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Essay: What Is The Music Industry? A lot of people talk about "The Music Industry" as though it's a tiny, secret cabal of corrupt, evil drug addicts who are hostile to new blood. As with any other industry including law, investment banking, retail sales and public school instruction, if you look around a while you can find shady and dishonest people, or people who abuse dangerous substances. You can also find honest, hard-working people who give good value for the dollar. There's a lot of negative hype surrounding music and musicians. Bits of it are even founded in fact. Yet many people who are not professional musicians and who have no direct knowledge about the music business are prejudiced against it. The negative hype sells records, but it also turns many parents against the notion of their children making a living in any entertainment industry, especially music. The purpose of this essay is to explore exactly what the music business is and to look more closely at some of the myths and realities of the music industry. Debunking Myth #1: "Musicians are train wrecks" The way musicians are portrayed in movies or on TV, you could be excused for believing we're all a bunch of train wrecks. It's not true. Although most of us can be eccentric at times, as a rule we're fairly normal. We can't afford to be otherwise. We're entrepreneurs. Our livings therefore depend on giving the customer what they want in a consistent, predictable way. Misfits and losers who aren't capable of delivering value to the customer make bad entrepreneurs, and they either wash out quickly or shape up. Most music films such as "The Blues Brothers", "The Rose", "Spinal Tap", "The Commitments", and "Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny" are works of fiction. While a few scenes are representative of things that really do happen once in a while, the non-stop drama and silliness is about as far away as it's possible to get from a real day in the life of a real working musician. Biographical films such as "Ray", "The Doors", "Lady Sings The Blues", "Amadeus" and "Walk The Line" are based on people whose life stories were heavy on the drama even before Hollywood got involved. The main characters in each of these films had serious problems even before they got into music, and they succeeded in spite of their problems, not because of them. As always, the biggest train wrecks are the ones who get all the attention, because drama is what sells movie tickets. The film-writing process also compresses a person's entire lifetime into just a couple hours of script. The thousands of hours of practice and rehearsal are skipped, as are casual friendships or family relationships that don't end in tragedy. As a result, only the highlights and low points remain. These are therefore blown out of proportion, and then super-condensed into an hour or two of footage. Addiction features prominently in both fictional and biographical movies about musicians. It's true that people who are trapped in hopeless, stressful situations often turn to drugs or alcohol. Anybody can be vulnerable to addiction, and some people are extra vulnerable for biological or social reasons scientists don't completely understand. We do know that environmental concerns can definitely create a state of affairs in which a person is far more likely to experiment with, and become addicted to, harmful substances or behaviors. People who are under severe stress for extended periods of time, who are heavily in debt, who don't know whom to trust, who are caught in a hopeless situation, who are socially and emotionally isolated, and who don't see any other options except to keep staggering through another day, are more vulnerable than average. This is why addiction is definitely an occupational hazard for musicians who tour heavily under physically strenuous circumstances, who are in serious debt to their labels, and who have no other options or sources of income. Musicians who arrange their lives and careers differently so that they are not solely dependent on a label, an agent, a tour manager, or any other particular customer are a lot less likely to be tempted. Debunking Myth #2: "The music business is very small and selective, kind of like professional sports" The music business is gigantic. Millions of people make a living in it every day, but most of it is invisible because the criteria for entry require something besides a college or university degree. The average high school counselor is probably not aware of most of these branches, because his or her job is to steer kids to institutional education such as tech schools or college and university programs. As you'll see, most of the available work in music can't be gotten that way. The most visible parts of the music industry (that is, the people you see on stage performing big arena rock acts) can be compared to professional athletes in the most elite leagues such as the NBA or the NFL, in that there aren't many of them and that some of them make a lot of money. Yet they aren't the entire music industry, any more than the elite leagues are the entire athletics industry. To deter someone from pursuing a career in music just because you (or someone else) might believe they have no chance at putting together a big arena act is just as silly as telling someone to not pursue a career in sports medicine, kinesiology, golf club design, coaching, or stadium management just because their fastball isn't fast enough to get them into major league baseball. When someone says: "I want to be a professional musician" or "I want to earn a living with my guitar" there are plenty of ways for them to make a decent living fulfilling this very dream. They do, however, have to work very hard, get competent instruction every step of the way, and plan their careers just as intelligently