The point is this: regardless of how wonderful a talent your are, the commissions you pay a booking agent must be able to not only cover the agent’s expenses related to their representing you, but must provide some degree of profit for them. If you as an artist cannot provide an agent a profit, then you are asking the agent to make a financial investment in you and your career. Think about that for a moment.

As musicians, it can be discouraging to read these things, but my hope is that it will make us that much more vigilant in creating our own path and definition of success!

This is a must read article for any serious band/musician actively looking to make a career in music.  As far as I’m concerned, it means we just have to get that much more creative in figuring out how we can pool our resources and keep people interested in music together instead of in competition with eachother.

• Barely Legal Radio - A radio show hosted by 12 year entertainment law veteran Joe Escalante, Esq.  You can download the show as a podcast, listen to it live on Indie 103.1, or listen to it live on the web if you’re not in the Los Angeles area.  Think of it as a “Love Line” for musicians needing legal advice.  The number to call in to is on the website.
• Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts - Their goal is to provide free legal services to non-profit arts organizations.  Issues often handled include contract negotiations, mediation services, nonprofit incorporation, copyright information and infringement lawsuits, tax information, estate planning, and lease review.  VLA organizations also provide education programs, including seminars, publications, and the maintenance of art law libraries.
• FindLaw’s Message Boards - FindLaw is a resource many lawyers and law students use for their own research.  They have a message board dedicated to Entertainment Law where you can post a question and get it answered by active law professionals.  It’s at least a way to help decide if it’s worth it or not to actually get your own lawyer.

Don’t forget to check out Bob Baker’s article.  He has some great resources listed on there.  Especially the Music-Law.com site.

Have fun!

What I see are bands that are still relevant in the music economy.  They’re still making big bucks on these tours, and often times they are the biggest drawing tours of the year.  If we dig a little deeper, I see a demographic with a large population that wants to feel young as they grow older.  These baby boomers have a wealth of money and are from an era where music ruled and video games, cell-phones and MySpace didn’t compete for their attention.  They really appreciate music!  Not to mention that they aren’t as computer savvy as college kids these days, nor do they have as much reason to illegally download music.

So what’s the point?  The point is that record labels seem to be ignoring these huge music fans.  If labels helped seek out and develop bands with rootsy rock sounds alongside of these teeny bopper, trendy, one-hit wonders, we might see a shift in the relevance of new music.  In fact, according to radio format popularity trends as reported by Arbitron, Rock as a format is significantly more popular than Alternative for ages 12+ across the US.  The Contemporary Hits format is slightly larger as a whole, but when broken down between “Pop” hits and “R&B” hits, it is significantly reduced (assuming that these rockers aren’t really competing for contemporary R&B fans).

The bottom line is that the music industry seems to be shooting itself in the foot by catering to a demographic of younger people who consider music to be just one of the many entertainment sources available to them; and it happens to be one of the easiest to copy and distribute digitally and illegally. 

What if…. what if labels found new bands that sound musically like where some of these classic rockers left off, and solicited them to the classic rock radio stations.  Listeners would finally get some fresh material on some of these stations, but with a sound similar to what they enjoy.  The best part is, the labels could put the younger bands on tour with the classic rockers!

I think there’s a lesson to be learned here. ultimately it’s every unsigned artist’s dream to quit their day job, but certainly not to get stuck later with no job. Now we are seeing the reality of the fickle music industry today and what shooting to the top prematurely can have in store for an artist. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aim for the stars, it just means that we should have a solid stairway to the heavens built on real fans that support you all the way.

My dad always said experience is the best teacher, but sometimes it’s better when it’s someone elses experience. As much fun as he may have had during O-Town’s height of success, I don’t envy his situation now. Good luck Ashley…

The bottom line is: do a little research before you send a package.

Find out how to personally address the person you are sending it to. Make sure they are accepting unsolicited material, or find out how to get permission to send it. Be cordial in your introduction and be sure you don’t look like an idiot by making all kinds of grammatical mistakes.

Another point I’d like to add is the value of including a cover letter. It’s obvious you should make an introduction statement in an email, but it’s equally important to include a cover letter in a demo package. Even if you have the opportunity to hand the package to someone in the flesh, it could be days or weeks before they get to it, and by then they could have already forgotten what it was you wanted from them or who you are. I personally think the introduction should also gently guide the reader what their next step should be. For example, if you want them to listen to a specific song on your demo you should say so. If it’s a connection lower in the chain of command (like a front office person you met at an industry event) and you want them to pass your package on to someone higher up, you should say so. It doesn’t help if they love your demo and take it with them in their car but never pass it on to the VP of A&R! That’s my 2 cents at least; you can add your own thoughts in the comments section below.

Do yourself a favor and read Mr. Foxworthy’s article. Not only does it show how important it is to make the right first impression, but how a bad first impression can anger the recipient and lead to being viewed as a liar. This is serious business…

The biggest advantage I find in doing this is that you don’t have any time constraints. You can do retakes or experimentation until you get it just right. The biggest disadvantage though, is learning a new art form. Recording music can be a very complicated endeavor.

One tool which I just discovered to help make my life easier in the digital studio is Voxengo’s SPAN. Not only is this VST plugin great quality, but it’s absolutely free! SPAN is a spectrum analyzer which can be put either in a single track’s fx bin, or in a master output…or both. It has a small enough footprint that you can use it in multiple places without eating up too much CPU power.

So, what’s a spectrum analyzer? Basically, it shows you a real-time visual analysis of the frequencies in your track or master output. Most media players like Winamp and Windows Media already have this built in. It would seem that most high end recording software would add this too, but many don’t. Those that do don’t offer something as flexible as SPAN. SPAN allows you to adjust the rate at which it tracks the frequencies, so you can watch the changes fly by or have them show more averages, which is a little easier to follow. It also allows you to angle the frequency spectrum so that you get a reading that looks more flat. Otherwise, the lower frequencies are taller on the graph than the higher frequencies.

The reason I love SPAN is that since I don’t have the luxury of owning the best reference monitors and I don’t have an acoustically tuned room, having a relatively flat frequency guide helps me to see where imbalances are.

For example, let’s say I think that I really need to add a lot more bass because the mix is just not thick enough. If I look at the spectrum analyzer and see that the bass is actually way more pronounced than I can perceive audibly, I’ll know that I’m already really pushing the bass. Of course if I mixed it down and burned a CD, as soon as I played it in my car or something I would here plenty of bass. The spectrum has helped me to kep a better balance and my mixes have turned out a lot better.

Anyways, what have you got to lose? It’s free! You might as well go download it and give it a shot. Good luck on those mixes!