Learning about music industry - the essentials

Polymorphia wrote: This was my music industry textbook, if that helps.

Dayvenkirq wrote: I'm going back to Reno, NV (since things did not work out here in Port Orange, FL), and I'm seriously thinking about starting a project of my own (solo or band) and get into the music industry. I see no other path, quite honestly (I'm single-minded that way, unfortunately); I have very specific goals. That is why I resolved to be more dedicated and organized and change my habits. In fact, when I'm done writing (God knows when), recording, mixing (and maybe even mastering the songs) for something like an EP, I'll give you guys a little taste of the product because I really need us much feedback as possible. For the past few days I've been doing intensive research on the music industry, and I feel like I don't know nearly enough about booking shows, affordable and reliable equipment,management, PR rep, etc. What I'm asking is this: is there a place where they teach you the works? What is the least every start-up artist should know about recording, mastering, marketing, distribution, promotion, and gigging? Do you really have to do all the heavy lifting? (I just want to make sure I don't do too much?) Is coming to workshops and taking marketing classes really necessary? What is the most effective way of becoming a part of the indie music community (artists/listeners) worldwide? Soundcloud? Should I come up with a reasonable business model or let someone else do it? Will gigging around your local town be worth it even if the people there don't get your music? (If someone who hasn't heard my work may think it's good, I don't want to be discouraged by the lack of good response from the people who have.) I figured that in order for music to sell, it should somehow evoke human interest. (Don't people pay for skill and originality/personality/imagination?) It looks like I'm only skimming the surface at this point.  I felt that instead of doing research on the Web and getting info that way, some of which might be dubious, I should discuss this complex matter with a real, live person (like a producer, whenever those people have the time for a 25-year-old fresh face). I figured that I've wasted much of my youth (some ten years), albeit you may tell me that's no big deal, so at this point I'm playing catch-up, compensating for the time lost. I feel that also puts me at a disadvantage of not being well-conditioned and resourceful enough; I have no serious musical education (I taught myself); I'm in debt (though I have a way of coming up with a couple of thousand in a few months); the Reno music scene is rich with punk, metal, and dad-rock acts*, not experimental/folk/post-rock/avant acts; I don't have a voice (I guess I'll have to pay for a vocal class in college or get a permanent singer); and I have no connections. By the way, if you give me tons of information in massive paragraphs, I will absorb it. (There is do, there is no try.) If not, then at least point me in the right direction. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Are people really that interested in hearing new music? I guess it depends on where you perform and get some reaction. I thought social media could help me break those geographical boundaries.

I spent six years as a Band Manager taking a group of talented teenagers from playing to 20 people in local pubs right up to the moment just before they got signed to an independent record label and played to audiences of 10,000+ around Europe. 

The thing to remember is people will only help you if there is something in it for them, for myself that was reflected-glory as I did all this for free (more of that later), bragging about this here and now is my payment. Altruism is not unknown in the music business but it is very rare - I've only met two or maybe three promoters who were not in it for themselves - I found that so disheartening I decided early on that the best way to get the band paid for gigs was to become a promoter myself - my maxim was: after the venue and the sound engineer was paid whatever door-money remained was split equally between all the bands that played. This meant that it was in the best interest of every band I booked to help promote the gig because the more people that came through the door the more each band earnt - strangely this concept was pretty much unheard of twenty years ago, many bands would expect to do nothing but turn up on the night. I also scrapped the notion of "the guest list" - anyone who got in for free had to earn their keep: either by handing out flyers before the gig, being a roadie, offering to help with transport, taking a stint on the door, manning the merch tables or just collecting the names for the mailing lists. The only exception to this was invited journalists, and then only begrudgingly.

