Do you come across a TON of broke bands? Do the artists you spend weeks recording get ANY amount of traction with their music? Are your recordings ever ACTUALLY being enjoyed by a large audience?
Chris and Brian interview Chris Greenwood, aka Manafast, and discuss artist development. If you take the time to A. Help artists fund their music with Kickstarter B. Help them market their music so it ACTUALLY gets heard and C. Connect them with an industry expert that can help their career, you can help your career immensely.
The bottom line is this: If they win, you win.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- Why engineers and producers have an easier job than artists
- Why we rely on the success of artists
- How you can make good connections to further your career
- Why artists need producers, not engineers
- Why you have to ensure that artists have money left over for marketing
- Why you need to focus on the long term success of your clients
- What you need to understand about the future of the music industry
- How the “arms race” in audio has changed in the past decade
- Why learning about crowdfunding can help you get more clients
Join The Discussion In Our Community
Click here to join the discussion in our Facebook community
Click the play button below in order to listen to this episode:
Quotes
“I want you to take my little turd and I want you to polish it and make it a diamond. I want you to take my idea and I want you to develop it with me. I want you to challenge me to re-write my chorus.” – Chris Greenwood
“The goal is not to get the artist to spend the most money possible. The goal is to have enough artists to be able to do this every day. To do that, you have to make sure that the artist is going to promote once they’re done.” – Chris Graham
“No matter what period you’re talking about in the history of audio engineering . . . that has always been the case. You either adapt, or you die off.” – Brian Hood
Episode Links
Websites
456 Recordings – www.456recordings.com
Chris Graham – www.chrisgrahammastering.com
Smart Music Business – https://smartmusicbusiness.com/
Smart Music Business Free Book – https://smartmusicbusiness.com/freebook
Manafest – https://www.manafest.com/
Courses
The Profitable Producer Course – theprofitableproducer.com
The Home Studio Startup Course – www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/10k
Facebook Community
6FHS Facebook Community – http://thesixfigurehomestudio.com/community
@chris_graham – https://www.instagram.com/chris_graham/
@brianh00d – https://www.instagram.com/brianh00d/
YouTube Channels
The Six Figure Home Studio – https://www.youtube.com/thesixfigurehomestudio
Send Us Your Feedback!
The Six Figure Home Studio Podcast – podcast@thesixfigurehomestudio.com
Related Podcast Episodes
Episode 63: How To Profit From A Rising Trend In The Music Industry – https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/how-to-profit-from-a-rising-trend-in-the-music-industry/
Conventions/Conferences
ASCAP Expo – https://expo.ascap.com/
MIDEM – https://www.midem.com/
South By Southwest – https://www.sxsw.com/
People
Henry Ford – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford
Tools
Kickstarter – https://www.kickstarter.com/
GoFundMe – https://www.gofundme.com/
This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 65,
listening to the six figure studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable own recording studio. Now your host, Brian and Chris. Welcome back to another episode
six figure home studio podcast. I am here with my cohost Chris Graham today. Chris, I'm good man. How are you? I am doing awesome man, and I'm also here with our guest Mr Chris Greenwood. I've got to. Chris is here. Chris Greenwood. How you doing today, Chris?
Doing absolutely incredible. My friend,
for those who don't know Chris Greenwood, he's an artist who goes by the name manifest and he runs a website called smart music business smart music business.com, and Chris, his entire platform is essentially what the six figure home studio is except for musicians. So we teach recording studios how to run their businesses. Chris teaches musicians how to run their business as well, and so our hope today was to bring Chris onto the podcast to help give us some ideas of how we can help artists develop and the whole thought process behind this as this as home studio owners. When our artists succeed, when the people that we produce succeed, we also succeed and so if we can do anything in our power to help our clients succeed in their businesses, they're going to come back to us more. They're going to get our name out there more because our music that we recorded is out there being listened to and that is good to nothing but good things for our business. So Chris, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for taking the time here to chat with us.
