Success Part 1

It always amazes me to see just how many people are happy to take your money to make you successful.

During my years in Nashville, I saw countless songwriters throwing money at shady promoters and self described music industry insiders promising to get your songs to professional representatives. I never met anyone that sold a song that way. Many successful writers knew someone personally in the business. Sometimes the writers had an arsenal of good commercial songs and came to Nashville with enough money to survive without a day job, and buy the attention of actual music industry executives. They made their connections before even moving to Nashville.

I’m lousy at making solid plans. My plans for Nashville changed drastically just on my drive there, but that’s another story.

In Nashville, I once met a guy from Houston, who was fully financed by family friends that won the Texas lottery. He had athletic good looks, money, and had written at least one really great song hook (that I’m surprised we haven’t all heard yet) but got caught up in the Nashville party scene mixed with self promotion. When I met him, he was working off debts on a horse ranch and going through a severe, cold turkey, drug rehabilitation. He blew all of his gifted lottery money on cocaine and partying after only two years. His family gave up on him and he had destroyed all his music industry connections. There was a long line of people that took advantage of him and it left him completely broken. I’ve never seen someone fall so hard from so high up.

I suppose I was lucky to have so little. It kept me from blowing it all on drugs. I chose to waste my money on food and shelter instead… like a loser.

I have to admit, I also capitalized on the constant flow of aspiring songwriters a teeny bit. I built part of my recording studio with money I made from other writers. Sometimes I would even go out to a writers round at a venue and recruit business. A few times the clients were Music City tourists that just wanted to record a song in an actual Nashville recording studio. (It only qualified as a real studio because I installed a cool looking slanted window and built an isolated sound booth). I never promised any promotion. I just provided a demo recording on a CD at an affordable price and had fun. That type of business recruiting makes me feel predatorial and sleazy, but that’s why I’m also lousy at marketing and sales. I obviously don’t have the stomach for it. Mostly, the studio was built with the help of friends who agreed to help me with getting equipment for recording their demos. I then kept the studio going primarily by recording local rappers. I somehow became a premier east side, mix-tape studio. My given rap name was Thug Nasty and I learned about blunts and proper use of the N word.

The years I ran the recording studio, I had a stream of promoters and representatives trying to get me to recruit seemingly desperate songwriters. Sometimes they offered me a one time commission but usually nothing at all. Not one of those businesses were truthful about their accomplishments. They all claimed to have success stories of people no one has ever heard of, or some grandchild of an old fart country singer with a random hit song as part of their sales pitch. I was amazed at how much business there was that seemed to be the bottom feeders of the music industry.

I once had a songwriting session with a guy that worked for a major record company. He even showed me around the building on Music Row one Sunday afternoon, including the writers rooms where staff writers actually wrote multiple hit songs. It was an amazing experience and I’m grateful I got to see it. Not many people do. We got together at a friend’s house later and started writing the next “Redneck Anthem” as he put it, but after about forty-five minutes, I became frustrated with the cold and insincere process and abruptly walked away, almost like a real jerk. Also, I was writing all the melody while they were just trying to come up with string of catchy phrases. Oddly, some songwriters do exactly that and occasionally they write a hit song. I later learned that he was actually a part time janitor at the record company building. I would have thought that was even more cool than being a staff writer, if only he didn’t discreetly lie about it.

One rule I still follow is “Never pay to play”. In all of my experience through the years, that still hasn’t changed, even though it’s often tempting when something amazing or exclusive is offered, but it’s always too good to be true.

With the release of my third album, I am now bombarded with ads for promotion on Facebook and email. I see some friends using these marketing techniques and I really hope they know what to expect. I also hope it really works for them. It takes an incredible amount of effort and time.

I’m doing some of the same techniques as the marketers, usually by sheer coincidence or intuition. I have difficulty dedicating a lot of time for self promotion, so I’ve given myself reasonable deadlines and realistic goals. I plan on doing things before I die of old age.

There is a huge demand for independent music marketing on the internet. It’s actually mostly about gathering data to sell ads, not music. So you’re really in marketing, instead of music. Did you want to be in marketing? Too bad, you’re in marketing now. Surprisingly, the pitches are pretty straight-forward and honest about that if you’re really listening, but they can still be pretty tricky.

Creating music is actually getting more affordable as the processes get more streamlined and competitive. It’s also becoming less meaningful as it gets more and more saturated. I’m contributing as well, I’m sure.

