“So, do you think I’m good enough to make it?”: The Scope of Duty in the Representation of Musicians
May 12, 2009 by BrentWoody · Leave a Comment
He’s twenty years old, oozes confidence and hipness and coolness and lots of other ‘nesses that haven’t been made up yet. He’s a musician. His demo tape is ridiculous. Everything about him promises multiple revenue streams, if the public ever gets the chance to react to him.
He’s forty-three years old. Two-hundred twenty-three pounds. Five foot four inches tall. He’s a musician. His demo tape is rough. It’s not rough; it’s scary.
You are a lawyer. Both of them visit your office within a few hours of each other. Both agree to pay your $5,000.00 retainer to perform work on various issues related to their careers in music. One of them asks you to shop the demo to major and indie labels at an hourly rate. The other only wants you to do copyright, trademark, contract and general business work. You are a musician, too. And you know, with reasonable certainty, that the hip twenty year old has the potential to go somewhere. You also know with equal certainty that the forty-three year old does not. If you take the forty-three year old on as a client, do you have a duty to tell him what you think about his talent and the odds of achieving his dreams of success? Should you listen to the demo tape before cashing the retainer check? Or is the talent level or your opinion irrelevant? Suppose later on the forty-three year old asks you to leverage your hard-earned major label connections to shop his scary demo. Do you risk your rep with your label folks? If not, what do you tell the client, if you’ve already billed $3,000.00 worth of work? “I thought it was okay to charge you a lot of money to set up a career that I knew was never going to amount to anything.”
Or, as my friend RJon Robins mentions in his comment on my previous post, suppose you’re a manager or other professional entertainment industry advisor? Are you duty-bound to advise the old guy that he’s not going anywhere? Or do you just perform the tasks that are requested, take the money and let the chips fall where they may, keeping in mind, of course, that Kenny G has sold a lot of records.
My thought is if the client only hires me to perform certain tasks related to setting up business structures for furthering her career and protecting her intellectual property, then whether she can sing or play is irrelevant to me. If a client is a plumber and I perform legal work related to his business, I don’t render an opinion on his ability to work on toilets and, thus, the prospects for his career, before I do the requested tasks.
I have encountered this as a producer, actually fairly often. Someone hires me to produce his project and along the way, asks me whether I think his music is any good. If I say “no,” maybe he doesn’t finish his project with me and looks for a producer who will “believe” in him. As a result, since I don’t want to lose the business, I learn to tap dance. And the really perceptive client will tell me that I have no future in tap dancing.
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Fame and Misfortune
April 21, 2009 by BrentWoody · 1 Comment
After a recent meeting with a client, I was thinking about the wisdom of the sign-with-a-major-label/achieve-fame-first, then-develop-a-longterm-career approach to a life in music. There is no doubt that it can happen this way: An artist signs with a major label, attains enough success through the label to become well-known (even though the artist achieves very little, or no, financial gain), then builds a longterm career from that foundation, independent of a major label. Now, admittedly there are numerous pieces missing from this hypothetical. But what about the validity of the theory itself?
Next post will ask this question: Is a lawyer obligated to tell his musician/client, if the lawyer thinks the musician/client is terrible and has absolutely no chance of succeeding in the music business?
Finally, if you have not checked out the very excellent blog wrtten by my friend, Bill Vincent, get on over there and do it!
Radio
April 1, 2009 by BrentWoody · Leave a Comment
It occurs to me that for most of us, a component of artistic success is that a reasonable (or unreasonable) number of people hear, see or otherwise experience our artistic expression and react positively to it. For pop musicians, that component has traditionally and largely involved radio airplay. After all, how many fewer listens will a song get if it does not receive airplay? iTunes and other digital music services have changed the breadth and nature of distribution, but I think the fact remains that overall, with respect to popular music, radio is still the leading medium for significant music exposure. If this is true and a musician wants to be significantly “known” or recognized, and if radio is the sine qua non of significant artistic exposure, maybe a young artist should sign with a label just to get that exposure (assuming a label deal would even accomplish that), even if the artist could achieve greater financial success by doing it themselves. Now, there are several premises here that may be flawed and I’ll be looking at those in the next day or too. But for a young musician or band, I think the general fundamentals are in place enough to make the question still valid.
Success and a Digital Landscape
March 25, 2009 by BrentWoody · 8 Comments
Jason Feinberg of Music Business Blog has a great post at PBS’ MediaShift suggesting five tips on how to leverage technology (and the alleged declining value of the separation of artists and fans) in order for an artist to more effectively engage his fans in the digital space. Wherever you are on your artistic trajectory, I suggest you take a look at the article and think about what it means for you, if anything.
Like anything, the opportunities resulting from advancements in technology are only as valuable as the effectiveness in which we use the technology. Moreover, effectiveness is inextricably linked to what we hope to achieve. That is, goals and objectives drive the decisions we make, the way we allocate resources (time, money, energy, etc.) and how we measure success. Granted, especially as artists, those goals and objectives, will change along the way. (Shoot, mine have changed four times already this morning.) Still, what we hope to accomplish at the end of the day should determine the direction we decide to head in, the tools we use along the way and the way we measure our progress. (Keep in mind that goals will not determine our direction; we determine our direction and our direction will determine our destination.)
I used to think there were two fundamental (and not necessarily mutually exclusive) expressions of success for the musician. One, become famous. The other, make a living with music. Traditionally, those two avenues have translated to two directions. That is, to become famous, an artist pretty much needed a major label. To make a living (and often a better living than one could as a label artist), an artist could create a local or regional fan base, record and manufacture CDs, do live shows, sell merchandise and promote accordingly. I now realize that for many artists the way they define success involves neither of the foregoing objectives. In fact, they’re happy with playing music on the back porch with the rest of the family. Or they’re cool teaching part-time. Or maybe it’s jamming with friends in the evenings at the local pub and carrying mail by day. Nonetheless, I think it’s true that for many of us, seeing our artistic expressions reflected in the faces (and perhaps, wallets) of others is important and a fundamental piece of whatever it means to be successful.
You all are songwriters, film scorers, performers, producers, jingle-writers, publishers, arrangers and engineers. Has the internet changed your trajectory as an artist? Do new business models and digital venues for artistic expression give you new hope? Does it change your music? Where you once thought your future was in the hands of a label, if one would just pick you up, do you see new new independent opportunities? Have you experienced a label’s response to the paradigm shift by getting into a bad 360 deal? Are you tired of that embarrassing scratching while you wait in line at In-N-Out Burger? Hope to hear from you soon.