Yeah, super stoked to be here, man. We're chatting like two weeks in a row here, so it's going to be great.
Yeah. So Chris was here in Nashville recently for a real estate event. Chris also is in real estate, so he and I got to meet up down in Franklin, Tennessee for lunch and it was awesome to see that. It's going to be weird. I got to Christmas here. When we interviewed Graham Cochran, we had two grams basically, so I'm going to have to get used to this. But Chris, before we started really rolling here, we started talking about the importance of networking to create contacts within the industry and I would like you to kind of start there and we can go from there when it comes to how we can help artists succeed in today's music industry.
Yeah. Well first of all, I kind of want to give all, you know, studio owners a little bit of Jab because you guys kind of got the better end of the deal here in us artists. Sure. We get all the glory and touring, but we're the ones who have to drive through the night and promote your songs. Will you get to collect on the publishing and the points that you got. So I just want you to know you guys suck. No, just kidding.
Well, Hey, I actually, there's a lot of churches that like when I started the studio in 2009, it was kind of after realization towards my last tour as a touring musician that the only people that really make money in the music industry, at least back in 2009 when I got started. The only really the people that make it are the ones that are not making the music, so either producers make money, tour managers make money. Our merchant guy made more money than us. Labels tend to make money sometimes. Maybe not back then and booking agents make money, but not the musicians themselves because man, we weren't making much money back then.
Yeah, yeah. It's crazy man. But you know what? I've got to see the world and all that stuff and it was great. I used to joke around with one of my producers, we went and toured Japan and I was trying to get them to come to Japan. He was so focused on his craft and you know what? It definitely paid off for him. Let's jump into that context thing like you're talking about and you know, when we were talking even before then, I was just like thinking, okay, like how can a producer really engineer, you know, studio owner help artists. And the first thing that came to my mind was contacts in your network and maybe you've heard it before, that your network equals your net worth. The more people you know, the more things that you could plug into. And I remember when I was recording with one of my producers, obviously I wanted to work with him because he had results.
He had hits already, you know, and so I knew I was so confident that by working with him I knew I would get a great song, number one that was so confident. Like when I go to a dentist to get a cavity, I know I'm going to get out of there with my cavity filled. Like that's how confident I was. But then it got to the point where we had these songs done. It's like, okay, well what are we going to do with them now? Like we need to get them out there. He didn't want to spend all his time just recording all these songs and them not working for him. And so he connected me with a buddy that he knew that was some a and r guy and we started shopping the record. So we actually started shopping the record and that's probably one of the only producers that did that. And that wasn't just two little indie labels, it was like major major deals. That was an absolutely huge asset. But you know, he wouldn't have had those contracts unless he had been working with artists for awhile and he was also out there meeting people, getting to know other people or else that wouldn't have been a thing for me. So that added a lot of value as far as a producer.
I'm really pumped or having this conversation, you know, because I've been looking at your course materials a little bit and I think for our industry as sort of the behind the glass guys, so to speak, at least 80 percent of our issues from a business owner's perspective come back to the fact that artists, that musicians are having a hard time figuring out business, they're having a hard time making a living. And what's interesting about this is we have a saint on this podcast that one of the biggest lies in our industry is if you build it, they will come. This idea that, hey, if you just do something good in your passionate, that that's all you need. And then the world will beat a path to your door and that is, as I'm sure you agree here, is just absolutely not the case. There's so much more that goes into getting what you've made out in front of people and building a fan base and this lie that affects, you know, the behind the glass industry so much I think affects the musician industry even more. This idea that, hey, we made this and the world now owes us something because we worked hard in the studio and wrote some songs and recorded,
yeah, nobody cares and I'll share the story on that. The back half because we did have label interest of my producer and stuff and me, the artists that wanted to rush and kind of took some bad advice. Went and rushed and went and signed with an Indie label as opposed for waiting for this huge opportunity that could have presented itself. And I'll, I'll even just share this, that I thought that I was the golden ticket and I had the golden touch and that record did end up blowing up in to Nixon is sold. Like, I don't know, it's probably done over 100,000 records now, but I ended up kind of just thinking it was me when it was actually the producer who really made this stuff. So that might be an interesting thing too when I think about, you know, because dude was super humble and stuff.