Which brings me to the financial side of things - in the beginning one band member expected me to do all the work, after all I was The Manager and he was The Talent, and he even offered to pay me for my time. He had this strange idea that I should be working for him, something that I wasn't prepared to do. I had to carefully explain to him that the band couldn't afford to do that: 10% of their earnings wouldn't even cover my petrol costs in getting to band meetings, rehearsals and gigs, let alone pay enough to keep me interested in managing them "professionally". I told him that the only way I could afford to do this was as a hobby, and that meant sharing the workload - I would manage them but I wouldn't do everything for them. From then on he struggled to see what my incentive was to "do a good job" so he manoeuvred the band into firing me (and I gladly walked away)... 

A few weeks later I was invited to a band-meeting where they asked me to manage them again, and I told them I would but under my terms. After much 'cards on the table' discussion I asked them to chose between carrying on as they were, waiting for that elusive recording contract to drop into their laps, or putting the effort into building up a following so the industry noticed us. In doing that I had to burst a few fanciful dream-bubbles, like pointing out that many of the bands whose albums they cherished had day-jobs to support themselves.

I told them flat I wanted nothing to do with the financial side of the band - I appointed two of them as treasurers and got them to open a joint account at the bank, they had to manage every penny earnt and every penny spent with the aim of saving as much money as possible for recording and promotion - there would be no "freebies" and no dipping into the pot to pay for drinks or even for broken guitar strings. I stipulated that they could spend band money on van and PA hire only if the gig would pay enough to cover most of the cost, therefore any fuel, hotel and food expenses had to come out of our own pockets. 

So, working together we set about networking the band - collecting names and addresses (surface and email) of anyone and everyone we could get - record label execs, promoters, radio stations, magazines and ezines and most importantly of all, fans. The mailing lists I got people to collect at gigs became the central-point in our strategy in spreading the word and creating a fan-base. Since the public-face of the band was what the public saw I encouraged the band members to circulate and meet people at each gig - no hiding away in the "green room" and no prima-donna's, and after a couple of embarrassing incidents I also made it a rule that there was to be no alcohol consumed before a set and no public tantrums if anything went wrong during it. {this may seem a little draconian but the band had many self-enforced discipline "rules" before I met them, so adding a couple more was no great hardship}. I also designed T-shirts, badges, sticker and posters to promote the band and created a web-site, I organised gigs and contacted as many other bands as I could.

All we had was an early demo EP the band had recorded before I met them so I created a press-pack and sent it out to everyone I could think of. Needless to say the rejection letters started to trickle in, but I was expecting those, even back in 2000 I could see that the days of sending out poor quality demos to disinterested record labels was numbered and the internet and self-release was the way forward. Never-the-less, some band members were convinced that getting signed was the only option so we recorded another demo sent that out and waited for the inevitable rejection letters. 

After this I wanted the band to re-think their approach and concentrate on live shows, playing to larger audiences and even touring. Back then touring was a Catch 22 closed-shop, tours were organised by record labels and only featured bands signed to those labels (or their affiliates) so support-slots were nigh-on impossible to get - basically to get on the bill of similar bands to ourselves meant being signed to Peaceville/Music For Nations or Century Media and that was not going to happen until we had a grass-roots following from touring. (Later the band would support well known bands such as Paradise Lost, Haken and Threshold but only after they had become a signed band themselves - we did play a joint-headline with DragonForce before they were famous but that's another story). 

Rightly or wrongly I thought trying to play to two different audiences (Goth and Metal) was spreading our limited resources too thinly, the underground music scenes are notoriously cliquey and crossovers are viewed with suspicion, so I pushed for a move towards the Goth scene which I believed was stronger in the UK and easier to break into. At the time many of the prominent European Gothic Metal bands were transitioning from "demon and angel" vocals to cleaner vocals with female accompaniment and we were no different. As this sound was present in embryonic form on those early demos this was not so much a change in direction as a re-alignment. 

