Con-Artists, and Scams In The Music Industry

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

As many of you know by now, this industry is a very difficult one in which to maneuver unless you are in the inner circle. There is a large circle of people who all do business together, and getting into that inner circle is never easy. It’s even gotten harder as the music industry is making less and less money these days.

The cool thing about Hip Hop is that we have never waited for an invitation, and we don’t care if you like us, we just bulldoze our way into situations and make the best of it. I call this ‘kicking in the door.” We don’t knock and wait for an answer, we kick that bitch in! Part of kicking in the door, is knowing how, when, and where—and what, to kick in. An even larger part of that is making moves utilizing relationships and connections. If you are missing a key aspect, you need to be able to pick up the phone and call someone legitimate who has that access or knows someone else that they can call to gain access. That access allows you entry (kicking in the door) to the industry, and achieving success will keep you there. Surrounding you, every step of the way, are bullshit people who claim to have access and connections, but don’t. At best, they can get a meeting or a call returned, but they can’t close the deal.

Let me be real frank here: if you are the type of person that people do not like, or if you have any asshole tendencies (including an over inflated ego), you should NOT be on the front lines. Find someone in your camp who is a people person and can kiss a little bit of ass to get what is needed. It’s not a problem if you are not that person, as long as you don’t try to be something you are not. People see right through the bullshit in this industry very quickly, and we all talk to each other (in fact, male or female, we are little gossiping bitches in this industry, so expect bad stuff to spread faster than a forest fire).

The hardest aspect for you to overcome, if you are NOT in that inner circle, is knowing who is legitimate, whom to trust, and to whom to turn when you need something accomplished. This industry is ripe with sharks, snakes, scam artists, and idiots. And all of them have one goal—to separate you from your money, especially if it appears as though you have a lot of it.

In the music industry, there are a LARGE handful of clueless people who suck at what they do, but will happily charge you money for that. You will lose money if you fuck with them. You will also lose credibility with the legitimate people if you fuck with them. Inevitably, I get a handful of people who come to me every week asking me to undo some stupid shit that another “consultant” did to fuck up their project. It is ten times harder to clean up someone else’s mess than it is to start a project from scratch, so expect to be turned down by the legit folks, if your project is already a shambles. I know I won’t touch it.

Oddly, the clueless people who suck at working other people’s projects, seem to be masters of their own self-promotion. Not only are they not too busy to send out a ridiculous number of email blasts talking about their “success” on a project (I especially LOVE the ones that come through talking about the meetings they’ve had that didn’t lead to anything, but they sure have pictures of themselves with famous artists and CEOs who would never take their calls again), but they think that doing a little bit of work is the same as finishing a project from A to Z, and they pump that up publicly. I guess it’s like a little kid learning the alphabet, where they feel that if they can recite the first four letters of the alphabet, it gives them the right to claim they know the entire alphabet. And then they go brag about it.

I have spent the past year undoing incredible damage that one of these “master self-promoters” has done to an artist’s career. And he or she is still out there claiming to have built success for this artist, when all that was accomplished was a big mess for 4 other industry professionals to have to sort out and clean up. Every time I receive an email blast from this idiot talking about what a great job he did building this artist, I cringe and roll my eyes in disbelief. It’s hard for me to decipher if he or she really feels that something positive was accomplished, or if the goal is just to claim success to get checks from other artists who don’t know any better.

Part of me wants to expose the fraud, and part of me wants to accept that this person’s intentions may have been good, just that ignorance is bliss. On a similar note, there’s an artist out there (many actually) who has built some limited success on taking others’ music and selling it as his own. Of course, in this industry, exposure comes very quickly—you get about a 2 or 3 year run before everyone finds out what a fraud you are. This artist recently got signed and then dropped from a major label when it was discovered that he has limited fans but bodacious self-promotion. Why is it that other industries have Better Business Bureaus, Consumer Report Agencies, and Ralph Nader type whistle blowers to expose the frauds, but in the music industry we shrug off the frauds who are jerking people out of millions of dollars every year? I hear folks compare the music industry to the streets and the drug game regularly, but if that were true, we’d have no scams because the price of ripping someone off would be very, very high.