as an aspiring doctor or politician does. Aspiring musicians must also prepare themselves to be entrepreneurs. This means they must have strong work ethics, they must be self-starters, and they must be able to take measured, qualified risks. In addition to developing playing skills they must also have math skills, people skills, and organizational skills. Mentorship helps too, and this is one reason why musicianship often runs in families. The rest of this essay breaks the set of available musical and music-related careers into several options. Each option covers a variety of kinds of work. Option #1: Teaching music Teaching provides steady, non-seasonal income. In order to succeed at teaching, you have to be able to cause some other person to make music. The more consistently you get results, the more successful you will be. It helps to have an established pedagogy, a curriculum, and a good idea as to what you teach and what you don't. To be effective as a teacher, you must be reasonably organized. You must show up to the lesson on time, and you must have good communication skills. Depending on how good your bookkeeping skills are and how hard you're willing to work promoting yourself, you have three options in terms of how you teach:
Private instruction is by far the most lucrative, since you can work out of your home studio or travel to your students. It's flexible too. You get to set your own hours, and after taxes you get to keep all you earn. A suburban location, offering evening and weekend classes to working adults and their children, is the best setup provided the location does not put you into competition with institutional teachers. Most professional music teachers teach privately. Private teachers have few barriers to entry. You don't need a degree, just a business license and a home studio set up for teaching or a reliable form of transportation so you can get to your students' homes and teach there. The down side is that you're responsible for everything. You need to do your own advertising, accounting, and organization. You also need to deliver the goods. You have to be able to teach any randomly selected person how to play. Your students have the option of leaving at any time, and nobody will replace them for you if they quit. Since students do move out of town or develop interests besides the guitar, turnover is inevitable, so you've got to have some means to advertise and promote yourself. Although you can charge higher fees proportionate to the results you get, you must first deliver results that are better than average. Institutional teaching is far less lucrative than private instruction, and the barriers to entry are higher. You generally need a music or education degree plus a teaching license, because you'll be teaching in a public school or a university. That means there's a lot of work to be done before you get in. Of course, once you're in somebody else handles the accounting and scheduling, so that you don't have to do anything but teach, generally in groups. You will collect a regular pay check, and you may earn tenure or become part of a union. This is one of the only music careers for which there's a retirement pension. Many people who do not have the drive or energy to be an entrepreneur choose institutional teaching because it's fairly safe and reliable income-wise. Besides the poor money, there are other down sides to institutional teaching. You'll generally have to teach something besides your chosen instrument and like all teachers you will be required to supervise after-school athletics and fund raising. This will be done after your work hours on a "volunteer" basis, which means you won't be paid for that time. Your work hours will be fixed. So will your student roster. At least some of your students won't want to be there and will resist learning. There will definitely be school or departmental politics. On a per-hour basis the pay is about half what you could expect in private practice. Supplementing your income by teaching or performing on the side will be tough, especially if you're a university teacher, because you'll be competing with your own students, who are located in the same area and who are usually willing to give cheap lessons. In university areas, most of the customer base is made up of students, who are very price-conscious. The end result is a fight for the bargain basement, which you are destined to lose. Store based teaching is a hybrid between private and institutional teaching. You either rent space in a music store and bring your students in, or you rely on the store or music instruction company to find students for you in exchange for part of the fee. Although the store will generally advertise for you, schedule the students, and handle the money, they take a slice off the top (generally about half) and also set the price of lessons. To get as many people through the doors as they can, it's in the store owner's interests to keep lesson fees as low as possible. If you are allowed to set your own fees and keep what you earn, you're generally also on the hook to pay for the space even if you don't have students to fill it. For teachers who work out of a store, the barriers to entry are almost as high as the ones for institutional teaching. In order to improve the perceived quality of their teachers, music stores often insist that their teachers must have music degrees or exceptional playing skills (or both). Teaching skill, as with institutional teachers, is frequently optional. Then, once you get in the door, the money is almost as poor as it is in a school. Although you're offering one-on-one private lessons, the music store generally sets the fee scale as low as possible to get as many customers in the door as they can (hoping that at least a few will buy something). Of that fee, you can generally expect to keep about half. If you're allowed