Posted: Apr 12, 2016
Category: The Musician Business
accountants build a buzz danny barnes doctors expenses gossip jobs know your audience lawyers make money managers record deal taxes value
**Guest Post written by Danny Barnes as featured on DannyBarnes.com.
"I hear so much complaining about this subject, I just wanted to lay my practical experience on you. free.
First, three pre-conditions:
1. If you are a very materialistic person, skip this article, I don't think you are going to like what it says.
2. If you don't have the music where you want it art-wise, you might want to go work on that. This article isn't going to help you much either. You will be better off by practicing and studying and working on your music instead. You will need to get the art pretty close to where you want it, before you should worry about making much of a living out of it.
3. Determine if you are actually called to be a musician. If you aren't called, all the gyrations in the world, won't make it work. If you are called, no matter what you do, it's going to work. This determination will solve most of the problems you are going to encounter.
Assuming these three conditions are met, you are financially workable and you have the music where you want it and you are surely called into the art, here goes, in no particular order:
Read that one again. Move someplace cheap. Drive a good used car. Do all the things it takes to be a secure un-monied person. You have to have health insurance. You have to have a reliable car [unless you live in nyc or something]. You have to have some money in savings. You have to pay your taxes. Don't have a big expense of alcohol or drugs or any drag on your system like that. I wouldn't even smoke. Use your head. Spend very little, save as much as you can and don't get into any big expenditure until you can afford it, maybe never. Buy your gear used. Research as much as you can. Think about it really hard before you part with a dollar.
Learn how to honestly add and subtract without emotion. If you spend more than you take in, you lost money. I can't tell you how many folks that i run into that have trouble with this. If you bring in more that went out guess what? You just made money.
Stick to this low-overhead model, if you end up making a bunch of dough, you already know how to deal with it. If not, you still get to keep working because you don't have a bunch of stuff that you have to dust and pay for. The more overhead you tack on, the harder it's going to be and the easier it is to get knocked off course.
+You're Talented. How Come You're Still Broke?
Title or donate faithfully whatever your heart tells you to do. Pay your band as much as you can. Never withhold a laborers wages. Tip well. Give street musicians money. Become involved in charity work.
Render unto caesar that which is caesar's. If you try to fudge on this, it will come back to bite you every time. Get receipts for everything, 1099 everyone no matter what, unless they are a corporation. Be totally on top of this or you are burning money in a pile on the lawn. Claim every dollar you make and take every deduction, otherwise you are a drag on the system. Keep perfect records.
Maybe a backup of each one. and do what they say. These are all musts, even for solo acts. Then later you can add a good agent. Then maybe a manager if you have lots of stuff to deal with like a label. You can grow from there. If you don't assemble a good team of the first eight people on that list, you are likely to have problems every time you turn around and you might not have a way to fix them.
+You Don't Find A Manager, A Manager Finds You
1. The arrangement must be win/win. win/lose is ultimately lose/lose. Avoid that.
2. Make an agreement that either one of you can walk away at any time and everything is cool.
Keep taking lessons and studying and working. This is the main art strategy. Research, learn, study, experiment, develop, edit.
+Ten Things I'm Still Learning About Being in a Band
This can be a very rewarding experience. Historically musicians have been barbers and bartenders and all kinds of stuff to make ends meet. This is totally fine. Don't worry about it. It's cool. Do what you need to do. Waiting tables will give you lots of stuff to write songs about. I used to call myself the king of the part time job, because I could get up out of my chair at any time and go get a job of some sort. not that it would be the greatest job of course, but I could go and get something going. I've cleaned pools, painted apartments, done maintenance work, taught music, worked in a factory, threw newspapers, drove a delivery truck, cooked, all kinds of stuff, and none of it killed me. Through it all I was able to keep practicing and writing music and studying what i was doing. Bills? Hey no problem, go flip a few burgers and I can pay that and get back to playing the banjo. Get a job in a dance band whatever I have to do. Just live within your means and you can avoid so many hassles. Hassles interrupt your practice routine.
+Music Industry Jobs & Internships Listings
It isn't about you it's about your art. Do what's good for your art and don't draw attention to yourself as much as the art. If your main focus is on the art, waiting tables is no big deal because you are doing it to support your art. If your main focus is you, you are not going to like waiting tables. You will feel like you are way too good for that.
I know this sounds ridiculous in a performance based industry, but think about this. Here is a recipe for disaster.
my value = my performance + other people's opinions
The reason why, is that someday, you are going to have an off day and/or someone is going to criticize you. If you put your value in the world like that, you are going to have a bad time of it. I speak from experience. I only learned this at the age of 46. Finding my true value fixed this for me. [Write me if you want to know what it is.] But establish your value outside of how well you did on the gig and what the papers said about you, otherwise you are going to be miserable and you are going to make everyone else miserable. Somedays you play better than others. This doesn't make you a great person. Somedays you make lots of errors. This doesn't make you a bad person.