There’s an artist in Indiana, whose parents were bilked out of a quarter million dollars that they invested into their son’s career (the Feds got involved in this one). A few guys out of Chicago with no traceable track record of success took these people for a financial ride, promising to help their son accomplish his dream of being a superstar producer. When I asked the parents what made them trust the guys (a Google search turned up NO information on them), they pointed out that these guys claiming to be music industry executives always showed up to their home in a limousine, so they assumed they were successful. Classic. That’s worthy of dumping a quarter million dollars into a slick talking charlatan. They pulled up in a limo. Jimmy Iovine, the head of Interscope Records (one of the most successful labels on the plant) wouldn’t even pull up in a limo.

I remember meeting with a charismatic “producer” when I lived in NY. He flew in from out of town. He constantly cited God for his success and even closed our meeting with “may God bless you!” He had a beat CD of incredible music. What I did not know at the time was that this beat CD contained beats of not his own work, but the production of 3 or 4 other producers from his hometown. Although I never did business with him, that “producer” went on to get a publishing deal for his production even though it was not his music. He never became a “super producer” because the real producers back home caught on to what he was doing. Two of those producers who got jerked by this bullshit artist have gone on to become platinum producers in this industry, and the bullshit producer has just recently been exposed for being the sham that he is. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy!! I hope God “blesses” him properly.

All this to say, when you do other people dirty—intentionally, or through inexperience and ignorance, there is a price to pay. This industry is built on connections and relationships. Once you burn them out, there’s nowhere else for you to go, but down. And it happens very, very quickly. And I am happily spreading the word.

Developing Relationships

This is the UNEDITED version...

Developing Relationships
By, Wendy Day (www.WendyDay.com)

You have heard me stress the importance of team, over and over again. Just as Lebron James, who is inarguably one of the best basketball players in the world, could not take on and win against the worst team in the league by himself—even as talented as he is, no artist can succeed without a team of people propelling them forward.

Team + Grind = Success.

David Banner said it best, so I will quote him here: “One of the mistakes I made was not continuing the same grind I had earlier in my career once I got on.” It is important to put in the work and to keep putting in the work, on a regular basis. Building a rap career is similar to politics in that it’s about shaking hands, kissing babies, and meeting fans (and making an impact on fans) one by one.

Team + Grind = Success.

I just got back from spending 28 days on the road with BloodRaw, where we went to 26 different cities. He has an album dropping this Spring, and we felt it was best to get him back in front of his fans, and potential new fans, to connect with the new music and to reconfirm all the work and grind that Raw has put in over the years that he was unsigned. It was time to take Mr Florida regional, and then national.

By “we,” I mean BloodRaw’s team: the staff at CTE (he’s signed to Young Jeezy’s label, which has a deal with Def Jam for their releases), his management team of Czar Management helmed by Jimmy Henchmen with Snake doing the day to day, me, and his publicist, Kim Ellis—plus, of course, BloodRaw himself.

Since there is no money involved in the early stages of an artist’s career, it’s important for the team to be devoted and work harder than if there was actual payment involved. Getting people to do work on speculation (the promise of something in the future that may or may not actually happen) is extremely difficult. That dedication is based on the relationships that the artist has. It’s pretty obvious that the average person would not put in hard work randomly for just any artist, but someone who believes in the artist as a person and their ability to succeed, will put in hard work, dedication, and time.

There were seven of us who went out on the road with Raw, again, with no money involved. We had Raw’s artist and hype man Gator, the security team of Scrappy and King to keep us safe, Nokey who filmed the tour and uploaded footage daily to Raw’s YouTube TV station, Raw’s DJ Mike Fresh, and me (I routed and planned the promotional tour on a shoestring budget that made sense to both BloodRaw and CTE). Our individual relationships with Raw is what got us out on the road with him, and kept us there when times got tough. Not one of us was paid to be there. Not even Raw.

We woke up everyday in a different city, visited retail stores, radio stations, DJs, clubs, high schools, the ‘hood in every city, and malls. In some cities we even spent time on campuses at the Black colleges. The key was to figure out who would buy a BloodRaw CD and reach them in the areas where they’d be hanging out. Performing at the clubs every night was also important to let folks see and hear the single, “Louie,” featuring Young Jeezy. Working a single is what spreads the word about an artist and the impending CD release.

We focused heavily on the streets and the DJs because we needed a certain amount of spins at radio to get Def Jam excited about BloodRaw as an artist. The staff at Def Jam is based in New York City—they have no idea what’s hot on the streets of Dothan, Macon, or Gainesville. It’s the artist’s job to show them. Truth is they care about Jeezy, and Raw is Jeezy’s artist. We needed to get them as excited about Raw as Jeezy is—in fact, moreso.

