Sunday, February 28, 2010

Mistakes Artists Make

Mistakes Artists Make
By, Wendy Day from Rap Coalition (www.WendyDay.com)

I’ve learned so much from mistakes—both my own and others’. Mistakes are NOT necessarily a bad thing (provided you can fix the situation when things go wrong), if one learns from them. The cool thing about mistakes is that it means that you are trying new things and taking action (assuming you aren’t making the same mistake over and over)! Here are some mistakes I have learned from and that I’ve seen others’ learn from—some are small errors in judgment and others are million dollar career killing mistakes. If this prevents one person from making one fatal mistake, it was worth the time it took to research and write it. Thank you to everyone who shared their painful stories to help others avoid the same pitfalls (I’ve protected your identity, as promised). These are in no particular order of importance…

Surrounding Yourself With The Wrong Team: If the best player in the NBA stepped out on the court alone, against the worst team in the NBA, the worst team would win. Why? Because they are a team working against one player. There’s a powerful force that occurs when multiple people come together with one goal in mind—especially if each person plays their role and stays in their lane. And teamwork is especially powerful if you have key players who are the best at what they do, all coming together to move forward towards one goal.

New artists don’t often choose the best teams. They often surround themselves with their friends and family who know very little about the music industry or how the business works. Whether due to trust issues or laziness in finding the right people, I’ve seen more careers end because an artist has trusted their careers to the wrong people.

There are people in the music business who are good at what they do, and even more who are not. Unfortunately, because it’s a “who you know” business, one’s popularity in the music business is not conditional upon being good at what one does. If an artist doesn’t do thorough research on a person to find out if their skill level is sub-par, they could very easily have a team member who sucks at what they do. For example, having managed a major recording artist is NOT a sign of aptitude, it’s a sign of access. Managing multiple recording artists successfully IS a sign of strong management skill.

A team consists of a manager, an entertainment lawyer, an accountant, a booking agent, and a publicist (I am the only person I know who includes a publicist as a mandatory part of the team, but if there’s no one broadcasting the artists’ moves and triumphs, no one will know). Since this is a “who you know” business, relationships, connections, experience, and aptitude are all important.

On the flip side, often artists choose the wrong people to surround themselves with and are outcast by the industry. This fact may be hidden temporarily while the artist is experiencing a little success or popularity, but it really shows itself down the road when there are no endorsements, limited media coverage, reduced shows (burn a promoter one time and your show money is affected all over), etc. Everyone will put up with a bullshit team while the artist is riding a hot record. But where it matters is on the upside or downside of that hit record, and this is where a strong team comes into play. This is the main reason why urban artists have such a short shelf life….they often have shitty representatives and terrible teams.

A contract can protect your rights, but it can also hurt you. It’s important to have a well-connected, experienced entertainment attorney look over everything before you sign it. It’s often what’s missing from a contract that can hurt you more than what’s in there. You need professionals on your side to advise you.

Indecision -Or- Jumping From Plan To Plan: Quite a few artists go from person to person in the industry seeking a quick and lucrative way into the industry. When one plan doesn’t seem to lead anywhere, or even before giving it a solid chance, they meet someone else that they think can advance them forward and they jump from person to person, plan to plan, or crew to crew. Aside from being exceedingly disloyal, it doesn’t make good business sense to do this. The best way to find a direction and plan for yourself that will work, is to learn as much as possible about the music business, devise a plan that’s best for your situation, and then move forward to enact the plan with the proper team. If you’ve given one plan a solid try and enough time to work, and it doesn’t, then it makes sense to rethink your plan and try another angle. But to jump from industry person to industry person alienates the folks who really can help you, and makes you appear desperate for success, thereby attracting to you all of the bottom feeders who may want to take advantage of your desperation. There are numerous paths to success in this business. Find one that works for you, make a decision, and stick with it long enough to see if it is the right path for you.