+The Worst Brand of Opening Bands
Gossip means you aren't in the problem or the solution, you are just talking about someone and probably gaining pleasure from something bad not happening to you or envying something good that happened to someone else. Spend your energy on getting better at your art.
They can help or they can drag you down. Here's the scoop: if they expect you to be the primary distributor of the product, don't sign the deal. The typical deal is a 90/10 split, you get the ten minus every expense related to the project. Thus you are paying for everything and giving the label 90 percent of the gross. Read that sentence again.
If they aren't really really offering you something good in terms of promotion, or something....some tangible quantitized tie-in to something bigger, skip it. You can hire that stuff yourself easier. Talk to other artists on the roster and ask them what they think. Any more, if you are an emerging artist, it's going to be hard to find a label home. They are losing so much dough they only want for sure money makers or somewhat less money losers on the roster, and they are dropping folks right and left. This is all good for you. Take heart. It's a 90/10 deal and you get the 10 and they want you to be the primary distributor of the product plus pay for the whole deal - those are not very good terms. In addition, they will charge you eight bucks plus shipping for your own cds that you can make for either zero or one dollar. and they might complain about every little detail. Again, if they really have an idea for a bang up thing they are thinking of, by all means have a go. If they are motivated and have a track record and have ideas and are workable, they can really help. However, you might want to have an out. Have an out clause in there. Shooting from the hip, i'd tell you to avoid the whole thing and do it yourself. It's very likely that the person that brings your act into the label fold will get fired. Then you can get stuck with four years left on the deal and no one will return your calls. Then they just hope you will get another deal and someone will buy out the rest of the contract. Lots of bands close up shop at this point.
There are some labels that operate with different models. I have had very good success with them. They tend to be more punk rock style outfits. You might want to investigate that. The standard deal referred to in the preceeding paragraph is pretty hard to profit from unless the contract is on your letterhead. The punk rock deal goes something like this... all the black ink goes in a list, all the red ink goes in a list, find the difference, split what's left if it's a positive number - fifty fifty. These are really the only deals i ever made money on. The point is, there are some other ways to look at stuff contractually. If the deal is win/win, great. If it's win/lose, skip it. If the label in question is locked into doing contractual things a certain way, this won't be for your benefit. You are creative, your business arrangements can be creative.
+Major vs. Indie: What really happens when you sign a record deal
If you have a draw, agents, labels or investors [which i do not recommend], stuff will come to you. If you skip this step and start trying to talk to industry people and you don't have a draw yet, you are going to be sorry [unless you are really hot looking or have a famous parent and/or willing to sign away the rights to the whole thing of course]. Build your own audience. If you can sell your own records that you make yourself and do your own shows, you can attract the attention of industry folks and get your calls returned. Then you probably won't need them unless you want them. That's a better bargaining position for you. Work on your draw.
If you don't have a draw, these are some likely things to look at:
- where you are playing isn't the right place
- the music isn't there yet
- the time isn't right
+How to Make Your Audience Love You!
In any case, the answer is to forge ahead. Keep doing it. Always keep writing and practicing.
Keep working on finding more and better places to play and new contexts within which to place your work. If something feels right, it probably is right. If you are having to bang your head against the wall in regard to something, it may be better to drop it sooner. The longer you work on something that isn't going to work out job-wise, I think the more time we waste.
I wouldn't get too hung up about opening slots. They are okay and you can increase your draw, but as far as that being the principle strategy you are using, it may not work. The old model of thinking that if you open for someone and do a good job you can get some of their audience interested in your work is not really that reliable. Find a new model. If you meet someone who wants to work on your team, and you are thinking of hiring them and they offer this as the main strategy, this is not a creative workable person. They are working on business models that are decades old. This ploy will work sometimes, but it should be part of an overall deal, not the main thing. Just like if you went to interview a financial advisor and he said, "what we are going to try to do is to buy low and sell high," and behaves as though he has just isolated the plutonium isotope. You might need a little more horsepower upstairs than that if you get my drift.
I work for free when it's kind of my idea to do so. If someone else suggests it, I tend to pass. I also pass on a job where they say they aren't going to pay you, but you'll sell lots of cds. When i did not adhere to this, I was sorry.
I'm not really a self promotion person, and find that sort of distasteful. In my experience, the strong self promotion vibe alienates people or attracts folks that you don't want to work with. Maybe i just didn't do it right but this did not work for me. I've had much better results endeavoring to let the art speak for itself.
+Shows: Which Ones to Play, When to Play Them, and Why
If you draw ten people, and the cover is ten bucks a head, you gross one hundred dollars, not five hundred. Don't get mad at the agent, club owner or whatever because of simple math. You drew ten folks. Guess what? That's better than nine. If you want a raise, figure out how to draw more folks. This is not as mysterious as some would suggest, but you can't ask for more than you bring in the door. If you don't believe this, try producing some concerts of your own."
Related Blog Posts:
+How to Make a Living Playing Music - Part 2
+7 Signs Your Grind is Finally Paying Off
+Defining Success And How To Achieve It With A Career In Music