Relationships are what enabled us to find key people in each market to take us around and share their market with us. While an artist can infiltrate a market without someone from that market involved, it’s always easier when there is someone there who can roll with the team from point to point. It also gives the artist a local contact person so that if something is going on in that market, they can educate the artist, or easily reach out to the artist to bring him or her back for a show or an important event.

So in a market like Mobile AL, where a key industry person like Dirty Dan was there to take us to all of the ‘hoods, the strip clubs, the radio clubs, the Malls, high schools that mattered, and even to show us the best chicken wing shack and a local studio where the artists in Mobile record, it was invaluable to have that relationship that allowed Dan to do all that work as a favor to us. He was even able to get us into the radio station to appear on Nick At Night’s show—BloodRaw’s relationship with Nick kept us there most of the night.

Relationships go further than money in the music business. While many people try to buy their way into the industry, the smart ones learn to leverage their relationships and trade favors. But the important aspect of trading favors is to actually remember what people have done for you in the past and repay their kindness when you can.

Sometimes it’s relatively easy, such as us staying in contact with DJ Neko in Augusta, and DJ Hotrod in Savannah, and offering them exclusive material on all of the artists our team has access to (which are quite a few artists from The Game to AlphaMega, to Gorilla Zoe to Young Jeezy, etc). Sometimes it’s a bit more difficult when you have a DJ in Charlotte helping out, like DJ Chuck T, who already has access to everyone from whom he would ever need something exclusive. The key is to figure out how you can be helpful to those who’ve been helpful to you, and fulfill it.

As we visited with DJs along our promo tour, one resounding theme kept recurring. The DJs, both club and radio, could recount endless stories about artists they’ve helped in the past by showing love on a record, only to have gotten nothing in return but broken promises. One of the DJs in SC shared a story about helping an artist years ago who had no budget but had a hit record, and while this artist promised the moon to DJs throughout the south, once he became a star he changed all of his phone numbers and did nothing for any of the DJs. One thing DJs do is talk to each other, and that artist’s name came up over and over again on our promo tour. He hadn’t just burned one bridge, he’s burned many. This is especially sad because this artist still puts out records, and is nowhere near the level of an Eminem or a Nelly, and perhaps this is why. Many, many DJs really feel burned by him, and won’t spin his records.

This is a “who you know” business. Knowing the wrong people is just as detrimental to a career as knowing the right people and fucking them over. And it may not even be the artist’s intention to fuck them over, it may just happen because it’s the circumstance the artist is in. Regardless, a burned bridge is a burned bridge. They are almost impossible to repair.

There was a radio DJ of some importance who told me a story about an artist who always called him every few days when he had a record that was about to come out. He would stress to the DJ how much he needed him on the record because his label wasn’t fully behind him. He’d even pop into the market semi-regularly and stay at the DJs house, eat his food, and drink his booze. The artist would do free show after free show as he attempted to build his career—for everybody but the DJ who was helping him. Then, once the artist had some success, not only could the DJ no longer get in touch with the artist, but the artist stopped coming through his market to promote, bypassing this market for bigger markets where he could make more money. To add insult to injury, the label, not knowing there was once a relationship between the artist and the DJ, hired the competing DJ across town to do street team work for the project (the artist never stepped in to right this wrong).

Do you imagine this key DJ will ever support anything this artist does? If this artist has artists coming up under him, do you suppose this DJ will ever support any of them? Probably not. After staying at this man’s house, and getting countless spins on a record that could have gone to another artist with a bigger budget, the least this artist could have done was arrange to come back once he was successful, and do a free show for the DJ. Most DJs have a night during the week where they have club access, and doing a show and letting the DJ have the door is a nice way to let everyone eat and repay a favor. Some artists are too short sighted to see this.

Sadly, the artists who’ve come before and done people wrong, are making it difficult for the new artists coming through now and need help. Many of the DJs, promoters, and street team guys have been burned so many times that they are reluctant to work with anyone new. It hurts everyone, especially the industry.

Relationships are key to success in this business. It’s important to guard your relationships and connections as tightly as you guard your money—in fact, when the money is gone, all you’ll have left are your relationships. At the very least, call everyone that has helped you get to whatever level you are at right now, and tell them thank you! Maybe even ask them if there’s anything you can do for them…