Waiting Too Long To Realize Something Is Wrong: As I am writing this article, I got a call from a major platinum producer who informed me that he was never paid his royalties on a number of #1 hits he had with a record label. I remember these hit records because they are classic records today, but they were in the early 1990s, which was almost ten years ago. My first question to the producer was: why did you wait so long to try and collect your money? “We were family,” he said, and “I was hoping I’d get more work from that label.” I won’t mention that the label eventually hired in-house producers and this guy hasn’t made a record for that label in at least 5 to 7 years. How long did he hang onto hope of more work?!

In law, there is a statute of limitations on everything including collecting back royalties, and except for a case of fraud (which is difficult to prove) an artist has a limited time to file a claim against their royalties due. That time can be anywhere from 2 to 4 years, and is stipulated in whatever agreement was signed at the time. Additionally, most artists and producers have limited financial resources for legal fees and filing lawsuits against labels that are international conglomerates with very deep pockets and lawyers on staff. It’s important to chase your money immediately—twice a year, every year. Royalties are paid in March and September of each year and part of your team’s job is to chase money due, audit regularly, and keep track of what’s owed and outstanding.

Do not let a label or powerful artist bully you. By speaking up for what’s due you, you are NOT hurting your career, not stopping more work coming your way, or creating tension. By not being paid properly, they are fucking you out of what’s rightfully yours. If the money isn’t coming to you, it’s going to somebody—you earned it, so collect it in a timely fashion.

Self-Destructing and Making Bad Decisions: This mistake is the most popular one I see artists, producers, and DJs make in our industry. I don’t have a solution for this one beyond getting your shit together as an artist and getting some professional help if you continually do dumb shit and can’t stop yourself. I most often see this occur surrounded by drugs and alcohol. The music industry is naturally a “party” industry and has a fun vibe. Most artists spend their time in clubs when they aren’t recording, so the influence is constant. But many artists take partying to the extreme-- to the point where they miss important events in their schedules, get arrested, exercise bad judgment, or do inferior work. I’m not saying not to have fun, or party. I’m saying that if you have to take drugs or have “chemical cocktails” on a regular basis, you are a junky (the industry seems to have a fascination with syrup, ecstasy, Viagra, pills, cocaine, and weed—and often mix them, hence the term “chemical cocktails”).

But self-destruction doesn’t just come in the guise of excessive partying. I’ve seen rappers have babies like they are accessories, spend more money than they make, fight to prove their “realness,” beef with people who ether them, make music that is outside of their lane, date the wrong women, do prison bids mid-career, die, not pay people properly, say or do dumb stuff publicly, etc. Self-destructive behavior comes in many forms. In my opinion, the goal in life is to be the best human being you possibly can be, and if you are a miserable scumbag that can’t even stand to be around yourself, it’s time to change some things about yourself. No time like the present!!

I have also seen artists make horrendous decisions about their careers—like a street rapper choosing to let his label bully him into making super commercial pop music. Or an artist has a very public negative event happen (a sex tape leaks, domestic violence, a drug overdose, and public fight or shooting, an arrest, etc) and doesn’t handle the situation immediately with qualified publicity firms that specialize in damage control. Exxon has a major tanker accident with the Valdez, killing the eco system and wildlife for generations and for hundreds of miles and recovers, yet you punch someone in the face or have a sex tape release and your career never recovers…. Mel Gibson gets arrested and spews anti-Semitic remarks in a drunken stupor in an industry where his livelihood depends mostly on Jewish executives and it doesn’t even dent his career, but you get into a verbal battle with another rapper and it ends your credibility and career? C’mon son… learn from others who’ve survived worse.

Not Understanding How The Industry Works: Back in the 80s and early 90s, I understood how artists got jerked. It was difficult to learn how the label system worked and hard to do any research on the aspects of the industry that effect artists. But in the mid-90s all of that changed with the internet. Today, anyone can research and find out anything they need to know about anyone or anything. Not understanding how this industry works is unacceptable for anyone considering a career in the music industry. So if you come into this industry just thinking you can rap, sing, make beats, or DJ and that’s all you need to know, you are an idiot.