Yeah. He's killing it. I guess that's another question too. How do you keep your artists and like, because at the end of the day, like it is their career, right? And you can only give so much input without them, you know, going off. And I've also heard the stories where, you know, a producer does go in and makes the band and then they go and write with somebody else and it's not as good as record and then they kind of come crying back and I think, you know, for a producer to bring that value and keep that relationship is just keep dropping hits and being cool to work with obviously to. And then, you know, not only in this labels, I think we can go as far as, you know, music supervisors to get for TV and film, you know, why can't a producer have those relationships? That's what a lot of people just do.
They sit in their studio and they crank out songs for TV, film. If you can be, as a engineer producer, say, Hey, you know what? I know this music supervisor who's working on this film for this artist. I think your son would be perfect for that. Or actually is it cool if we lean it this way or do a version of the song this way because it'll help you. It'll help me and I don't see any reason why an engineer producer would not want to develop those contacts because getting one placement could change an artist's career as well as the producers career. That's awesome.
I think what Chris is talking about here is super, super important to just drill into your heads. If you're listening to this podcast and that is first and foremost, getting off your butt and getting out into the world and actually meeting people and start building a team of contacts that you can then bring your artists to in order to help accelerate their careers because again, if your artist succeed. So do you. So Chris, what are some of the. I guess I could use the word as team members. What are some of the team members that are producers should be building relationships with in order to help artists like you succeed in the music industry?
Well the first one is definitely the music supervisors and I might as well give you some ideas of where you could go to meet some of those. I went to Ascap Expo in Hollywood. It's just a conference and I met all kinds of people, but I paid a little bit extra to get a meet and greet with a music supervisor to play the my stuff. And I'll give you a little secret when you're meeting somebody research on them first before you know you're going to meet them and find out what they like. I found that this dude like surfing and stuff like that. So do you think I just talked to him about music right away? No, I've found a commonality that we could connect with and I ended up getting a couple six and I bet you heard of all the people he met all day.
I'm probably one of the only ones that was stopped because my music was so great is that I was just being cool, you know, like just just be cool, don't be annoying, don't be a Douche, be cool with people. Right. And so you know, that's a team member. Like he sends you your briefs, he sends you your stuff and you should have like maybe one or two people that really just like work with you on that. And then there's obviously me, them, there's south by southwest, there's tons of other conferences you can go to, but go with an agenda specific because you can go to one of these things and you can meet all kinds of people. Water the two needle, moving things that are gonna really help you and help your artists and go build that team. Like you're saying and get those people on your team because you don't need a whole bunch of people. You want to find those a players in my opinion.
Yeah. So kind of a cool component with that. And then why don't you guys that are listening to kind of imagine this is let's say an artist like manifest was thinking about two different producers and one producer pitched himself as a business expert that was like, Hey, you know, not only do we want to make great art together, but I also have some ideas on how we could pitch you to this guy or pitchy to that guy or a way that we could take your style and molded in a way that's going to be more marketable on this song for this connect that I already have. So I think it gets really interesting when instead of, Hey, I'm an audio engineer, I can press the red button and make the preamps gain stage properly. None of a, hey great, that's awesome. But if all the sudden it's, you know, I can do all these things, but I can also help you grow your business as a musician. I can give you some guidance there. I can hook you up with some people, you know, maybe even like I've got some course materials that you can go through. All of the sudden that gets a lot more interesting. Who would you hire as the musician? The producer that's connected with business skills, or the guy that's just an audio guy?
