How To Make It In The Music Business (Not!)
August 1st, 2008
Where to begin? How can I put you off this awful profession? Many ignorant people think that any kind of placement in the Top Ten is a guarantee of easy money, easy sex and hard drugs. Let me state at the outset: Most bands are skint, smelly, underfed and too wrecked to engage successfully in sexual congress.
And that’s the successful ones.
Pop music isn’t a career, it’s an obsession, an excuse not to get a proper, paying job. For me it started in secondary school. From then on I committed a number of sins against the great Goddess Fortuna which have doomed me to be a ‘never-were’. Here are the things I should have done. Read on and wise up.
1. Start Young.
Take up an instrument at the latest in your early teens, or don’t bother. By the time you’re old enough to order a pint in a bar or club, you should be proficient enough to get a gig there and not embarrass yourself. Assuming you have talent, that is. If you leave it too late you’ll not be proficient enough to earn a living from your muse.
2. Have Talent.
Lots of people can get by in pop, it’s simple music. If, however, your friends and early audiences think your music is ‘all right’, if you keep having to make excuses for your performances every effing gig, then TAKE A HINT! Give up, get back to college, you self-deluding fool! Better yet, learn a trade that people really _want_, _and_ which you can make good money at.
Listen to that small still voice in the night. It knows.
3. Pop Music Is Not Art.
In some ways it’s Art’s antithesis. Artists strive to authentically represent their own subjectivity. Pop musicians just want to get laid and paid. It’s vulgar and Pop-ulist. It’s what gets people to crowd onto the dancefloor and what they roar along to on a drunken Friday night.
So don’t disappear up your own backside, Mr Marylin-Manson-Morrisey-Wannabe. We won’t be sending out search parties.
4. Save Your Money.
One of the worst ways of spending money in this game is in other people’s studios. Most studios in Britain are staffed by under-qualified chancers who say, for example, that, sure, they can sync your two workstations to their 24 track tape machine so you can do some vocal overdubs and a mix all in a 10 hour session at
Tags: hit record, make a hit record, music business, music industry, music promotion, musicians