Nobody Holds A Gun To Your Head When You Sign On That Dotted Line!!

Music Business 101: If you start working at McDonald's, don't you first have to learn how to run the register, cook the fries, clean the machines, the bathroom and mop the floors properly, in order to be the best employee you can be?? The same should be applied to your music business career, stop sleeping on it, and letting non-music professionals handle it for you, who are just trying to separate you from your money. In order to reap the full benefits of the business you have decided to become a part of, then you need to learn it inside and out, no excuses!!!

This was a response that I had to commenters yesterday on a blog that had posted Nas's letter to Def Jam. This was not a direct response to Nas himself, because as an artist and producer I feel his pain, because I was left hanging in the balance by a major a few years ago, and because they didn't support the album, it didn't go anywhere.

Know that creativity, or having aspirations to make it is not an excuse to not know the business. I'm an artist and producer myself, so I will always stand in defense of artists, but they need to learn the business before they get into these contracts, whether it's with one of the 4 major distributors, an online digital distributor, or otherwise. How can you expect to create and earn revenue if you don't know the sources of that revenue and how to protect them? I can't tell you how many artists I've worked with that know all, say all, but as I break the business down to them, they find out they truly didn't know as much as they thought they did. No company is holding a gun to any of these artists and telling them to sign on the dotted line or else. They have more than enough time and opportunity to consult with a music professional and/or entertainment attorney before they agree to the terms of any contract without knowing what is in it, or completely understanding it.

I place a lot of information on my fb, myspace, and other social networking sites, and my blog, musicbizinfo, that is pertinent to an artists and his/her career, yet I can count one one hand how many access this "FREE" information for themselves. It's one thing to not know and want to know, but to act like you know, and then get screwed anyway, who can you be angry with but yourself? I know numerous other music professionals right here on fb that pour out information daily, but no one accesses this information either. Yet some half naked girl posts something and everyone is on board.

I remember while I was working at a one stop distributor, we had a corporate meeting with some execs from what was then the "6 major distributors" at the time. A conversation was struck up about Eminem. The label he was signed to let it be known that if they had not signed Eminem, they would have signed several clones like him. So to them it's not about creativity, it's the bottom line, revenue. They could care less about creativity as long as they can make a buck off it. This is why the state of the industry is spiraling out of control now, because of the content out here that folks are passing off as "music", brought on by the insatiable appetite of the major distributors of reaping more and more from the artist's creativity.

Traditional radio is dying, you need to know a radio consultant in order to get stuff played on radio now, because the radio broadcasting companies have a monopoly on a block of stations, there are only 4 majors, numerous one stop and wholesale distributors have bitten the dust or merged to stay afloat, and a host of online digital distribution companies that are providing content to the masses, have sprung up overnight it seems, and are slowly taking over the business. Little Wayne just moved over 100,000 units of an all digital release of his new album "I Am Not A Human", further proof that the days of "physical" distribution are dying a very slow and hideous death. Look at the inroads that Prince and Radiohead has made for artists these days in moving their own intellectual property digitally and more importantly, independently.

In today's music industry selling half a million units is looked at as a good album, when just 10-15 years ago, artists were being dropped from their contracts for moving that many units. That in itself tells you the current state of the "New Music Industry".