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MUSIC BIZ INSIGHT #29 Power Reading for Busy Music Professionals Hope you're hungry! MUSIC BIZ INSIGHT is published for musicians, songwriters, managers, label reps, booking agents, entertainment attorneys, studio owners, music publishers, and all others involved in the music business. Its purpose is to help boost your business, find new markets, make the right connections, develop professionally, work smarter and improve your bottom line. "As a general rule, the most successful people in life are those who have the best information." Benjamin Disraeli Written and published bimonthly by Peter Spellman, Director of MUSIC BUSINESS SOLUTIONS: Turning Music Business Data into Useful Knowledge. Career-building books, articles, training, consulting and more. P.O. Box 230266, Astor Station, Boston, MA 02123-0266, USA Phone: 888-655-8335 Email: success@mbsolutions.com Web site: http://www.mbsolutions.com © 1997 - 2003, Peter Spellman, MBS Business Media, www.mbsolutions.com Please feel free to redistribute with above credit and copyright notice.
THE BOOK IS OUT!: THE MUSICIAN'S INTERNET: ONLINE STRATEGIES FOR SUCCESS IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY is finally available! This hands-on guide is essential for any musician who wants to build a fan base and increase profits through the Internet. Here are a few comments from others about the book: "If the number one lesson learned from the Internet is that of education and empowerment for artists, then The Musician's Internet is the book to do that. Keep it handy at all times!" -- Sounni de Fontenay, Editor-in-Chief, MusicDish.com "On behalf of aspiring artists the world over, and in the spirit of history's great explorers, Peter Spellman has discovered the secret pathway to profit for the independent musician! The Musician's Internet unravels the often overwhelming maze of options and opportunities that exist online for those seeking to gain exposure in today's music industry!" -- Walt F.J. Goodridge author of "Rap: This Game of Exposure" and founder of www.hiphopbiz.com "The Musician's Internet is the best how-to book I've ever seen, with specific advice and examples on how to get your music to the world, there's tons of great ideas here, whether you're new to this, or been doing it for years." -- Derek Sivers, President, Cdbaby.com Further info is available at: www.musiciansinternet.com ORDER YOUR COPY TODAY direct from the author (that's me) by calling, toll-free (U.S./Canada only) at 888-655-8335. $24.95 + $5 s&h (and worth every penny!) STORIES WANTED FOR THE HYPERBOOK!: As mentioned in the last issue of "Career Juice," my publisher has asked me to develop a complementary web site to the book. This will allow the ever-changing subject of my book to stay fresh for its users and provide a community where internet intelligence can be shared and learning sparked. So the invitation for net success stories is open and on-going! Check out the book's web site at www.musiciansinternet.com Specifically, I am looking for stories of bands and artists who've:
Stories from small labels, production houses, and other music-related businesses are welcomed too. Of course, war stories and snafus of all kinds are also welcomed as are any tips & tricks anyone would care to share. Email 'em all to me at: peter@mbsolutions.com Thanks in advance! ONLINE MUSIC BIZ LEARNING: Beginning in October 2002, I will start offering online music biz classes through Berklee Media. You can be anywhere in the world when you take these classes. Some of the six-week courses slated for release include: "Finding Your Music Career Niche," "How a Song Makes Money," and "Creating a Total Internet Music Marketing & Promotion Plan." Keep returning to the MBS web site for updates on this development. AOL KEYWORD:CENSORSHIP...... Through its merger with Time Warner, AOL is now one of the biggest record companies in the world. So does AOL's heavy-handed censorship of fans' discussion of lyrics mean that Time Warner artists will also be censored in the future? What's next? SOME BIG PICTURE THOUGHTS ON THE ARTIST IN THE WORLD by Peter Spellman (Note: The following is an essay I wrote several years ago that was never published. It probes some important issues all creative people face in our civilization. The topic is near and dear to my heart so I thought I'd give it a spin in MBI. Any feedback is welcomed. Though the piece is heavy with history, I think you'll find it's the kind of historical perspective few of us ever received from our schooling. Hope you enjoy it.) While working for the Salvation Army a number of years ago, I had the opportunity to develop and teach an oil painting class for senior citizens. Most of those who signed up had never painted before and, more importantly, had never been encouraged to paint. But to my amazement all that they needed was some basic knowledge about the materials and they were off and running, driven by an inner impulse that had laid dormant for the length of their long lives. I heard the same words over and over again: "I never knew I could......" I remember marveling at their eager motivation and their production. Most continued working at home, sharpening their unique styles, and even getting others involved. At the end of the year we organized a gallery showing of their work for the larger community. It was a smash and the painters' lives were noticeably changed. For me, the experience provided a peering into something very deep and significant. It had to do with untapped human abilities and the positive transformative result of actually expressing this creative potential. These elders reached into their creative souls and then pressed (ex-pressed) what they found onto paper and canvas. In looking at what they created they knew themselves and their world better and found courage in that knowledge. I remember also feeling a bit sad at the time, for the experience also raised a nagging question: Why did the transformation come so late to these persons? We are told human beings use a mere fraction of their inner resources. Like icebergs where water levels hide the large majority of the ice, so the great majority (some say up to 90%) of the potential human lies hidden and unused. It's as if we all have grand pianos