It was with great pleasure and relief that I posted, today, the final lessons in my Marketing Your Music and You class. What started out to be a “simple” four-lecture class turned into a major extravaganza going for nine lessons and lots of unplanned hours of preparation and teaching.

What prompted me to expand so much?

The question is really, “Who prompted me to expand so much?”

Jim Collins. I have to blame it on him. He wrote this book called How the Mighty Fall. After guzzling it down in 24 hours, I knew I had to rewrite everything I had previously planned. Jim Collins’ books have that kind of effect on me and have since he first wrote Built to Last and Good to Great.

OK, they’re both business books, just don’t call me a suit.

I burned my pinstripes after I left marketing for good and moved to L.A. to make it in Avocadoland as a composer. Thus far I’ve not looked back at all with regret on that move since it allowed me to dress coolly (a look combining Timberland, LL Bean, and the Oakland Raiders sports shop).

Little did I know how much having a marketing background after music school would help me in Once Upon An Orange Grove. I would love to just focus on my art and label myself as a classical composer as John Adams did in one post in his blog.

But I know too much.

I knew long ago that radio stations computerized their play lists and so the need to do sweeps might not really have been, be, or are necessary. I knew that certain types of music rarely/never got airplay, like film music, most classical recordings, a majority of Christian music, jazz, broadway show tunes, or just any other music genre you can imagine.

I had my own reel of TV commercials and I’ve done more than a few radio spots where I also did the voice overs.

Long ago I learned who got paid and who got asked, or told, to work for free, or they’d find someone else to work for free just to get a credit on the resume. I also had one other distinct advantage, a debt to which I clearly owe to my father who was a math teacher - I could work a slide rule, which meant, I could also work a calculator to figure out the deal.

The idea of taking control of your composing destiny came across to some I knew as a heresy, from academia to Hollywood. There’s this business thing we’re not supposed to talk about, which I found rather amazing considering the kind of negotiations you have outside of music where everything is discussed down to the hair follicles on your head. But this kind of talk seemed and still seems to be taboo.

To some, it was an affront that a composer would ask such basic questions as:

1. How much money am I making on a digital download?
2. Why aren’t I earning money when that movie I scored shows up on cable?
3. Who decided it was OK for me to make 30% less on my music on iTunes?
4. Etc.

All of these are fair business questions. That so many are afraid to ask them points out that like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, we have done a poor job of listening to Papa Leopold and remembering that composers are entrepreneurs, just like actors. We are afraid of rejection. We are afraid that if we speak up the creative marketers will dismiss us and get someone else who will be more malleable and do exactly as they say.

Here’s the hard reality I was able to teach my students: if you want to stay in the game for a lifetime doing what you love, you have to accept that the most money is made by the companies marketing the creativity, not the creators themselves.

You change the game by marketing your own creativity by building a business that markets you and your works.

That means you’re a business person. Sorry dude, them’s the facts.

It’s the reality I had to face, and it’s the reality others, some very late in the game, are now beginning to face, accept and speak up about because their fees are dwindling and getting paid is getting harder and harder.

Now think about this for a second.

Talent like Mel Gibson, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Tom Hanks, Kenneth Branagh, and others, produce themselves. Wagner, Handel, Puccini, and Britten (to name four), produced their own works. How many country and rock artists produce themselves?

So what’s the problem with composers?

I can tell you in a word that echoes throughout academia and the composing community as a whole: commercial.

To take control of your composing destiny, as you hear it so often explained, is a betrayal of the composing muse. There’s just something inelegant about writing and marketing your own music, and making money at it. But what I’ve found that’s inelegant about it, is that the composer or artist who would promote themselves is moving ahead of those who lack the inclination to put out the same self-determinative efforts. The result is that their colleagues, to be blunt about it, are jealous. Of course, no one wants to admit this. What’s more popular to do is to divest yourself of the angst of self-promotion by saying you’re too busy doing other things (meaning you’re artistically above it all) while letting your wife (or husband) do the marketing work for you.

I was very candid about these subjects in this multimedia class I taught. Maybe too much so. But I find it troubling that so many want to be successful with their music but fear in setting out because of concerns of what their peers might think or say.

So I put it on the table for thought and discussion.

Back to Jim Collins. His book so entranced me, the first two lessons were about failure. Why did people fail in the music business? That’s where we started, because if you understand why some failed, you could understand why some succeeded. Shortly after the class started Michael Jackson died. It was surreal looking at Jackson’s life compared to Jim Collins’ check list. We moved through principles of music marketing, how to plan, quality control and producing yourself, your web site, and a few odd ends.

I finally finished recording about 4:30PM, maybe closer to 5. Can’t remember. What I know is that it’s done. Finally. And I’m glad this first wave of students stuck with me as I revised, rewrote, and re-recorded. And I feel spent from it. Once I shut off recording, I could feel the “low” setting in.

After I had finished, Caroline came in and told me the Christmas tree was up and the lights were on it.

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