to set your own fee scale, you must pay rent for the room even when you're not using it. You're limited to store hours, which are mostly not marketable teaching slots because nearly all your students are at work or at school. During the most lucrative evening hours, the store is generally closed. If the store owner is a friend of yours and lets you use the teaching room for free, or if you're just starting out and building a teaching practice, or if there's something extra in it for you such as the use of studio equipment, it may make sense to teach out of a store at least for a while and offer private lessons on the side. Option #2: Paid performance This is the kind of work most aspiring musicians want. Most people aren't qualified to do it. Either they don't develop the skills, or they have the wrong attitude and get confused about what professional music is. Professional musicians, like professional writers, get paid to produce a certain kind of product. They give the customers what they want. For the most part, customers aren't interested in the stuff you create for you own gratification. Customers are interested in a particular kind of sound to attract and entertain a particular kind of clientele. If that happens to be what you enjoy doing, fantastic. Otherwise, you're going to have to compromise a bit in order to get business. Here' a short list of the kind of work where you get paid to make music. You might not think that this happens to famous musicians who are household names, but it does. Once they create a sound and a style people like, they're under pressure to deliver more of the same even if they would rather move on and experiment with something radically different. Very few professional musicians get paid big bucks to experiment. Frank Zappa and The Grateful Dead come to mind, but they were very rare exceptions. They also never became part of the musical mainstream. I've divided the list of possible performance work into three sets. Set 1:
Set 2:
Set 3:
The next figure shows the relationship between the amount of work available and the total amount of pay that's involved in each kind of gig.
The numbers in the above figure are approximate. They're meant to illustrate just how the pie is sliced up. As you can see, most of the gig opportunities are small potatoes in Set 1. At the other end of the spectrum, Set 3 has a much higher reward per gig than Set 1 or Set 2, but there's less work to go around. There's a reason why the number of gigs in Set 1 is so big and the gig count in Set 3 is so small. Nearly everyone gets married, has a bar mitzvah or landmark birthday or anniversary, graduates, retires, or has a funeral once per lifetime. Most people also go to church or to restaurants. A lot of these events require live music. So even a village of a few hundred people can offer two to five paid gig opportunities per week, which is enough to support a couple professionals on at least a part-time basis. But it takes several thousand customers to fill an arena for a big rock concert or to buy enough CDs to pay for the production cost of a new album. After playing a city, a Set 3 musician has tapped out the market and has to move on. In the middle of the income-to-gig spectrum is Set 2. This work is regular, it's often salaried, and although openings don't happen very often and there's a lot of competition, once you get a seat in an orchestra or land a job with Disney World or a cruise ship company you can keep renewing your contract or getting similar contracts from other companies as long as you perform well and give the customer (your sole employer) what the customer wants. Sometimes there's even a pension or a retirement savings plan. People who want a steady income usually pick this kind of performance instead of the unreliable Set 3 work, because at the top of the food chain in Set 3, the competition is fierce and what's hot today may not pay the rent tomorrow. The career path to Set 2 is different from the path to Set 3. To get to Set 2, a person usually needs a degree in music and spends several years doing unpaid performance to build up experience. To get to Set 3, a person spends several years in Set 1, or very occasionally in Set 2. Of course, it's possible to make a very good living in Set 1 provided you're willing to promote and book yourself. This is not what most musicians want to hear, because most movies depict music success as something that happens overnight without much effort. I've already told you how movies gloss over repetitive, hard work. Another thing I'd like to point out is that most of the gigs in Set 1 are NOT heavy metal, progressive rock, or highly experimental. Restaurant customers want background music (classical, ethnic music, jazz, or occasionally blues). Churches want something religious. Nearly everyone wants the "Here Comes The Bride" song at weddings and "Amazing Grace" at funerals. At receptions, people want something they can dance to (which means swing or maybe country). On cruise ships, people want mainstream jazz, pop, and oldies. At outdoor festivals or for licensed busking people generally prefer folk. Even for private parties where people request rock, they generally want the cover tunes that they grew up with, instead of originals. Even the Beatles played mostly cover tunes for years while they worked on their technique and played club gigs in Germany. This means that if you're unwilling to learn to play at least some of these genres, and if you refuse to play anything but the kind of music that interests you, you're going to starve to death before you get enough experience to get out of Set 1 and into Set 2 or Set 3. This is what keeps most amateurs at the amateur level. Even though the facts clearly don't support what they want to believe, they hold onto the hope that there's somebody out there who can, or should, pay them to create the