inside us, but only a few learn to play them. Why? Each person came to the painting class with their own particular background of life-experience. These were unique and, of course, contributed to the question at hand. But each participant was also an heir or heiress to western civilization, an American citizen, a one-time worker in the nation's labor force, and a dweller in and among mass consumer culture. Perhaps it is in these larger cultural commonalities, and in the values they promote (and those they don't), that we can search out and expose some of the forces that guide us towards or away from creating. This means looking over our shoulders at the recent past and, in the process, experiencing that inner freedom born from the revelation of our roots. I have deliberately avoided using the words "arts" and "artists" thus far because these words appeared rather late in history and, as such, raise questions of their own. When were "artists" suddenly a separate breed? When was "art" regarded as an activity set apart? "Artists" came to possess their contemporary meaning around 1800 in the context of the "Romantic Movement". For the first time since ancient times large groups of creative workers set themselves against the prevailing "order" of society, in this case, of late 18th century Europe. It was in this milieu that the "modern world" as we understand it began to reveal its outlines. The "Romantics" (as they were called by their adversaries) were responding to both the emotional restrictions of the then-dominant style (neoclassicism) and the progressive dehumanization of persons being brought on by hyper-rationalism in science and in the industrialization of the economy. Strong, impersonal forces, they felt, were beginning to undermine and redefine the human being. In opposition to their surrounding culture, the Romantics stood for spontaneity, imagination, deep feeling, stewardship of nature, and a view of society as an organism rather than as a machine. Their ranks read like a course in nineteenth-century literature: Blake, Byron, Keats, Coleridge, Goethe, Shelley, Carlyle, Wordsworth and Rousseau were only a few of the more well-known. They are relevant to us because they were among the first to see modernity's human costs, costs all of us are now feeling acutely as the West plays out its chosen logic. Many of the Romantics' cultural criticisms and warnings have endured, appearing again, for example, in the Sixties and wherever else human being has been threatened. "Art", the Romantics believed, should resist the new erosive winds and seek to shelter and preserve the many-layered human being at all costs. The majority of their fellow citizens, however, felt differently and continued on with the times. As a result, "counter-cultures" composed of writers, painters, dancers and poets emerged for the first time. They were places where creative workers could warm themselves with like-minded company and conspire ways to thwart the budding western technocracy. They were also places of madness, ecstasy, and rage. Extremes all the way around. They were experimental social worlds in a larger world set on a course of increasing social conformism. In its adversarial relation to the prevailing culture creative art began to lose touch with the masses. This continued apace until today most of us look at "modern art" and say, "Huh?" Perhaps an even larger context would be helpful. We may ask: How do people view the phenomenon of "art" in a preindustrial or "primitive" society? In a primitive society there are no highbrows, no lowbrows, no museums, no art markets, no avant-gardes, and no classifying critics. Such disciplines as poetry, music, dance, painting, and sculpture tend to merge in a sort of continuing symphony dedicated to magic, religion, ancestors, survival and social cohesion. Like the Balinese, art is so much a part of an all-pervasive way of life that the people can say: "We have no art; we do everything as well as we can". This pattern changes, however, as soon as workers, peasants, priests, aristocrats and court courtiers emerge and become "class-conscious". With the increasing specialization (read "division") of labor in modern times, the mind and the hand drew further apart, as did the original design and its execution, the goal and its realization. The psychic and spiritual costs of this division gradually affected the entire culture. By 1800, when this tendency had been socialized into an industrial context, sensitive individuals started using a new vocabulary to describe its consequences. Simultaneously, in almost identical terms, Herder and Schiller, Hegel, and Novalis developed the concept of "alienation" to describe the peculiarly modern feelings of purposelessness and fragmentation spreading throughout western civilization. Alienation, they saw, is multi-dimensional and profoundly destructive of human uniqueness. Persons are alienated first from the product of their labor (since it is legally owned by another), then from the activity itself, (since their actions reflect the desires of the owner not theirs), also from their real inner potential (since their activity requires only a narrow part of overall human creative ability), and, finally, from other persons (since in a money economy all workers become competitors). In short, a person's "work" is reduced to the status of an object or thing to be "negotiated", "brought" and "sold" by strangers. If we consider for a moment some of our complaints about our "jobs" in light of this cultural condition we will better understand the reason for our protests and discontents. So it was in this way that human labor lost its creative character while "art" was elbowed to the sidelines, became a distinct activity, and took on the character of an impregnable preserve of man's creative ability. Think of the "art museum" (another phenomenon emerging around this time). With features resembling temples and cathedrals, art museums "enshrine" artwork, promoting a mystique of "apartness" from everyday life. We read "Do Not Touch" and obey. All of these developments were spawned and set in motion during the last four hundred or so years. It might be said they are the natural costs of "technological progress" as we understand it. We chose (or supported those who chose) a certain