The independent music industry is turned upside down right now and I assume that the real players are way ahead of the trends and protecting themselves. Nashville executives have always been in control of their industry, for the better or the worse. It’s all subjective, and as long as they can say what’s good music, they’re going to be just fine.

Success Part 2

With the internet, the average person can now produce music and make it available for the whole world to hear. We can go out and play live shows and peddle our CD’s and t-shirts for a few bucks. We can even possibly make a living doing it-if it’s set up right and highly maintained. (It’s important to note that professional music producers, talented writers, and craft musicians are still in another league. All musicians should aspire to be in that elite league, or at least know the difference.)

Making it big is still as elusive as it ever was. Getting a hit song on the radio or movie soundtrack is still amazingly difficult. Everybody wants a cut, everybody wants a piece of the action, and nobody wants to invest in the highly unlikely chance of your success. It’s worse odds than winning the lottery and being struck by lightning on the same day, but we do it anyway. We tell ourselves that someone has to win the lottery, and the chances are greater the more we play, and we try and put ourselves in the path of opportunity. I am there with exactly that.

The hope of making money doing something so creatively satisfying is mind boggling. It’s an addiction and it’s a foolish pursuit, but it is also a legitimate business. Computers, software suppliers, bars, restaurants, instruments, electronics, CD manufacturers, online distributors, ads and more ads. It’s a big, big business for so many, and sometimes lightning really does strike for an artist.

It’s also hard to accept that you should just go get an unsatisfying job for sixty-five years when you are capable of creating music. 

An extraordinary soul stuck in a conventional life. (I heard that on the radio). It makes you wonder why you even exist at all? It’s even harder when you have to accept you’ve struggled to dedicate your entire life to music and realize that you’re barely closer than you were thirty years ago. You didn’t plan for surviving with nothing, and it seems too late to start building anything. It makes you wonder, again, why you even exist at all?

That’s why some people believe it’s absolutely foolish to chase such dreams to begin with. I get that now, because I’m older, worn down, cynical, and poor.

There’s also a heavy guilt side effect in investing in my music endeavor because I should probably be putting money into my home and family instead of throwing it away on guitar strings and making CD’s. When I get a few extra bucks, it usually goes into a music fund and I try to spend it before something new breaks around the house. (I’m ignoring the old hole in the back porch.) I even keep my self embezzled allowance a secret from people that wouldn’t approve. I’m probably way too old to be doing that, but I’m also too old to have to be explaining myself.

I’ve tried many careers and made many mistakes. One mistake was not going in deeper. Fully immersed and sacrificing everything. Homeless, starving, alone, and maybe ending up dead. I sometimes listened to people who didn’t get it. I was convinced that I always had to pay the rent and have a steady job. That kept me from discovering and learning everything I really needed to know about music or entertainment. I was so focused, for years, on trying to earn a living instead of figuring out a way to develop my very real passion, I actually wound up failing at both.

I’m aware that it sounds like I’m blaming others because I am. I’ve got plenty of things to blame on myself, but it isn’t like everything can be my fault all the time, right? Right?

When I was seventeen, I wanted to go to L.A. to try to get into the movie business. I didn’t go because something told me I would die without support. The truth is, I was already dead, or at least my future was. There was nothing for me where I was. In hindsight, I had no real prospects either way so I should have just gone to Hollywood. Part of me thinks that is my biggest regret. Another part knows I probably wouldn’t be here now to complain about it, so I try not to give it too much thought.

So years later, I’m still struggling to make music. It’s still just as useless and futile as it ever was, but it’s the air that I breathe. I have no desire to quit creating music and still no desire to work at a meaningless job for lousy pay. At least no more than I have to. I still gotta provide and survive.

At this point, I’m sort of just running out the clock. I have to make my failures my accomplishments, my poverty my contentment, and my lack of desire for competitive wealth my social protest.

Making music is powerful. Sharing music is nice too if everyone at least pretends to like it. Making money from making music would be life altering. The amount of work that’s put into making music is mostly kept a secret because it’s ridiculous. And don’t even ask how much money we put into it.

I was thinking about how much I can charge for a CD. If I sell one for ten dollars, that’s about thirty minutes of work for an average person. It would be kind of like giving someone my CD for taking out my kitchen trash or folding a load of laundry. My cost with shipping is about seven bucks so I make three dollars for a CD that I’ve invested thousands of dollars and a lot of years to create. I’m starting to think it’s a bad business model. Unless I can guilt millions and millions of people into buying them.

It’s strange to think that music is for sale at all. Music is the way humans breathe through their souls. It’s just too bad we can’t eat pentatonic scales.