product (oops, they prefer when I call it "the ground-breaking, world-changing Art") they want to create. So instead of finding ways to give the customers what they want with the best possible quality, they keep looking for excuses to try to sell the customers what the customers manifestly don't want. Set 1 really isn't a bad place to be, because your income is limited only by the number of customers you can serve and how well you can serve them. In Set 2, your performance opportunities are generally limited by your contract with the casino or by the board of directors who set up the orchestra performing schedule. Unless you set up something independent (and Set 1-ish), your income has an upper cap on it. The same goes for Set 3. Big-name performers who have contracts with major labels don't get to decide how many albums per year they release, or how often they perform. The label controls when and how their albums are released, and has a lot of say as to when and how the artist will go on tour. In fact, most big label contracts contain exclusivity clauses that say the artist MAY NOT perform, or even appear in a movie or record a track on someone else's CD, without the label's permission. Some labels even require that they, and not the artist, get paid for such outside performance. In Set 1, by contrast, you really are your own boss. It's possible to make more money playing weddings (and doing other work that interests you on the side) than you could earn by recording and promoting an average album on a major label. You also get more performance time and experience in front of an audience. Option #3: Intellectual property This is the kind of work that keeps on paying, at least a little bit, for quite some time after you've done the bulk of the work. It can even pay you after you're dead. Unlike a recording session where you get paid by the hour or a wedding where you get paid at the event, when you write a book about music, or a song, you (or your heirs, or whoever owns the rights to your wor) will get paid as long as that piece of intellectual property is in use. Here are some examples of intellectual property work:
The challenge with intellectual property work is that all the effort must be made in advance. You have to produce something that people want, and that they're willing to pay for. If you're writing a book about some aspect of music or the music industry, you've got to offer material that hasn't already been published somewhere else. If you're composing a film soundtrack, you've got to be able to format it in a way that's appropriate to the film. You have to know at least a little bit about copyright law and how to protect your intellectual property. You also have to know enough about contract law to understand what kind of deal you're making with whoever is promising to pay you. The process of "getting signed" or becoming a recording artist involves making a deal with a company that promotes and distributes music in CD or electronic format. Sometimes the deal also involves a slice of the royalties you get for airplay or for the use of your music in advertising or movies. A lot has been written about this kind of deal making, and I won't duplicate it here although I recommend the book "Confessions Of A Music Producer" by Moses Avalon, which is in its third edition. In a nutshell, if you plan to get into this kind of work you need to know enough about law and accounting to not get ripped off. Paying someone else to know what's good for you (so that you don't have to watch out for your own interests yourself) looks good on paper but you still need to know enough about the business to manage the people you hire to manage your affairs. Otherwise, chances are good that you will work very hard making somebody else rich without having much to show for it. Entertainment lawyers, accountants, record company executives, promoters, producers, and agents are not "bad" or "greedy" people by definition. Most of them are not out to rip off musicians or other people. But they do have financial interests that aren't necessarily in alignment with the performing artist's. Income from intellectual property that is licensed or distributed by others is usually not steady and it is seldom delivered in a timely fashion. It is also subject to unexpected deductions and holdbacks. If you are the songwriter on a CD or the author of a book, you will notice that most of the sales come immediately after its release and then taper off. You don't get the money immediately though: the retailers pay the distributors, the distributors pay the label (or publishing house if you've written a book), and the label or publishing house takes half of everything that comes in right off the top. Of your half, your agent, manager, and other team members get their share. What's left gets applied toward the advance your label or publishing house gave you to produce the album or book. That advance is essentially a very high-interest loan against future royalty income. After everyone else has been paid and the label or publishing house has been repaid for the advance, if there's any money left over you get it a month or two later after the check works its way through the accounting department. Even if you have a gigantic hit that more than pays for the money it took to develop it, expect a turnaround period of several months before you see a cent. After that point, the income from the work depends on how steady the sales are. A successful book, for example, will inspire other authors to write similar books to take away market share. The same goes for a successful song. Option #4: Technical support This branch of the music industry requires knowledge and experience with electronics, software, recording equipment, and music theory. The idea is not to generate your own intellectual property or to put on your own show, but to help make someone else's intellectual property better. Technical support work includes:
Most of this work is very specialized, and it requires both theory and practical experience. An architect who specializes in recording studio design, or an engineer who designs recording equipment or amplifiers, needs four to six years of advanced education. A bachelor's degree in engineering or architecture is the minimum qualification for entry into this career. A master's degree is preferred. Arrangers and transcriptionists must know enough about music theory, arrangement, and composition to satisfy the theory component of a bachelor's degree in music. Some get this knowledge in school (which is what music transcription companies and publishing houses prefer). Others learn it privately. To be an arranger or transcriptionist you must also have two to three years of practical experience with one or more software notation program such as Finale. A luthier or a recording engineer can get most of the necessary theory and technical knowledge in a two-year associate's degree, but two to four years of practical apprenticeship is necessary before a person is qualified to open a recording studio for hire. A recording engineer must have enough of a physics and electrical engineering background to understand the signal path and enough knowledge of ProTools or a similar audio recording suite to get by in the studio and to create the sounds a producer or artist wants. Although equipment costs are coming down, it is still very expensive to put together a professional quality recording studio or luthier shop. Many luthiers therefore make money doing instrument setup and repair in addition to design, while most recording engineers work for other studios or producers in addition to working for themselves. To control light or audio equipment during a performance requires practical experience and good eyes and ears. You will work mostly nights and weekends, and if you want to work full-time you must travel with an established band. If you tour this way, you'll be expected to carry and set up some, if not all, of your equipment. Roadies need to be in good physical condition. The hours are long, the living conditions are sparse, and the lifestyle is not conducive to a stable family life. Unlike a recording artist who generally tours only a couple months at a time, you can expect to mostly live on the road. If you're touring with a small band, you may have to drive the van (because they can't afford a bus). On the plus side, expenses are low. Most of your food and accommodations are provided, and in addition to your wage or salary you get a "per diem" pay for every day you're on the road. It's meant to cover incidentals like toothpaste and replacement clothing. Many roadies live on the per diem and bank the rest of their income. Unless they're paying rent or child support somewhere, that money is clear profit. There's not much in terms of retirement pay or a pension plan, and you're generally responsible for your own health and accident insurance, so roadie work is usually a young person's job. It's a bad idea to rely on it for lifelong employment unless you can find an aspect of work such as instrument tuning and setup that is easy on your back. However if you can find a short-term contract between terms while you're in music school, it may be worthwhile. Videographers need not travel unless the music video or concert they're filming is off-site. They generally have degrees in film and either own or can rent their own recording and editing equipment. They handle most of the video related aspects of a music video. Sometimes illustrators or graphic artists can find work related to music video or display but it is seldom steady work. Set and costume designers typically have an art degree plus substantial experience building and sewing things. Makeup techs (at least the successful ones) usually have a background in photography or videography. Just going to school for this kind of work is not enough. You need to "know people". That means you pay your dues by hanging out at school and community theatre projects making yourself useful. You will need to do an impressive amount of volunteer work and make sure you're a good listener who takes direction well. You need to put in thousands of hours doing this kind of work, with no pay whatsoever, in order to be at the top of other people's call lists when they finally have work to offer that involves pay. The more people who know to call you first for costume or set design, the more work you'll have. If your city doesn't have much in terms of the performing arts or film, you may need to relocate, or to find ways to serve customers in more than one city at a time. A producer is often trained as an audio engineer. He or she usually has a musical background and can competently play at least one instrument. Sometimes a producer starts out as a recording artist but then starts to do arrangement or procuction for another artist. This happens a lot in rap and hip-hop. Producers are often songwriters or session players as well, and they know more about music theory than usual. They are generally older than the average recording artist and have gone to the trouble of meeting people and making contacts in the local music community. Option #5: Non-technical support This is the kind of work that goes on behind the scenes. It doesn't involve actually making music but the industry as you know it couldn't survive if this work was not done. Artists who are just starting out, who work mostly in Set 1 when it comes to gigs, have to do all this support work for themselves. But organizations that employ Set 2 musicians (such as cruise lines or ballet companies) often hire this kind of technical support full-time. Groups that are too small to employ full-time staff sometimes contact an agency or company that provides these services.