Well, first of all, I hate the idea of just somebody pressing record in honor producer and engineer, and I don't want an engineer. I can engineer and press record to and buy a couple of fancy mix and studio. Okay. Technology is to the point. I want someone who's going to challenge my songwriting. I want you to take my little Turd and I want you to Polish it and make it a diamond only to take my idea and I want you to develop it with me. I want you to challenge me to rewrite my course because I've worked with dozens of different engineers and producers, whatever, the ones that don't challenge my songs are no the worst saw. Okay. Because they're just my ideas, you know, and it takes a team to make a great song. So I think that, sure we're talking about network and all that stuff, but just developing those songwriting skills and pushing the artist and you know, some artists don't want to be pushed.
I don't know why they wouldn't. Maybe they just think they're God's gift from heaven and their songs are already great, but you know, in my experience, songs that were challenged or rewritten or worked on those ended up being the better songs. And I knew those were the producers that really cared and they're worth me and helped carry the song, you know, because until I got comfortable in my skin and became a good songwriter, I think what some things, I never talked about this before but engineers don't realize is that you're the one who's kind of carrying the session. You know, you almost need to take the vision of the artist and then you need to pull them along because a lot of the times the artists are just kinda not sure where to go next, you know, and so you need to be able to paint that vision and challenge the song and nowhere to go with it and that is an extreme value.
And like again, talking about earlier, just knowing that I'm going to get the product I want and then I think all these other things that will get that we're talking about like you know, music suits, whether it's TV, video games, radio, we can talk about that for a little bit because that's obviously sculpting a song completely and having relationships. But at the end of the day if you don't get a good product and the customer's not happy and it's funny, I guess the everyone's happy about the product and thinks it's awesome until the sales, soccer till her spot sex, right. Everyone's like the public didn't think so.
And this is interesting stuff. So it's been a long time since I've produced, you know, more than 12 years. I'd say, but one of the things I used to love to do was to work with an artist as far as the scope of the project to try to help the artists structure something that would be profitable for them, and I'm sure this is much less of an issue now, but the issue I'd run into all the time was people were like, yeah man, I want this big pop record and I want to like drop 30 grand on it and to be in a situation with that artist and explaining, wow, you don't really have the fan base to even break even on that $30,000 record. Let's talk about maybe any Pii or let's talk about a record that's got more of a program vibe. Then you know, like a full band thing, but helping the artists as the engineer, but as a producer also figure out how do we make you a product that you're going to make a profit on as opposed to just the flip side of the coin, which I think a lot of engineers do this.
How can I get the musician to spend as much as possible with me? This is an interesting component because I know a lot of us listening, you know, for you thousands and thousands of audio engineers, you guys know exactly what I'm saying. On the one hand, you do want to get the artists to spend as much with you as possible. However, if the artist goes out and loses money on the product they made with you, that does not bode well for your career. You want an artist to walk away and be like, yeah man. I mean I made a lot on that record with them.
Yeah. I'd rather them take that 30 spend 10 on the record and spent 20 marketing it. Bingo. That's what needs to happen there, you know?
Yeah. Dude. Well I'd love to hear you talk more about that. As far as the marketing piece.
Yeah. You know, that's a component. You already kind of nailed it and I feel like we share the same thoughts, which is really cool. Is that like, yeah, don't make a full album, you know, make it a or just get two songs done and get those out there and start marketing right away. It's like, you know, they spend all this time in the studio. They don't even barely tell anybody about it. They haven't even thought about the kickstarter date and to actually recoup on this and if you're listening to this, every artist you should always do a kickstarter. It's a part of your launch strategy and it's not. If you do a kickstarter, it's when you do a kickstarter because it gives you so much buzz. It gives you so much momentum and it lights the biggest fire under your butt to market because you've got that deadline and that scarcity and you don't want to look stupid, right?