You don’t get “put on” in this industry without getting pimped—so building your own buzz and leverage so you put yourself on is a good career move. A great connection doesn’t lead to a great career, but it does lead to making someone else a ton of money at your own expense. Sending out demos to record labels won’t get you “discovered,” but it will allow an idea, a beat, or a whole song to be stolen from you (even if you copyright your songs, so you have enough money to sue and enough proof that they took your song?). Promoting yourself at industry convention after industry convention doesn’t build your buzz with fans and people who buy records (the ones that REALLY get labels’ attention), it just makes people like me hug you a lot. Getting signed to a record deal isn’t a guarantee that your career will take off you will be successful. More people sign to labels each year than records come out by that label. Just because you have the funding to start your own label doesn’t mean you have the talent or know-how to do so. I’ve seen some mediocre artists spend millions of dollars to fail.

Take the time to study the industry, learn who the players are, and find out who’s on the teams behind each successful artist (this shouldn’t be difficult to do since so few artists are successful today). Attend industry events and actually network with industry people and attend the panel discussions instead of macking hoes or looking for your next boytoy. Read as much as you can about the music industry. Some great books are Confessions Of A Record Producer (Moses Avalon), Everything You Need To Know About The Music Industry (Donald Passman), Dancing With The Devil (Mark Curry), Hit Men (Fredric Dannen—this is a history book more than a how-to book), etc. Meet with as many successful people who are doing what you want to do, as will meet with you. Many won’t take the time for you, but many will. Build relationships with those who will.

A solid understanding of how publishing works, performance rights societies (ASCAP and BMI), and how to get a record deal, will prevent you from getting jerked out of money by others. A little bit of education goes a long way in this business. We can’t stop the huge amount of fuck boys in this industry who will try to steal your dreams from you to make a quick buck, but you can educate yourself so their pitch doesn’t make good business sense to you. You can keep yourself from being a victim.

Focus On The Talent, Not The Money: In the mid-90s, the music industry shifted from being about talent to being about money. It seemed to become the new dope game. Folks were trying to get into this industry to hit a quick lick, not because they wanted to impact music or propel the artform of Hip Hop forward. International corporations got involved, either as record labels or through endorsement opportunities with international superstar artists hawking their products.

Rather than choosing the best music or writers for songs, companies and even artists themselves began choosing people that were signed to them or their own companies to create for them. Rather than choosing the best producer to compliment a rapper, labels began choosing in-house producers to make the beats because the label would retain an additional 50% of the ownership, or get a kickback from the producer or writer of the song.

Some employees at companies quickly tired of seeing the money wasted by their employers and figured out enterprising ways to get a bigger share of the pie—they started secret production companies with the artists they signed, took big kickbacks from artists in exchange for record deals, signed artists and then cut out the teams and producers who got them where they were, chose producers based on kickbacks or co-ownership of the music, chose song writers based on kickbacks or co-ownership of the songs, etc. Even the artists started their own companies so they could eat off of the artists coming up under them—there’s a lot of money in being a middleman, especially if others are doing all of the work.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Measuring Success

By, Wendy Day from Rap Coalition (www.WendyDay.com)

One of the many changing things in the urban music business is how we measure the success of an artist. Measuring Rap, R&B, Reggae, and even Dance music sales has always been challenging, and even though companies like the Neilsen-owned SoundScan claim to have been 100% effective, they were not.

SoundScan is a company that began measuring music sales in the early 90s by supplying willing music retailers with special scanners and software that counted and tallied up bar code (UPC) scans at the point of purchase (cash registers). Every Sunday night that tally would be automatically downloaded to SoundScan headquarters in White Plains, NY for publication the following Wednesday to subscribers with very deep pockets (the subscriptions are costly), meaning major record labels.

One of the problems with SoundScan is that it has never been able to measure EVERY sales outlet. Many of the independent retailers around the country, where the bulk of rap sales were happening in the 90s, were reluctant to have any counting system overseeing their business. Whether it was for tax reasons (did not want the IRS to know how much music they were really selling) or for business reasons (fear that a chain store would get their retail sales information and open a store directly across the street with lower prices thereby putting them out of business—which ironically happened anyway), many didn’t want to report their sales to anyone. It also didn’t count venue sales until somewhat recently—and they are self-reported, which means it depends upon the honesty of the person reporting.