As with musicians who make most of their money from Set 2 gigs, people who provide non-technical support get steady work and steady pay provided they (or the company that employs them) has enough customers. A booking agent, for example, cannot usually earn enough income by booking just one artist. Nor can an accountant expect to earn a living by balancing the books for just one songwriter. But if your company has a hundred customers and earns a hundred dollars per month to provide some useful service to each of them, you're bringing in ten thousand dollars a month. To practice any kind of law you need to be a lawyer. That requires a two-year law degree (at a minimum) on top of a four-year bachelor's degree. It's very seldom possible to work part-time when going to law school because of the brutal class schedule. Also, most of the top law schools assume their students are independently wealthy already and can afford to pay massive tuition bills. If you or your family cannot afford tuition payments in the upper five figure or six figure range, and if you are not quite able to earn a scholarship, you'll end up with gigantic student loans that you'll have to start paying off within a few months of graduation. Until you pass the Bar exam, you won't be able to practice law by yourself, so you must also secure employment with some other law firm. That in turn requires excellent grades. So there's a selection process that goes into becoming an entertainment lawyer, and only a small fraction of the law students who begin their degrees make it through. The same phenomenon applies to doctors who specialize in performing arts related medicine. Some are medical doctors who treat carpal tunnel syndrome or repetitive strain disorders. Others are psychologists who deal with stage fright, performance anxiety, and other problems that are over-represented in musicians. Like lawyers, doctors must go through a four-year undergraduate degree at a university, followed by two years in medical school and an internship. Like lawyers, doctors generally also graduate with absurd amounts of debt. Like lawyers, doctors must work extremely long hours at first and they do not generally start to earn serious money until they reach middle age. Accountants and bookkeepers, and people who coordinate intellectual property, don't need to go to school as long as doctors or lawyers do. There is a system in place to certify professional accountants, however if you understand double-entry bookkeeping and can run Quicken or some similar accounting software package you may be qualified to do the books for a small business such as a band, or for an entrepreneur such as a musician. To book, manage, or represent a performing artist you must have very good people skills. This is because you are the interface between the artist and the rest of the world. You're taking phone calls, conducting interviews, and filling out paperwork while the artist is busy making music. To succeed at this kind of work you must be super-organized, you must communicate well in speech and writing, and you must have the ability and desire to stay on top of things. It helps to be a bit of a control freak. A booking agent needs to match qualified acts with paying work. To do that, you need to be able to attract paying work by advertising and by knowing people who hire the kind of musicians you represent. You need to be able to determine the qualifications, reliability, and skill level of the acts you represent, and that means you have to like and understand the genres of the musicians who hire you. None of this requires a degree or special training. It does require patience and a substantial investment of time to build and maintain the network. Note that you must build the network before you will earn so much as a cent. As with all entrepreneurial activities, the more customers you have (and in this case your customers are both the bands that represent you and the clubs where you book), and the better you serve the customers, the more successful you will be. Ushers, caterers, ticket takers, and janitors also provide support at concerts however they are not generally considered part of the music industry any more than they are considered part of the professional sport industry. Option #6: Retail and promotion This kind of work is the most visible to the end customer, because you're the person whose face they see, or whose work they see, when they buy the product or go looking for it. Work like this includes:
Many instrument manufacturers pay endorsement fees to top performing artists so as to encourage other people to buy their gear. Sometimes a celebrity can earn endorsement income for things that have nothing to do with music, but only if they work a lot in Set 3. Unless you're Eddie Van Halen, Celine Dion, or some other artist who is a household name or well known among aspiring performers, the most you can expect endorsement-wise is free gear. A pick manufacturer or store may send you product, or an amplifier manufacturer may lend you some gear or provide free maintenance and repair. A lot of the time the gear is not yours to keep. From the manufacturer's point of view, unless you're a top-name artist you won't generate any real income for them. If they sign an endorsement deal with you, it's in the hope that you become famous enough later on to make it worth their while. In the meantime, a few cables or picks aren't to be sneezed at, and they reduce your operating costs. But they won't feed you or pay your rent. Brand ambassadorship is a step down from endorsement in terms of prestige, but it provides a regular income for Set 3 performers. If you play well and become reasonably well known, you may be eligible for hire as a special sales representative who travels around demonstrating gear and selling to music stores (as opposed to being in a music store selling to an individual). Part of your promotion effort may be to offer clinics or autograph sessions in music stores. This kind of inside sales is also customary for start-up amplifier or gear manufacturers who want stores or retail chains to stock and sell their