Because you didn't meet your goal. But when it comes to marketing your music, like it's literally those numbers. If we're taking a $30,000 budget, literally 10 should be towards an APP or an album and then 20, you know, whether that part of that goes to a buying onto a tour or facebook ads or youtube ads or making a music video that's again on budget and like. And if you had 20,000 on a budget, I would maybe do two, three grand on the music video and then again, all that money, getting it out there, getting new fans, putting the word out there, putting the word out there because you know, you can make anything these days. It's marketing it and selling it, which is, which is really the tricky part and that's some of the stuff I teach in my world a lot to my students.
Yeah, I mean that's super cool. Brian and I talked a lot about this Henry Ford quote and Henry Ford talks about that. The problem that this is his words, not mine, but the problem the poor have is that the poor will get fixated on a small pile of money and the rich will walk past the small pile of money to get to the big pile of money. And this idea here, I seen this a lot where I've seen a lot of successful audio guys, producers, they fixate on how can I get that artists to spend as much with me as possible within the artist isn't going to tell anyone about me and what you're preaching I think is so cool, is the flip side of that as well. I want to make sure the artists has leftover money and again, I'm preaching to myself from what I produced back in the day, but if I had made sure more often that the artists had leftover money to spend on promotion, that artists would then go out and share that music with more people and more people are seeing that credit.
I had and more opportunity for more projects in the future. And what we typically see in our industry is something will go well. They'll have a record that comes out with an artist support. They're really proud of their work and then all of a sudden like the projects kind of slow down. They hit that dry spell and I think a lot of times is that artists isn't promoting. They believed that lie. If you build it, they will come, hey, you know I'm passionate about this. I poured my heart out. You know the world owes this to me as opposed to this flip side of the coin, which is make your own destiny. Go out and do it and promote the project and help artists do that instead of what's the most the artists could afford to spend with me.
You're focusing on the short term and the longterm and I think that's where you can really shoot yourself in the fit when you'd be better just to make the best freaking hit song one or two because it's just you only need one song and it changed your life. You don't hear about albums changing people's lives. You normally hear about one or two songs that were the game changer. Like when I go to meet with a label, it doesn't say play me the album. He says plainly the hits, you know, give me one too. I don't got time to hear your whole album. I don't care. I don't want to hear your whole album. I just want to hear two songs because guess what? A label can't even market a whole lot, but when you think about it in a whole album cycle, it's done in a year and you can only mark it two, three, four songs Max. If it's fricking crushing the normally you only get to three, so you only need two, three songs. Hello. That smack somebody upside the head.
Yeah. I think we talked about this in a recent episode. Number 63, we talked about a shifting music industry and how to take advantage of that. This is a big part of it is just not needing to do as many songs anymore. I want to go back on something you mentioned a minute ago. It's kind of shifting gears a bit, but you mentioned kickstarter and this is something for whatever reason we've really failed to talk about on the podcast, but this is huge because the number one biggest complaint you hear from every studio owner in the world today is bands are too cheap or bands can't afford me and one of the biggest things to come along to help artists fund records these days is kickstarter. So when it comes to getting a kickstarter set up and funded as an artist, you've helped people do this. Correct? Or you've done this yourself.
Yeah. I have a program called crowdfunding secrets and I've done six or seven kickstarter campaigns, so if you.
Yeah, so I think this is a huge part that audio engineers need to think about and I would actually highly recommend people go check out Chris's program on this as an audio engineer. If you can figure out how to set up successful crowdfunding campaigns for your artists, there's your budget. You're good to go from there.
That'd be huge. And then you get paid and you have to chase people down for money, you know, but that would be a huge asset to just even have an idea to navigate it and stuff because you know you're going to be the one who's going to be delivering the deliverables to the artists so that they can release their first song is normally it's the first. Once we got a hit song and feel good, that's the one I want to show to the world. Not The crappy one. You don't hold your diamonds back, you always put your best stuff for because it's like people are going to want to support. So like off. That's the first one. Sounds. Hopefully the rest of it sounds like you've just put out a bad one. It's like Dang. But I think a lot of artists think that they have to be known.
