I Ate Your Microphone

There is nothing like doing a gig and getting paid for it.

There is nothing like doing a CD and getting paid for it.

Musicians these days must be well versed on the business side of the music industry.

The business side of the music is a very complex system but if you start off understanding the basis, at least you’ll be able to get paid and tell the promoter to

Pass the Bread.

That’s right. Your must is intellectual property and you don’t want chump change for those nights that you spend trying to come up with a bridge for a song that’s real good.

You want to have mechanisms in place to collect when it’s time to get paid.

Everyone say “pass the bread”.

You need to keep track of your funky dividends. If you are planning on running your own music business, then you need to join a business development association and take accounting and managerial classes. You can buy music contracts off of the internet and have an attorney assist you to draw up agreements that fit unique situations so you don’t get cheated.

As musicians, we all want to get paid for doing what we enjoy but we must have the right business and accounting systems so that we can get paid. You work hard in your music so you can eat, sleep and spend those hours in the mountains at some cabin writing your songs.

Make sure that whatever you do, understand the business side of things so that you can eat and have a career.

Pass The Bread.

There is nothing like doing a gig and getting paid for it.

There is nothing like doing a CD and getting paid for it.

Musicians these days must be well versed on the business side of the music industry.

The business side of the music is a very complex system but if you start off understanding the basis, at least you’ll be able to get paid and tell the promoter to

Pass the Bread.

That’s right. Your must is intellectual property and you don’t want chump change for those nights that you spend trying to come up with a bridge for a song that’s real good.

You want to have mechanisms in place to collect when it’s time to get paid.

Everyone say “pass the bread”.

You need to keep track of your funky dividends. If you are planning on running your own music business, then you need to join a business development association and take accounting and managerial classes. You can buy music contracts off of the internet and have an attorney assist you to draw up agreements that fit unique situations so you don’t get cheated.

As musicians, we all want to get paid for doing what we enjoy but we must have the right business and accounting systems so that we can get paid. You work hard in your music so you can eat, sleep and spend those hours in the mountains at some cabin writing your songs.

Make sure that whatever you do, understand the business side of things so that you can eat and have a career.

Pass The Bread.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 30th, 2006 at 11:17 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There was a time when radio stations were community owned. Your local D.J. made the programming choices and most local bands got their foot in the door by getting A and B side rotation on the local radio station.

Those were the good old days. Today, in 2006, the ballgame is different.

Former President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which was basically the death blow to community radio stations. Corporate moguls, Clear Channel, started buying up mom and pop stations, upgraded the equipment and then, started dictating the play lists and the artists to be played. This left the local artist out in the cold.

In the old days, the local D.J. was the program manager. For these big corporate conglomerates, your program manager may be 300 miles away in another town. These big wigs don’t know your community and the communities listening style.

Radio was created to serve the community at large. Corporations have made much mint off of stripping communities of its sound that defined them. Can you imagine if this would have happened to the local radio scenes in Detroit, Memphis and Trenton N.J in the 60’s?

As an indie artist, there is still a way to get to your audience. Many cities still have thriving community radio scenes that play great indie music. You can find these stations on the internet by Googling “Community Radio Stations”.

Even though the corporate big wigs think that they are getting over, the community radio scene is going to come back through the Internet and alternate routes to getting heard.