How to Succeed in the Music Business (No!)

Where to start? How can I discourage you from this horrible profession? Many ignorant people think that any type of Top Ten placement is a guarantee of easy money, easy sex and hard drugs. Let me say up front: most gangs are seedy, smelly, malnourished, and too trashed to successfully participate in a sexual congress.

And those are the successful ones.

Pop music is not a career, it is an obsession, an excuse for not getting a well-paying job. For me it started in high school. From then on I committed a series of sins against the great Goddess Fortuna that have condemned me to be a “never again”. These are the things I should have done. Read on and be cautious.

1. Start young.

Pick up an instrument no later than your teens, or don’t bother. By the time you’re old enough to order a pint at a bar or club, you should be competent enough to land a gig there and not be embarrassed. Assuming you have talent, of course. If you leave it too late, you won’t be competent enough to make a living off your muse.

2. Have talent.

A lot of people can get by on pop, it’s simple music. However, if your friends and early audiences think your music is “okay”, if you still have to make excuses for your performances at every concert, give them a hint! Give it up, go back to college, you fool who is fooling yourself! Better yet, learn a trade that people really _want_, _and_ in which you can earn a lot of money.

Hear that quiet little voice at night. He knows.

3. Pop music is not art.

In some ways it is the antithesis of Art. Artists live to authentically represent their own subjectivity. Pop musicians just want to get laid and get paid. It is vulgar and populist. It’s what makes people flock to the dance floor and roars on a drunken Friday night.

So don’t just disappear into your own ass, Mr. Marylin-Manson-Morrisey-Wannabe. We will not send hunt groups.

4. Save your money.

One of the worst ways to spend money on this game is in other people’s studios. Most studios in Britain are made up of low-skilled chancers who say, for example, that of course they can sync their two workstations to their 24-track tape machine so you can do some vocal overdubs and mixing, all in a 10 hour session at £ 30 an hour plus VAT.

At hour five you’re sweating and trying to figure out why the voices are late. At hour ten you have a feeling of discomfort, a lighter wallet, and a slightly mixed track that will be redundant in a couple of months because your music has improved or changed direction. Hell, I feel nauseous even thinking about it. It happened to me. More than once. Pay attention, smart boy.

Invest your money in buying your own recording equipment. Buy only ‘name’ equipment as it should retain its second hand value. You can sell it if you want to upgrade or buy something sensible, like a roof over your head. Loot magazine in London offers free ads to buyers and sellers of just about anything. eBay is good for smaller items that can be shipped through the mail.

The second hand is very good value for money if it is almost new. Electronic equipment, like cars, depreciates as soon as they leave the shop. This can be to your advantage. However, DO NOT buy second-hand items from anyone who looks scruffy or lives in a dirty, messy floor. “Why not, fascist ?!” sez you. Because your attention to your appearance and surroundings will be reflected in the care of your equipment.

The best kind of person you can buy from is a good middle-class, middle-aged Englishman who lives in a nice, clean suburban house and doesn’t take his gear on the road. Trust me this time.

Invest your money in building your own bedroom studio if you are a dance musician. Find a squat room, a garage, or a room on an industrial estate and place it if you’re in a gang. Anything to avoid wasting precious candies.

5. Conserve energy.

If all the energy wasted in the futile self-promotion of young pop musicians were harnessed for political causes (for example), eco-warriors would not have to live in trees, and the Tories would have come out after their first term. If you must persist in the illusion that you too will one day be number one in America (or very close), do the following:

a) Only play in bands where the members regularly attend rehearsals. Whining and phoning after these idiots (“my girlfriend says I ignore her, I want to pay for gigs, I think we should get them back …”) is a drag. Either fire them or leave the band.

b) Rehearse regularly. Practice makes perfect, laziness leads to forgotten lyrics, vague notes, and ghastly concerts. Make sure that no matter how good you are at rehearsal, you will lose at least 20% of your competition by performing live. And any temperament gear will go bad at night, in front of all your friends and the A&R leech you invited, especially.

c) Write songs at home. Teach them there silently with other members if possible. Send each member (including the drummer) a basic CD recording and lyrics sheet. Have them practice on their own so you don’t waste time and enthusiasm when you are all together in your pay-per-hour studio (or see 3. above).

d) Dismissal of incompetent members. You can only retain them if you do not intend to perform in public, record, get a radio play, or a recording contract. Resist blackmail. If the bass player has a truck and is your best friend, but can’t play in time, kick him. You will thank me later. You can rent a truck and make new friends.