Especially if it's your first one. That's your first chance of raising a real lot of money because you've got your friends, you've got your family, you get everybody involved, and you the producer, engineer should support the record. You should buy the record. Don't be cheap. Okay. If you really believe in it, support it, even if it's the 10 or 15 slash $20 package, but you know, get involved with it and like package ideas and stuff like that and you know, because there are going to be probably filming in your studio or the behind the scenes stuff. So what if you even had some stuff, here's a really cool spot where you can shoot kickstarter stuff or hey you can come shoot. Maybe that could be actually a really idea studio plus kickstarter package and you can kind of monetize that and sell that. I'll help you do a little, you know, get your kickstarter video and whatnot and you can use my studio like you know, your studio looks sick back behind you there Brian. You know what I mean? Who wouldn't want to shoot in that, you know, like do it up proper and then you got to fricken location, you know, and some ideas
if people have seen any videos I've done where I had the music city sign behind me and the light on with the skateboard light and the cool little like old movie set light. I got all this stuff at a yard sale or at a flea market or on craigslist, like nothing behind me in this setup is expensive, so there's really no reason why you shouldn't have a good setup for video in your studio in 2019 and beyond. Well, I love what you're saying there, Chris. This idea of like I'm imagining a conversation that artists are having about an audio engineer and the one artist has worked with this audio engineer before. The other artist is looking for someone to help them come out with a wrecker to come out with some songs and I imagine that conversation would be a lot different than. Oh yeah, man.
He'd been my snare sound really good as opposed to like, oh man. He helped me set up the kickstarter, you know, we filmed and we did like some of live acoustic tracks out his studio and he just had great insight. He walked us through to do some basic facebook advertising to promote the kickstarter and wow know the record would have never even happened if it wasn't for him. That dude is making the sale. That audio engineer's getting hired every single time because it is the wild west for musicians right now. They don't have any clue how to exist in this economy and doing exist in this business.
It's the best time to be alive in it too.
I think one of the biggest takeaways, honestly, is being able to facilitate multiple areas of the artist's success, not just the record itself as a producer in 2000, 19 and beyond. I just think this is going to be a huge part of having a successful business is understanding all of these aspects so that if you can at least help you at least understand so you know what their struggles and what their next steps will be. Chris, thank you so much for joining us on this interview today. Where can people go to find out more about you and what you've got going on?
Yeah, and just because we've been talking about it so much, I have a free book that I've been giving away and it comes with a video course and it talks about how to market your music and it even gives you the four phases for hitting the billboard charts and guess what phase one is. I don't know if you'll be able to see that, but it says crowdfunding that is the very first step and you just go to smart music business.com/free book to get that. Just cover the shipping and we'll send you the book and the course, but that'll help you with the four stages of your launch because you know, that's really what it is and yeah, I just want to say thanks so much for having me on and love your stuff man. Love your webinar training. I had someone the other day actually say he literally went and detailed about how you helped him find artists to work with on bandcamp and stuff like that. I want to give away your thing, but I was
like, that's my bro Man. So I was kind of cool. So cool. Connect, so love what you guys are doing man. Thanks man. Awesome dude. Hanging out. Chris, do you have man, so good to meet you. So that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. Chris, what do you think about that, Brian? I mean I love what you said about
2018 and beyond like what does it mean to be successful in our industry? And I had this thought about, you know, over the years there have been shifts in our industry and I'm sure you know, 19 fifties and sixties. It was like, you know, I was going to hire joe to preuss my record or I was going to hire Bob to produced my record, but do bob just got an eight track man, Joseph at the four track ongoing with Bob all the way and then the next decade later, oh dude, Joe's, he got the eight track. But man, he also has the plate reverb. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to go with him. So there's been like an arms race in our industry for a long time of like it was track count or it was, you know, they've got a fairchild compressor or they've got this special receiver box or they've got this drum room in a lot of ways there has been an arms race and that arms race has really changed in the last 10 years where suddenly people are like, well, a gear arms raised doesn't work anymore.