To make up for this lack of accurate data, SoundScan weighted certain of the willing-to-report stores more heavily than others. This meant that when an independent store, in say St Louis, scanned one sales copy of a CD, it could count as four sold copies to make up for the area’s lack of actual SoundScan reporters. Additionally, many of the SoundScan stores realized early on that there was a business to be made of selling SoundScan scans to labels. Aside from being treated better by the labels because they were a SoundScan reporter (meaning promo dollars spent in their stores for key pricing and positioning campaigns), an economy of “seeding” sprung up around the country which caused labels to send extra boxes of CDs to retailers for additional scans for a price. Some would scan the chosen CD at the register daily no matter what other title was sold, while others would receive boxes of free product to scan throughout the week. Smart labels controlled the scans and made it appear as natural as possible, sometimes to have a big first week (hitting #1 on the Billboard chart was a sure way to garner extra press and attention which led to additional sales) and sometimes indie labels used this method to land a bigger deal with a major label.

Buying SoundScan in urban music (at least in the areas in which I travelled) became such a popular practice that when I was shopping deals at the major labels from 1995 to 2005, I used to separate out the SoundScan sales from the independent retailers, and if it was more than 15% of overall sales by the artist, I knew (and the major labels knew) they were buying SoundScan. I would pass on shopping those deals because I knew the Major labels would see the fraud and I didn’t want that fake shit to sully my otherwise stellar reputation for doing deals (I’m proud to say that I’ve done some of the best deals in urban music from 1995 to 2005 when there were good deals to be had). I was proud that my deals led to superstar sales levels (except two) and fake scans weren’t the way to achieve superstar status (at least not as an indie).

In the early years of the 21st century, however, I watched urban sales switch from a full length CD marketplace to a downloaded singles market. I also watched Best Buy and WalMart—the biggest music retailers become replaced by iTunes in importance and overall sales volume. I also noticed that the core rap fans were not really the active downloaders, the mainstream and pop fans were. So while 50 Cent and Kanye West were fighting illegal downloads, artists like Young Jeezy, Boosie and Webbie were still able to sell large amounts of CDs, especially in the South. I watched an increase of bootlegged CDs pop up at carwashes and swap meets throughout the ‘hoods in the South though, as CDs sold 3 for $10 in most cases, and as the RIAA resorted to suing college kids for illegal downloading instead of shutting down the shops with multiple burners to bootleg CDs. Music became “free” (or close to free) among an entire new generation of fans.

In a way, this shift benefits the indie artists who are out here selling their own CDs. Enterprising bootleggers don’t mass produce music until there is a mass market of sales, and the fans still seem to admire and support the grind of artists who sell their CDs hand to hand, or who travel from town to town promoting their music regionally. While artists and major labels all around me were complaining of bootlegging and lost revenue, I watched the TMI Boyz sell hundreds of thousands of CDs while on the road for almost 18 months straight. Very little of it was measurable by SoundScan.

But even with the inaccuracies in the SoundScan system, the urban music industry used to be able to measure the sales, the response to promotional and marketing efforts, and measure the buzz or hype an artist had. We could see it in the attendance at shows, merchandise sold, and CDs sold. More importantly, we could measure it by area. When I was managing David Banner and Twista, this was important because I knew what areas to target with shows based on sales data, radio spins, and buzz factor. And consequently, knew what areas to target to increase our sales, make sure product was heavy in stores in certain areas, and could target our campaign effectively around those key target areas (Banner was heavy in MS, Washington DC, IL, TN, AL, and GA; while Twista’s main fanbase was IL, TX, LA, MS, IN, OH, and MO).