6. Accept all concerts offered.

There is no such thing as bad publicity, even if you screw up someone’s wedding, heck, there is at least one family that will remember you for the rest of their lives. Do enough really horrible gigs and you might have something (see: The Stooges).

7. Study the top ten.

If you admire and emulate acts in the lower reaches of the Top 30, you will never get that far. Selling 10,000 singles in a week through stores that record returns was enough to guarantee you a spot in the Top Thirty in the UK, when you were interested in it. If you copy acts in the lower reaches, how many people will buy your version of their unpopular music? Avoid making music to please idealistic journalists or your “cool” peers. They don’t buy records anyway.

On the contrary, you should …

8. Write music from the heart.

Live your dream. Choose genres and styles that you are comfortable with. A big spinning eccentric noise will get you more fans than a second-rate copy of a top-ten hit. And you will enjoy it more.

9. Try all avenues of advertising.

Distribute brochures. Return phone calls. Telephone newspapers. Put up posters. Strong friends. Otherwise, you will get an audience of one man and his dog. You will die horribly and still have to bring your equipment home. You should not be ashamed. A packed concert in a small venue creates a ‘buzz’, while one in a larger venue, with the same number of people, will not.

Someone once told me that there were 100,000 bands in London alone, which I think is an understatement. And that excludes the coffins in the bedroom. How will you differentiate yourself from that whole lot? (Do you think if I had a great sexy idea I would put it in this article?). Get dressed, go crazy. Who cares? Just do it.

Public performances of any kind are an excellent part of market research. Make your best track first. Thirty seconds later you will know if you have the correct formula or not. If it doesn’t work, THROW IT OUT!

Play only your best songs. Keep your concerts short. Spectacular finish, then leave the building. Leave your audience with a positive memory. Be mysterious. RESIST the urge to play two hours of mediocre footage and then step off stage for a pint with the punters at the bar.

10. Talent shows.

Give them a try, except when they ask for an entrance fee. Think of them as a way to get a well-organized concert with a different audience. You won’t win, or the prize will suck, or your studio time will explode (see above) or your single will disappear without a trace, but what the hell WHILE YOU DON’T PAY FOR IT.

11. Release a small amount of CDs (if necessary).

Je n’ai pas. £ 2000 pounds in the early ’90s (which included the recording) for 250 copies of an LP (the vanity!) That was too trashed to promote, and I didn’t really believe in it anyway. He wasted it all. If you are good enough, other people will pay.

The same goes for promotional videos. You don’t have enough money to make them look smart. Spend the money (through music lessons and better gear) to make your music good enough for others to invest in it. Dance musicians should only push their music if they are completely confident that they can sell it to specialty stores or fans without having to make excuses for it. Dance music is strictly “product oriented” and relies much less on a good singer to carry the entire track. It can be sold more easily.

Still, don’t let your thirst for keeping your own record in your hands unnecessarily drain your pathetic finances.

12. Management is a good idea.

If he’s not an idiot, a coward, or a scoundrel, and has some energy and connections, take it. It’s too much work to write, rehearse, keep a job / go to college AND promote yourself. Just remember, a manager is for life, kids. He _ will get_ his grain of sand. Better to have a total crazy brute with a veneer of manners and respectability. Scare them and enchant them at the same time. DON’T think you can do it all. People in the industry are businessmen and they don’t want to do business with precious, pseudo-rebellious, and poorly educated “artists.”

13. Be brutal with your material.

If your songs don’t sound like anything in the top five, or you’re not getting an ecstatic reaction from the audience / media critics / large following, STOP what you’re doing right away.

Either it sounds like a current hit (last year for rawk, six months for dance music) or your audience wants to be like you and have your kids. Anything else is a waste of your youth. This is POP, just like POPULAR music, remember? If you have both of the above, hey, I want you to sign this paper here, no no, don’t bother reading it …

14. And there I leave it …

… because like I said at the beginning, I’m a total failure at this lark. Any advice I can give you on registry contracts and the like would not be based on my personal experience. You will find that there are many who will not let this stop them from bending their ear anyway.

To continue, read ‘The Prince’ by Macchiavelli or ‘The Art of War’ by Sun Tzu and that white paper ‘How to have a number one’ or something like that from the group of the 90s, the KLF. It prepared you very well for any race, never mind this crap. Best of luck anyway, sorry fool.

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