It doesn't work because there's not enough money on the table and what's going to happen if you tried to do that gear, arms race is you're going to have, you know, crippling debt and you're eventually going to fold. The interesting thing now is I think that there's a skills arms race. So good. It's starting to happen. That's this idea of like we were just talking about, oh well Joe, who is a vampire and he's always young and he's still producing. Seventy years later, Joe has figured out kickstarter or Joe has figured out how to do video and audio together well, or Joe has figured out the whole band camp thing or the whole patrion thing. There's the skills arms race where yeah, you have to have a niche, but you also have to have a unique selling proposition, a unique value proposition, a couple different ways to say that, to be able to pitch to your artists and say, you should hire me because I am the best at fill in the blank.
You should hire me because I have an eight track. You should hire me because I have a plate reverb. You should hire me because I can walk you through how to do a kickstarter campaign and get your record funded. Super interesting stuff. Yeah. I think it's just like we talked about with the interview with Chris is just going to get more competitive because you have to learn these things in order to differentiate yourself from the crowd. It's not even just about audio skills anymore. It's not just about finding your own sound. It's not just about knowing how to do all of these audio tricks. It's not even just about social skills. Now. All of those things are an extremely important part about having a successful career, but now you have of these really
cool things like crowdfunding that come into play that you can use to really help differentiate yourself from everyone else, so all the things we talked about in this interview today, like having connections outside of the audio world, connections that can help the artists develop, understanding marketing from the artist's point of view, understanding that you shouldn't take the whole budget and that you should help them put their money towards marketing their songs so that they are actually heard and they actually have a fan base and they actually make money off of what they paid you to record and helping them get the entire thing funded through crowdfunding, kickstarter or whatever's around nowadays. All of those things are such a valuable thing to know as a producer that that alone could help make or break your career. Yeah, just understanding those skills and honest to God, like I can't believe I've gone this long in my life without really understanding all of those things because man, if I'd have known this stuff right as it happened, punks, kickstarter been around Chris Probably. Oh, nine, I would guess. Yeah, I remember 2000, 10, 2011 seeing bands doing go fund me or kickstarter for their albums and like making fun of them because they were basically like asking for money and not realizing like this is genius and as a producer I should be helping artists do that because if they get funded, they can afford me now and to go my entire career without thinking about that is just idiotic to me. Yeah.
Well I think there's a temptation as an audio engineer to hear what we're saying and be like,
oh, it's a little bit golden ages over, Oh, well he's me.
I think there's a temptation to do that, but I really want to underscore for you guys that our industry has always been in flux. There's always been some crazy change. The first one was radio. When radio came out, people lost their Dang minds because they're like, you're not going to play music for people for free. Like everyone lost their minds about that and it didn't ruin things. There was a transitional period and then the things leveled out and it got awesome. Again. We're in one of these transitional periods right now and the thing you have to remember, I'm going to date myself here, but back in the nineties, the way you found out about a new band and the way the band made money was I or anybody else would be in a car with their friend and their friend would pop a CD in the CD player and say, dude, listen to this song.
And you'd say, Whoa, this is good. I'm going to go to. For me, it was media play on Sawmill road in Columbus, Ohio. I'm going to go to media play and spend $17 on the CD. And that was how music spread where it was like you were in at your friend's house and their big brother, you know, had a huge stereo system and played a record for you. And that's how it had been for a long time. It's not like that anymore. People aren't finding out about music when they're carpooling with their friend. They're finding out about music online. This is like obvious, but they're finding out about it on facebook. The finding out about it on twitter, they're finding out about on an instagram and the point as a musician is to get someone to share your songs with their friends. That's the same as it has always been, but the place you're trying to get them to it is the Internet.
