Where to start? How can I dissuade you from this horrible profession? A lot of ignorant people think that any kind of Top Ten placement is a guarantee of easy money, easy sex and hard drugs. Let me say right off the bat: Most gangs are skinny, smelly, malnourished, and too shredded to successfully engage in sex.
And those are the successful ones.
Pop music is not a career, it is an obsession, an excuse not to get a decent and paid job. For me it started in high school. Since then I committed a series of sins against the great Goddess Fortune that condemned me to be a ‘never was’. These are the things I should have done. Read on and find out.
1. Start young.
Pick up an instrument by your teens at the latest, or don’t bother. By the time you’re old enough to order a pint at a bar or club, you should be proficient enough to get a gig there and not be embarrassed. Assuming you have talent, that is. If you leave it too late, you won’t be skilled enough to make a living from your muse.
2.Have Talent.
A lot of people get by with pop, it’s simple music. However, if your friends and initial audiences think your music is ‘okay’, if you still have to make excuses for your performances at every damn gig, then TAKE A HINT! Give up, go back to college, you self-deceived fool! Better yet, learn a trade that people really _want_, _and_ where you can make a lot of money.
Listen to that still small voice in the night. knows
3. Pop music is not art.
In a way it is the antithesis of art. Artists strive to authentically represent their own subjectivity. Pop musicians just want to lay down and pay. It is vulgar and populist. It’s what gets people on the dance floor and roars on a drunken Friday night.
So don’t go down your own ass, Mr. Marylin-Manson-Morrisey-Wannabe. We will not send out search parties.
4. Save your money.
One of the worst ways to spend money on this game is on other people’s studios. Most studios in Britain have unskilled staff who say, for example, that sure, they can sync up your two workstations with your 24-track tape machine so you can do some vocal overdubs and a mix, all in a 10-hour session at €30 per hour plus VAT.
By hour five you’re sweating and trying to figure out why the voices are late. By hour ten you have a sick feeling, a lighter wallet, and a poorly mixed track that will be redundant in a couple of months because your music has “improved” or changed direction. Hell, I feel nauseous even thinking about it. It happened to me. More than once. Take your head, smart boy.
Invest your money in buying your own recording equipment. Buy only ‘name’ equipment as it should retain its second-hand value. You can either sell it if you want to upgrade or buy something sensible, like a roof over your head. London’s Loot magazine runs free ads for buyers and sellers of just about anything. eBay is good for smaller items that can be mailed.
Second hand is very good value for money if it is almost new. Electronic equipment, like cars, depreciates as soon as it leaves the shop. This may be to your advantage. However, DO NOT buy second-hand items from people who look scruffy or live in a dirty, messy apartment. “Why not, fascist?!” see you Because your attention to your appearance and environment will be reflected in the care of your equipment.
The best kind of person to buy from is a nice, middle-class, middle-aged English man who lives in a nice, clean suburban house and doesn’t take his gear out on the road. Trust me this time.
Put up your money to set up your own bedroom studio if you’re a dance musician. Find a squat, garage, or room on an industrial estate and clear it out if you’re in a gang. Anything to avoid shelling out for precious poles.
5. Conserve energy.
If all the energy wasted on the futile self-promotion of young pop musicians were directed at political causes (for example), the eco-warriors wouldn’t have to live in trees, and the Tories would be out after their first term. If you must persist in the illusion that one day you too will be number one in America (or close to it), then do the following:
a) Only play in bands where members regularly attend rehearsals. Complaining and calling these assholes (“my girlfriend says I ignore her, I want to pay for gigs, I think we should do more covers, etc…”) is a drag. Either you fire them or you leave the band.
b) Rehearse regularly. Practice makes perfect, laziness leads to forgotten lyrics, dumb notes, and dismal performances. Make sure that no matter how good you are in rehearsals, you will lose at least 20% of your competition when you play live. And any temperamental crew will break into the night, in front of all your friends and the A&R leech you ‘specially’ invited.
c) Write songs at home. If possible, rehearse them there quietly with other members. Send each member (including the drummer) a basic CD recording and lyric sheet. Have them practice on their own so you don’t waste time and enthusiasm when you’re all together in your hourly studio (or see #3 above).
d) Dismiss Incompetent Members. You can only retain them if you have no intention of playing in public, recording, getting a radio play or a record deal. Resist blackmail. If the bass player has a truck and is your best friend but he can’t play on time, kick him out. You’ll thank me later. You can rent a van and make new friends.