Then just as this new strategy started to pay-off the male lead singer decided that the band needed a break, something that didn't sit well with everyone else, so we parted ways with him and continued on as a female-fronted band. Fortuitously (or not) the trend for female-fronted Gothic Metal was starting to take hold so over the course of the next two years we mounted self-financed tours around England before finding ourselves in a farcical "battle of the bands" gig alongside the rather excellent but very bemused Ordinary Psycho and a couple of other bands whose names I've happily forgotten. Despite the ovation the band got from our very loyal and enthusiastic old (and newly-won) fans, behind the scenes politicking soured the final outcome of the "competition" and we walked away empty handed, much to the chagrin of our supporters who voiced their disapproval of the winners in the time-honoured way of booing. Unfortunately their reaction didn't go down too favourably and perhaps as a consequence gigs on the Goth scene seemed to be a lot harder to find after that. 

So we licked our wounds and regrouped. As we hadn't managed to shake off comparisons to bands like Nightwish, Within Temptation and Lacuna Coil we decided to capitalise on that and set our sights back to the Metal scene. To facilitate this we elected to record one more demo, and rather than settle for another 3-track EP we'd go all-out for a full album, but this time get enough made to self-release and sell at gigs and online. So we set about recording and played a reduced number of gigs to keep the fans interested.

We recorded the album in a disused cowshed on a nearby farm and in my living room, however we did book studio-time to record the drums. I was not prepared to do that in a cowshed with my DAW as I wanted to mic-up each drum individually and get the best possible sound out of them - luckily we met the drummer from indie band Reuben who was building his own recording studio and was willing to allow us studio time at a very reasonable rate. Once the drum tracks had been laid down we took them back to the cowshed and set about constructing each song with multiple tracks and overdubs of guitars, keys, voices and even a string quartet. When recording the bass guitar we discovered that the bass player kept playing something different on each take, something that he could get away with at gigs but couldn't be tolerated in the studio - then for one gig he managed to forget his bass and we had to borrow one from another band, so to reciprocate we simply "forgot" to include him in future gigs and recording sessions. Sadly after being together for six years I found all this to be an arduous and fraught process, with minor arguments over the silliest of things about the mixing, the arrangements, whether the singer should pronounce the word "been" as "bin" or "been", and even over the artwork. With too many people having an opinion of what we should be doing and how we should be doing it I was beginning to feel that this "horse" was becoming a bit of a "camel" (from the saying 'a camel is a horse designed by a committee'). Something that I expected to take a few months dragged on for almost a year and as we got close to finishing it there were grumblings that I'd made the drum sound "too proggy" and not "metal enough" so I suggested they use the some of the band's money to take the album into the professional studio we'd used to record the drums and mix it without me. Eventually we arrived at an album we were more or less happy with (though I now hated the 'clicky' drum sound) and started to hawk it around. The reaction to the album was good, if not great (though some wag did comment that since we had the best drummer in the South of England why did we use a drum machine...), but while I was proud of what we had achieved (and still am) I was burnt-out and totally disenchanted with the music business so when a group of industry professionals showed an interest in the band and the album, and were talking about starting a record label and management company solely to sign them I was somewhat relieved. So they signed on the dotted-line with my blessing and we parted as friends (and ten years later we still are). Remarkably the record label simply remastered and released the album pretty much as we recorded it, which is a testament to the quality of modern home recording equipment if used correctly. I don't know how many copies it eventually sold but on its official label release it was the 7th best selling metal album with a major UK online retailer (CDNow)... if Iron Maiden hadn't re-issued their entire back-catalogue the same week it would have been the best selling metal album, if only for a brief moment perhaps. Unfortunately it didn't sell well enough to keep the label afloat so the label folded and the new management team disappeared. Around that time the band signed the promoter of Bloodstock festivals on a pay-to-play retainer (where merch sales easily covered their costs) and got themselves on the same bill as bands like Epica and Within Temptation at several festivals in the UK and Europe.

For myself I was happy to revel in their success but not too keen on getting back into it myself, I have had a couple of requests to manage other bands since then that I have politely turned-down.

Good luck.