Three Ways to Make Big Elephant Dollars in the Music Industry
Welcome to spinme.com, where we help working musicians make more money making music. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed or our weekly newsletter. Thanks for visiting!
The first - and only - time I ever heard someone use the phrase “big elephant dollars,” it erupted from the lips of Kal Rudman, one of the industry’s most successful “hitmakers.”
We were both in a studio, observing the lead singer of a band from England on his first promotional tour. Kal proclaimed that this singer/songwriter had the chops to make it big. At the time, neither of us expected the consolidation of our industry to take such a toll on artists like this. The artist managed a few minor hits in America, but never got any real support from his label. He’s a superstar in Europe, though. He earned that success from years and years of touring.
In ten years of working with musicians in radio, television and recording companies, I’ve only found three reliable ways to make a solid living making music.
1. Own your own record label. If you learn anything from reading this book and Steve Albini’s essay, it should be that in any game where the label makes $710,000 and the artist loses $14,000, you want to be the label.
2. Write a song that gets placed inside a film or a television commercial. This earns what the folks on Music Row call “mailbox money.” Since producers pay licensing fees directly to songwriters (via publishing societies), many a songwriter has retired comfortably from three chords and a hook, without ever engaging the services of a record label.
3.Tour your ass off. This is the tried-and-true method to start building your own career. In most cases, you can’t achieve significant success in either #1 or #2 if you don’t do #3.
In the early days of my career, I never fully understood the logic behind #3. Wouldn’t it just be easier, I reasoned, to put all your effort into making a great record and letting that sell itself?
Two things make that impossible.
First, international conglomerates have locked up album sales so tightly that an artist on a major label simply will not earn a significant amount of money on a release unless it sells several millions of copies. Instead, most major label recording deals leave artists seriously mired in debt.
Second, and this is the really key thing here - audiences like records, for sure, but they LOVE the opportunity to connect, intimately, with the artists that make them. Every concert, every album signing, every chance encounter is another opportunity for a fan to deepen that relationship.
It’s this kind of relationship-building that major labels rely on to build their own businesses. When was the last time you bought a record simply because of the label it was on? (4AD Records is about the only one I could think of, and a conglomerate swallowed them years ago.) Think about it - HUGE companies that make music have two basic strategies that they use to grow their own businesses:
1. Buy lots of airtime on commercial radio and television.
2. Invest a modest sum of money on “tour support” and send bands out into the world with products to sell.
EXERCISE
Which one of these two strategies do you think you could start working on today?