6. Accept all offered gigs.
There’s no such thing as bad publicity, even if you ruin someone’s wedding, heck, at least there’s one family that will remember you for the rest of their lives. Do enough really awful gigs and you might be onto something (see: The Stooges).
7. Study the top ten.
If you admire and emulate acts in the lower reaches of the Top 30, you’ll never get that far. Selling 10,000 singles in a week through return shops was enough to guarantee him a Top Thirty spot in the UK, when I was interested in it. If you copy acts in the lower brackets, how many people will buy your version of your unpopular music? Avoid making music to please idealistic journalists or your ‘cool’ peers. They don’t buy records anyway.
On the contrary, you should…
8. Write music from the heart.
Live your dream. Choose genres and styles that you feel comfortable with. A big spinning eccentric noise will get you more fans than a second rate copy of a top ten hit. And you will enjoy it more.
9. Test all avenues of advertising.
Distribute flyers. Return ‘phone calls. Telephone newspapers. Put up posters. Strong arm friends. Otherwise, you’ll get an audience of just one man and his dog. You will die, horribly, and still have to get your team home. You must not be ashamed. A packed concert in a small venue creates a ‘buzz’, while one in a larger venue, with the same number of people, will not.
Someone told me once that there were 100,000 bands in London alone, which I think is an underestimate. And that excludes the brainiacs in the bedroom. How will you stand out from the whole lot? (Do you think if I had a Great Sexy Idea I would put it in this article?). Dress up, go crazy. Who cares? Just do it.
Public performances of any kind are excellent market research. Make your best track first. Thirty seconds later, you will know if you have the correct formula or not. If it doesn’t work, DOWNLOAD IT!
Play only your best songs. Keep your gigs short. End dramatically, then leave the building. Leave your audience with a positive memory. Be mysterious. RESIST the urge to play two hours of mediocre material, then head offstage for a pint with the punters at the bar.
10. Talent shows.
Try them, except when they ask you for an entrance fee. Think of them as a way to get a well-organized concert with a different audience. You won’t win, or the prize will suck, or your studio time will be a bomb (see above) or your single will disappear without a trace, but what the heck, AS LONG AS YOU DON’T PAY FOR IT.
11. Publish small amounts of CDs (if necessary).
Je n’ai pas. £2000 in the early 90s (which included the recording) for 250 copies of an LP (the vanity!) that I was too knackered to promote, and didn’t really believe in anyway. He ruined everything. If you’re good enough, other people will pay.
The same goes for promotional videos. You don’t have enough money to make them look smart. Spend the money (via music lessons and better equipment) on making your music good enough for others to invest in it. Dance musicians should only promote their music if they are absolutely sure that they can sell it to specialty stores or fans without having to make excuses for it. Dance music is strictly ‘product oriented’ and much less reliant on a good singer to carry the whole track. It can be sold more easily.
Still, don’t let your thirst for your own record in your hands lead you to deplete your pathetic finances unnecessarily.
12. Management is a good idea.
If you’re not a jerk, coward, or thief, and have some energy and contacts, order it. It’s too much work writing, rehearsing, keeping a job/going to college AND promoting yourself. Just remember, a manager is for life, kids. He will _get_ his part. It’s best to have a totally crazy brute with a semblance of manners and respectability. Scare them and charm them at the same time. DON’T think you can do it all. People in the industry are businessmen, and they don’t want to do business with uneducated, pseudo-rebellious, precious ‘artists’.
13. Be brutal with your material.
If your songs don’t sound like anything in the top five, or if you don’t get an ecstatic audience reaction/media reviews/many fans, STOP what you’re doing immediately.
Either it sounds like a current hit (within the last year for rawk, six months for dance music) or your audience wants to be like you and have your kids. Anything else is a waste of your youth. This is POP, like in POPULAR music, remember? If you got the two things above, boy, I want you to sign this paper here, no, no, don’t bother reading it…
14. And there I leave it….
…because like I said at the beginning, I’m a total failure at this joke. Any advice I can give you about record deals and the like is not going to be based on my personal experience. You’ll find that there are many who won’t let this stop them from bending their ear anyway.
To continue, read Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’ or Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’ and that white paper ‘How to Have a Number One’ or something from the 90’s group, the KLF. It sets you up well for any career, never mind this crap. Best of luck, anyway, you pitiful fool.