"I Hate the Music Business" :: Paul Moak
Okay, hate is a strong word, but then again the music industry can be a tough business. Here, Paul lays out his grievances of the music business and what he's learned along the way.
I legitimately hate the music business. I really do man.
“In a weird way that's comforting to hear.”
I've not I've not met an A&R guy that I like. I've not met an A&R guy that I feel like describes the definition of what A&R actually was meant to be, right!? Everyone makes decisions based out of fear, and you can't do that when you're creating.
I feel like I'm personally ready for the music business to burn to the ground and us to get to the other side of whatever this is that we're in, because when I was a kid, the music business, whether it was good or bad it was successfully operating, right. People were making money selling records whether you liked the model of how it worked. And then I don't think it's coincidence that I moved to town the same year that Napster went online and I'm like, “I'm here I'm ready to make my mark” and it's like you know the music business.
So I've had to actually and I will admit I'm part of what destroyed traditional recording studios being a guy that was like “I can't afford to do that but I can afford a laptop and you know a hard drive,” and now I'm at the other end of that where I have a full studio and there's kids coming in with laptops and it's like, “okay I caused part of this” and now I'm trying to survive in a post music business world.
But it's a necessary evil. You know it's like I can't just sit on my high horse and say you know I only want to work with people that are, you know, non-label passionate independent artists. You know it's probably more than half of my income, but it's just if you're gonna feed your family... if you're gonna play the game it's a necessary evil. And so what I'm trying to do... what I've been trying to do for the last five or six years is try to distance myself as much as I can from the stuff that I know instantly kills my creativity, like budgets.
I spend, gosh as much time talking about the budget of a record as we do making it, and not with independent artists, with labels. They just over complicate everything, you know. A lot of the labels in town are signatory to the Union so there's a lot of paperwork and and you know I hated tests in school, so all that stuff, like, really affects... like if I gotta talk about a budget for an hour and then go in and try to be creative it's just not going to happen, or it's just gonna take me a long time like switch gears.
So I decided to try having a manager probably 10 years ago, and not to find me work because that there's no manager out there that I know of that can represent an artist and actually bring work in, but where I found it was valuable enough for me to give a portion of my income to this person was to say, “okay, I'm not talking to anybody at the label other than the A&R guy.” I will help on the budget when we're trying to figure out, you know, what the scope of the project is, and then you got to deal with it, and anything that comes up along the way that I need help with, I'm gonna turn to you. That has been worth every penny that I have not… you know a lot of times you look like, “oh, this person was to take 15% of my income, I can't afford that.” Well you can when all of a sudden you have this much more time to actually make music because you're not dealing with, you know, the stuff that you're not good at.
So for me it was just surrounding myself with people that are are good at the stuff that I can't spend time doing another one is like file management like I can do it I taught my guys how to do it, but if I'm gonna continually generate money I can't be sitting in front of a computer screen making sure that all the right versions of a song got printed. I need to be in the other room writing the next song or whatever so it's just thinking about what am I doing what can I outsource.
That you know, at the end of the day, isn't affecting the total outcome of the record, and I know if y'all are like me at all in this in this room, I've got a serious problem with like being obsessive compulsive about a project and knowing what I need to tune the vocals. You know, because I know how I want to hear... well if you teach someone how to tune the vocals the way that you want to hear them, it's not rocket science, and so maybe a better use of my time than tuning vocals is teaching Dewey how to tune vocals letting him do that in the other room while I'm continuing to make the record and we could get it done faster get paid.