merchandise. At least part of your earnings will be based on commission. Promotion is a process by which labels advertise an artist. If you can design a Web site, you may be able to market your services to musicians. Otherwise, promotion generally consists of designing and putting up posters, and distributing flyers prior to an artist's arrival in town. You may end up maintining E-mail lists or data bases containing people who have to be notified when a band is coming to town. Sometimes you'll be a media liaison responsible for getting a write-up (or an ad) in a newspaper or an interview slot for your artist on the radio or on TV. You will probably write a great deal of advertising copy, and odds are you will be employed by an advertising or promotions company that handles several artists. You may also design and sell promotional materials such as clothing, bus wraps, and other things designed to raise a band's profile. A radio disc jockey or on-air commentator or personality is a kind of promoter. Likewise, a newspaper reporter who covers the arts scene or a TV news anchor can also be considered a kind of promoter. However, the goal of the news or radio promoter is not to advertise or push a particular artist or concert except to the extent that the station has been paid for advertising time. A newspaper reporter may write about his or her impression of a concert, or may mention that a performance is scheduled, but he or she is expected to be objective. Paying a reporter or radio DJ to promote one artist at the expense of another without reporting that the promotion is actually advertising is called "payola". Payola is illegal because of the laws that govern the use of public airwaves. So ultimately people who find work as arts reporters or DJs don't do it because they want to support a particular artist or promote music: they do it because they like music and the performing arts and want to be where the action is, earning a reasonably steady income. Most people who work on the air have very good speaking voices and can think on their feet. They also pay their dues at university stations doing volunteer work for years before they get within sniffing distance of a microphone. Merchandise sales differs from retail sales because you work only at concerts or performances. You may travel with one band and "push merch" at concerts, or you may be employed by a large concert venue to coordinate merchandise sales. Depending on the kind of merchandise and band you're working with, you may be employed by a promotion company that sells merchandise on a gig-by-gig basis for groups that come through town, or you might be employed by a label and lent out to a touring band as part of tour support. Retail sales are generally at music stores that sell musical instruments or sheet music, or else end product such as DVDs and CDs at retail stores such as Blockbuster, Hastings, or Barnes and Noble. The work is extremely repetitive and can't really be distinguished from sales work at a clothing boutique or department store. The pay is mediocre except for in certain music stores where commissions are available, and a lot of the work involves inventory and packing or unpacking merchandise. Accordingly, retail salespeople are seldom considered part of the music industry so much as part of the retail sales industry. Putting it all together: The Rule Of Three and independent income streams My personal Rule Of Three is that all professional musicians should have three separate, independent sources of income. Sources of income are "independent" if a loss in one area does not trigger an immediate loss in the other. For example, if you are playing in a band and the band breaks up, your performance income may suffer but your teaching income will not. Similarly, if you have an injury that puts your playing career on hold, you can still pay the bills if you are producing other artists or writing paid articles for a music magazine. Over your lifetime, exactly which of the three independent sources of income is dominant will vary. Even if you have a very good recording career, there will be peaks and valleys. During the valleys, other sources of income will dominate. Similarly, while you are touring (if you have the kind of work that requires it) obviously you can't teach, but you may be able to create other intellectual property. Three seems to be a bit of a magic number in terms of income sources. If you divide your attention between more than three kinds of work you generally lose your focus. If you have fewer than three income sources, your income will generally be unstable. It also helps to make the income sources as independent as possible so that a hit in one area won't cripple you completely. If you select your three income sources from separate groups (for example, teaching plus recording engineering plus gigging) you can survive a bigger disaster than you could if all your income sources depended on your ability to perform and tour. This is one of the reasons people often say: "Don't quit your day job". A day job, especially one unrelated to music, is a great example of an independent income source. It's a mistake to rely on only one kind of income, especially performance income which is very unpredictable. Yet it's not mandatory for a musician to have a "day job" not related to music. Passive income such as stock dividends or income producing real estate is also good, and most musicians who make significant money through royalties or performance have the sense to invest it instead of spending it all. You definitely have to be an entrepreneur in order to get by in music. If you aren't assertive, or if you don't understand the relationship between the value you create for others and the income you receive, then whether you live or die will be determined solely by luck and by other people. Music isn't the kind of industry where you can expect to go to work for someone else, work a forty-hour week, cash a pay check every couple of weeks, rely on someone else to manage your work and your schedule, keep the same employer all your life, and retire with a pension. That kind of job never