Now. That's a fundamental shift and here's the problem with the Internet. It didn't cost you anything to get Sarah to share a CD with her friend Jenny back in the day, but it was a one to one relationship and it was through many interactions like that that a record would spread and go viral. Now you have gatekeepers, you have facebook, you have youtube, you have twitter, you have google, you have all these different players who own the interaction between friends, sharing music and if facebook wants to bury your posts about your favorite cd or about the project that you just came out with, they will. If you're saying, hey guys, listen to this record I produced and it's not getting any interaction on facebook, then facebook doesn't want to share it with all of your friends and this is something we have to understand that the world's different now and you know, case in point, like when tape players came out, you had to learn all kinds of stuff to be able to operate a tape player.
You had to learn how to bias the machine, which is a mystery to me. You had to like have a magnetic one that you spun as you approach the tape machine. Do you get a bias correctly? It was crazy. That was a new skill that audio engineers had to learn in order to be successful at a certain point in history. Before that it was, hey, if you want to be a successful audio engineer, you got to know how to press vinyl. Well, you don't know to cut vinyl and if nobody in your studio knows how to cut vinyl, what's the point? So there was a certain skill you had to learn to be successful and what we're saying is that maybe the next skill that you have to learn to be successful has something to do with digital promotion and marketing.
Yes, I agree with that and it's. It's just like just like any other time in a transitionary period in our industry, if you are the one who refuses to adapt and change with the times you were the one that gets left behind and no matter what period you're talking about in the history of audio engineering and home studios, recording studios are commercial studios. No matter what period you're talking about, that has always been the case. You either adapt or you die off and for some it'll be a slow, painful death where you're slowly trickling money away until you file for bankruptcy. For some of you overnight, all your clients go away and you don't have a business anymore. It's one of those things that we are trying to help equip people to understand that they need to change because that's the first step of changing and adapting is understanding that you even have to and once you now know the things that you have to do, then you go do things like sign up for Christmas programs or whatever stuff he has to help educate you on how to do those things and take the steps necessary in order to learn the skills you need to adapt and change in a rapidly changing industry.
The thing I want you guys to take home is don't be the guy and say 19, 63. I'm sure someone knows when the date of like when eight tracks came out or when 16 tracks came out. Don't be the guy that's like, oh man, you don't use 16 truck. A truck's enough looked so dumb. 16 track is overkill. That's stupid. It's going to ruin music. Don't be that guy about Internet marketing. Don't be that guy about the successful people. Lean into the change and they help it come and they ride that wave like a surfer back to Chris's reference to surfing. They ride that wave all the way home. Don't just be out there in the water, just like this would even move. We we have to lean in and if that's the only thing that people take away from our podcast is that you have to lean into the technology, but you also have to lean into treating your career like a real business obviously, and also treating your clients business like a real business.
Yeah, so I love that man. I really wish I could go back in time to Chris Graham, the producer back in the early two thousands and explain like, dude, the goal is not to get the artists to spend the most money possible. The goal is to have enough artists to be able to do this every day and to do that you have to make sure that the artist is going to promote once they're done. Yeah. I think that's really the take home here is having the ability to not only put yourself in the artist shoes, but you help the artist achieve the goals that they are trying to set out to achieve and if you can do that, it's not only going to add value to the artists that you work with, it's also going to help your studio in your entire career out for the long run.
So I think that's about it for this episode. Uh, just real quick, when I apologize for how short the interview was, we just had some scheduling stuff that came up and had to cut the interview short, but I think we really had a lot of good breakthroughs of things that we really need to be thinking of as audio engineer's next week. We're going to be recapping our time at Nam. We just got back from that. We are doing an episode on the future of gear for home studios and the power of networking, so very good episode next week. Looking forward to that. Until next time, thanks so much for listening and happy hustling.