When I met the guys from Trill Entertainment in 2004, we saw Lil Boosie’s and Webbie’s largest fan base was northern FL, AL, GA, MS, LA, and TN. It was easy to measure and track. The buzz was easy to measure as well, based on their show bookings every weekend and the sales of the indie CDs in the marketplace mostly in those key markets. When radio adds for Webbie entered the equation, it was a no brainer as to where we should go. We didn’t have to wonder where anonymous downloads were occurring, they weren’t.

Today that measurement process is more challenging. I noticed it when Gucci Mane got out of prison in March of 2009. He had a good buzz on the streets from dropping back to back mixed CDs and from OJ Tha Juiceman keeping Gucci’s name alive while he was locked down. But I don’t think anyone could have predicted the $30,000 to $50,000 per show booking price that he’d command almost instantly, with no album in the marketplace and no hot single at radio (this was months before “Wasted” hit radio). There was no way to measure his buzz prior to that. He was kept busy doing shows but still managed to record mixed CDs and keep music in the marketplace. Most of it was downloaded for free (by his choice) from websites and blogs that had become the way to receive new music. Fans at his shows could sing along, word for word. They didn’t need radio singles.

While his MySpace hits increased and his popularity on Twitter was apparent, there was no legitimate measuring system in place to gauge his media mentions, count the downloads (too many sites had music posted), track the shows and price increases, or measure the increase in success he was experiencing. His increased popularity also led to an increase in popularity of the artists surrounding him: Nicky Minaj, OJ Tha Juiceman, and Wacka Flocka Flame.

In today’s music business economy we have no real accurate (or even semi-accurate) way of measuring success for artists. With SoundScan tracking mainstream sales, only the mainstream artists seem to be faring well (Lil Wayne, Kanye, Taylor Swift, Susan Boyle, etc). Meanwhile, I haven’t heard a decrease of music coming from or playing in the ‘hoods of America. Even without SoundScan sales, kids are singing along to every Gucci Mane and Yo Gotti song during their shows (music is from their mixed CDs). They are listening to a larger number of unknown, independent, and unsigned artists than ever, and they aren’t getting the music just from the internet.

As this change is occurring, I’m watching folks who thrive on research and numbers scramble to count MySpace hits, Twitter and Facebook friends, downloads from myriads of websites and Blog sites (too many different ones to count), World Star and VladTV views, etc. Yet none of it is accurate. Software programs can boost numbers on the web as easily as SoundScan swipes could be duplicated at indie retailers in the 90s. Music magazines are becoming obsolete, so purchases of issues based on our favorite artists on the covers are becoming a thing of the past. I guess we’re going to have to let the fans tell us. And this means we need an even closer one-on-one relationship with the fans, the streets, and the internet. What was as easy as picking up SoundScan reports on Wednesday mornings is no more. Oh how I long for those days….

I guess the key, at least for indie labels, is to keep your eye on the sales and the relationships you are building with fans. Last week, Tom Silverman who built the Tommy Boy Records empire in the 80s and 90s (Afrika Bambaataa, De La Soul, Queen Lafifah, Naughty By Nature, Information Society, Coolio, House of Pain, Everlast, etc) and who owns the New Music Seminar, published a study at www.MusicianCoaching.com . He pointed out that in 2009, there were 1,500 independent releases in all genres. Of those 1500, only 13 releases sold over 10,000 units (that’s only $70,000 to $100,000 in wholesale sales). The #2 release was the label I consulted, TMI Boyz. They were the ONLY rap act on that short list of 13. And that list was based on the (inaccurate) SoundScan sales we tabulated at 30,000 CDs sold. While on the road for a year and a half, they sold 2 mixed CDs and a full length CD. Tom’s research was based solely on the CDs that were sold at FYE stores in the South. Since we weren’t focused on SoundScan, just on making money, we weren’t trying to have each sale counted. The bulk of sales were at shows, Mall parking lots, state fairs, flea markets, street corners, gas stations, car washes, high schools, clubs--anyplace where a mass of people were gathered so TMI Boyz could jump out of the wrapped van to make a sale. You may have never heard of them, but they made $1.6 million in sales in 2009. Isn’t that the best measurement of all? Besides, being #2 is good, too.