existed except for a couple freak decades in the 1950's when the manufacturing and information sectors were unusually strong. Throughout most of history, life has been different and people have had to be far more self-sufficient than that. Training and education There's a difference between having three independent sources of income for which you're fully prepared and trained and being a jack-of-all-trades who hasn't mastered any discipline well enough to justify having a customer pay you. In order to succeed at any one of the kinds of work described in this essay, you've got to meet the minimum qualifications. Otherwise you won't receive work opportunities because you won't be able to compete with people who can and will deliver the goods. Nearly all the work described in this essay requires special preparation. A few jobs require a music degree, and some jobs require other kinds of formal education. Many of these jobs require formal apprenticeship. Not all of them require the ability to make music: in fact, only performance work requires performance skill. To teach, you merely need to be able to demonstrate the technique or music for your students and correct any deviation from correct play. If you teach only beginners, you need not play beyond the intermediate level. If you want the kind of work that requires a music degree, you MUST get into a post-secondary music program. In order to do that you have to be able to play your instrument. Generally you start learning your instrument as a child or an adolescent, but if you've got an extremely good teacher and are willing to put in a lot of practice time, you can start as late as high school. Without formal instruction, it is almost impossible to get into a music program. You CANNOT teach yourself everything you need to know about playing technique or form simply by playing or singing a lot. It's like trying to win a college basketball scholarship solely by shooting hoops by yourself on the patio. Not only will you be out of sight of the people who can help you, but you will be missing some of the key skills you'll need to capitalize on a rare opportunity should it open up for you against all odds. If you are a high school student aged 14 or higher and you have never had formal music training, or if you had some training as a child but have not advanced beyond, say, third grade piano, then the first thing you need to do is to get a music teacher. Simply enrolling in music classes at school IS NOT ENOUGH to get you into a post-secondary music program. If you can read and write music and have basic knowledge of music theory, you can get by with music classes at school if (and only if) you've had at least one to two full years of intensive once-a-week music instruction, for at least an hour per lesson. For every hour you spend in a lesson or class, you need to be practicing at least three to six hours outside the lesson in order to absorb the material and make reasonable progress. If you can't put in the practice time, it's unrealistic to expect progress. Similarly, if your ambition is to teach, your first few months to a year will be spent learning how to interact with a student so as to get results. This is true no matter what book or pedagogical system you are using. Essentially, it's possible to be taught how to teach, but becoming a good teacher (the kind who gets results and who can command a higher level of pay and more repeat students than average) takes effort and practice. A lot of the time, skill in one area is the price of admission to another. This is particularly true if you're dealing with an institution such as a record label or a university. You will never be taken seriously as a producer unless you've first proven yourself as a recording engineer or a performing artist. You will never be admitted into a university composition, music education, or music theory program unless you possess enough performing skill to get in the door. Although performing skill is not necessary to actually do the job you're training to do, because of institutional biases and prejudices there's a price of admission. You must be able to play some instrument well enough to play at the introductory professional level (well enough to get at least some Set 1 gigs) before you're considered worthy of training for Set 2 or Set 3. The ability to play a bunch of different instruments at a basic to intermediate level is not good enough. Nor is an exhaustive knowledge of theory or instrument construction. If you're reliying on an institution for ANY aspect of your education or training, expect to jump through hoops, and expect at least some of those hoops to be completely unnecessary. It's what institutions do. You can't change it, so know what the hoops are, and jump through them. Trying to go around them is a bad idea and it will more likely blow up in your face. Conclusion There's a phenomenal amount of work, and money, in what people call "the music industry" or "the entertainment industry". An industrious person who is willing to get the credentials and skills necessary to earn that work can do extremely well. Since most of the work is entrepreneurial in nature, any musician's earnings depend on the value they create for the people around them, the amount of effort the musician invests developing skill, and the level of personal initiative and organization that musician displays. The more organized, competent, and level-headed a musician is, the better he or she will be able to make a living. As with all entrepreneurial activities, being a musician carries with it a certain amount of risk. To keep the risk to a manageable level and to help ensure long-term employment and steady income, it's important to be able to do more than one thing competently. This is not a matter of having something besides music "to fall back on" (which, together with the phrase "don't quit your day job" is adult-speak for "I don't believe you can do it"). It's a matter of having a well thought out, robust career plan that will allow you both freedom and stability. For a discussion as to how to set that kind of career path up, read this essay. |
