stand back and think that on my very best day, I would not have had enough talent to wipe down the guy's guitar strings.  He had a major record deal.  He was good-looking.  He was insanely talented.  In the end, he had enough money to live on (almost all due to songwriting credits on Sheryl Crow's first album), but the whole rock star thing eluded him.

Personally, what I think ate him up is that the record labels didn't throw all that money into making him a star.  He watched as the labels created George Michael... hell, he watched as they created Milli Vanilli.  He worked with Madonna and saw how a nearly completely talentless hack can be the queen of the music industry if the label puts the money behind her.  Even all that wasn't what broke him.

What broke him was when his girlfriend, a former Michael Jackson backup singer, who he hired as a fill-in keyboard player for his band's tour and introduced to his buddies, recorded an album that A&M records threw their entire weight behind.

The first single fizzled.  The second single fizzled.  The label stood by her and kept throwing money into independent promotion.  The third single, written by her, Kevin and his friends, "grew legs" and the album, Sheryl Crow's "Tuesday Night Music Club" (named after Kevin and his friends' weekly jam session) went on to sell ten million units.

Why her?  Not him?  Who the hell knows.  The label picked her, not him.  Pretty much the beginning and end of story right there.

So, my advice would be to stay in school.  Get a bachelor's degree.  Afterwards, if you want to spend four years hitting the clubs in LA trying to make it big, more power to ya.  However, just realize that for all but a statistically insignificant few, that ride, however fun it may be, ends pretty quickly.  Pretty much you'll know your fate by the time you hit 30 years old.  That means you'll have to fill the next five decades with something else.

In the mean time, nothing keeps you from playing, writing and thanks to modern technology, from recording. So, my advice:  spend your life savings on at least one channel of badass preamps and record the **** out of your awesome ideas.

Here's one manufacturer of high-end preamps:

http://www.baeaudio.com/pages/products/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=204&Itemid=29

And here is my one crowning masterpiece composition, recorded with copious amounts of help and saintly patience by my good friend, Michael Papatonis, who owns Greek Isle Studios in Cleveland.  (Yes, it's obvious that I wasn't likely to make it as a vocalist):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRKENXcVFuE

Here's a great planet money podcast on how stuff gets on the radio:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/11/137705590/the-friday-podcast-manufacturing-the-song-of-the-summer

The Bizarre Life

I used to think I had a hard life.  Over the passage of years and travels of miles, I know now that this isn't really true.  My difficulties, in the grand scheme of things, have been minor.  Sometimes a little perspective goes a long, long way.

It's been a hard fall down the ladder of success that I had climbed.  In first half of 2009, I was at the peak.  I had pretty much everything I ever wanted in life.  I had nearly every material possession I had ever desired.  I was even talking to the folks at Cessna about buying an airplane.

Most importantly, I had my son.  If I were to write blog posts from now until the day I die, I could never fully express just how much I love him and how wonderful he is.  It is as though I willed him into existence selecting everything I wish I would have been in life.  He's handsome, funny, smart, hard-working, compassionate, athletic... they type of kid who loves all and in return is loved by all.

Now, it's almost all gone.  I have had precious few mercies in the past four years.  The one good turn I have had is my job.  Getting a job I love is a pretty big thing.  It makes life difficult with the long drive, but I'm more fortunate than many.  So many people without jobs, and so many slogging along in jobs they hate.

Still, the indignity and incongruity of this situation is hard for me to bear sometimes.  I sink into foul moods and wonder why in the world it seems that I'm always the one who is tasked with making the most when given the least.  I've had to sit by while I lose both the houses that had been so easy to afford just a few years ago.  Meanwhile, others close to me have been given homes or had their mortgages paid for them.

I've lost my business when I treated my employees well and by all measures was steering it as well as possible given the current business climate.  The weather, the divorce and the economy amounted to a perfect storm I just couldn't get past.  Others not far away had the weather it took to keep things afloat.  Lean times are not uncommon in that business, and if you're unlucky enough to have enough lean times in a row, you're going down.  Near as I can figure, 4 other franchisees around me have thrown in the towel in the past year.  The weather was the biggie.  You just can't fix disasters when the weather doesn't produce any.

Strangely, my biggest opportunities these days are in war.  I have skills and connections and military rank that would allow me to help right my floundering financial ship if I could get overseas to Afghanistan.  Fortunately for the world, Iraq has closed down and Afghanistan is due to be completely over by 2014.  So, there's really nothing left to save me.

In a way, I feel betrayed by the promises that were made to me in my youth.  Again, I didn't have it bad in the grand scheme of things, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that I was a kid who got the raw end of the deal.  The assurance was that as time progressed, that the hardship I faced earlier would equate to success later.  When I was in my 30s, I realized what a lie that was.  The fortunate kids ended up being fortunate adults, but without all the angst and fear.

Ultimately, a day doesn't go by where I don't beat myself up pretty bad for having a knack of always choosing option A when option B was the right choice.

So, here I am.  Almost 50 years old and starting essentially from scratch.  Time to take inventory.  Time to look around.  I have a good job that I really like.  I have the best son I could ever imagine.  If the universe makes bargains, then I guess I can live with this one.  I'd rather have my son than all the wealth of the world. That's really the only important thing in my life.

I can figure out the rest as I go.