kind of society and so certain other things (like a comprehensive sense of creative labor) had to be sacrificed. Technology is not evil in itself. It only becomes such when the ends-means relationship is inverted, when the technical model of life becomes imperial or ultimate, and when it serves an end other than human enhancement. It is then no longer merely technology but technocracy, the rule of technique over the ways we think about and live our lives. Technological "progress" then becomes totalitarian because it sees everything other than itself as reactionary, irrational and primitive. The western technocracy has produced a galaxy of tools that have eased the burdens of millions. But as a cultural dynamic it has simply been too one-sided. In her book, "Life Force," Jean Houston suggests that what was lacking in the history of technological success was "a sense of the vital ecology that links inner and outer worlds", (p. 160). Lacking this consciousness of inter-dependence with Nature, she writes, technology is frankly unworldly, and even in fact, "unworlding". Drunk from its own external, material achievements, it is blindly undoing the very world that sustains it. This over-concentration on the outward tends to starve the inward journey of western persons. In missing our connections with the natural world, we miss our connection with our own nature and all that that nature contains. Psychologist Rollo May probes this antagonistic condition in his outstanding little book , "The Courage to Create" when he writes: What people today do out of fear of irrational elements in themselves as well as in other people is to put tools and mechanics between themselves and the unconscious world. This protects them from being grasped by the frightening and threatening aspects of irrational experience... the danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and ... the deeper dimensions of our experience. Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of our consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness, (pg. 76). It is in fact what our natures' contain (and what we think they contain) that has kept us from exploring the depths of latent humanity. We've tended to let dominant "experts" decode the rich human hieroglyph for us, feeling ourselves unequipped and untrustworthy for such a task. And is there anything more effective for immobilizing and stunting inner growth than a distrust of self? What I witnessed in those young senior painters is the same that happens to all who attend to their imaginations and seek to create something new. Surface layers are peeled back and a deeper world is revealed. There's suddenly more of you, more to face, more to be filled with divine empowerment, more to accept and begin trusting as the chosen workplace of the Almighty. If people began to really create they might stumble upon other ways of doing this thing called "Life", ways different than those presented by the makers of mass images, ways different than government statistics about the "American standard of living", ways different from the many "authorities" (familial, cultural, theological, ecclesial, etc.) that have shaped our consciousness. What we need is a more profound and primary understanding of "art", one that does not identify it with a particular medium (painting, sculpture, etc.) or tendency (realist, abstract, etc.), one that enables us to understand "art" in its larger picture as an essential human activity, something for all of us always. In this light, art may be simply described as a way of seeing and a material expression of the sight in color, movement, sound or line. This could be the building of bookshelves or speaking in tongues in a moment of divine rapture; it can be one's style of food shopping or the way you go about meeting a stranger (who may be an angel in disguise!). All begin with inner seeing and progress to outward response. This is the creative process. It is entirely up to us how far we are willing to tap into our rich store or soul and imagination in order to be stretched through creation. Make things new. The original that you are awaits its unveiling. Peter Spellman Did you know... ...that Clive Calder and Ralph Simon named their company Zomba, after the then-capital of Malawi, where legend holds that local tribe members were blessed with superior hearing? (source: Forbes Magazine, 3/19/01) THIRTY WAYS TO CREATE NEWS FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION Getting YOUR media signal through all the noise out there today is a formidable task, even for publicists! But there is no dearth of good ideas IF you put your mind to it. I tell all my clients to spend at least an hour each week brainstorming on publicity ideas for their business. Here are some general ideas to help that brainstorm brew.
TO SUBSCRIBE to MUSIC BIZ INSIGHT: send email with the message in the body, "subscribe" to success@mbsolutions.com It's not an autoresponder so feel free to include any other comments, ideas, suggestions, etc. you may have. About the PublisherPETER SPELLMAN is Director of MUSIC BUSINESS SOLUTIONS, a business and marketing consultancy to the music industry, and Director of Career Development at Berklee College of Music, Boston. He is the author of several books for music entrepreneurs and teaches music industry courses at Northeastern University (Boston) and the University of Massachusetts (Lowell). A musician since he was ten, Peter continues to spin riddims in the improvisational collective, Friend Planet and sing Cat Stevens' songs to his kids every night before bed. BLOOM WHERE YOU'RE PLANTED! Quote of the Month-- "In the contest between rock and stream, the stream always wins; not out of strength, but out of persistence." -Anonymous Written and published bimonthly by Peter Spellman, Director of MUSIC BUSINESS SOLUTIONS: Turning Music Business Data into Useful Knowledge. Career-building books, articles, training, consulting and more. P.O. Box 230266, Astor Station, Boston, MA 02123-0266, USA Phone: 888-655-8335 Email: success@mbsolutions.com Web site: http://www.mbsolutions.com © 1997 - 2003, Peter Spellman, MBS Business Media, www.mbsolutions.com Please feel free to redistribute with above credit and copyright notice.
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