“You wanted a hit…” j.murphy
You gotta love those ‘musician’ workshops.
Dear lemmings with “when will i will be famous?!” sparks in your cute young eyes, let us, the league of gentle(wo?)men who didn’t manage to ‘make it big’ in the music bizness show you how to become a successful band.
Don’t forget to pay us in advance.
Lesson 1: Forget about fun and passion. Being in a band is about being professional and about planning and about optimised marketing. We’ll teach you GbR instead of DIY.
Lesson 2: Grow up and forget about creative playfulness and creative courage. We’ll teach you how important it is to be well-trained by music lessons and how to reproduce market expectation in your songwriting and promotion.
Lesson 3: Promotion! It’s all about promotion and image and joining competitions and about viral youtube clips. And about guest lists for important ‘scene’ people whose attendance at your shows will automatically multiply the number of your audience and bizness people. And don’t forget promotion! Music is about how you sell it, not about how it sounds. Have we mentioned how important promotion is?
Lesson 4: Let us show you all about how to have the best sound on a huge festival stage. (No, this lesson is not downgradable to the tiny stages with cheap PAs that you are going to play IRL, so shut up.)
Lesson 5: Forget about sharing. All potential listeners are potential thieves. Music needs to be locked up in bureaucracy and controlled. How else could the GEMA jobs and ours survive?
Lesson 6: Promoters are your enemy. Especially the DIY ones, who don’t put up shows professionally (= for money) but only in their spare time (=for fun). There’s a worldwide shady DIY network out there that is run by cons and punx who only want to set up shows cause they like bands’ music and want to help them out. Truth is: This is higly unprofessional and they will not agree to pay you a 500€ guarantee for a show but only give you ‘what’s left after their expenses’ and they will not pay hotel rooms for you but make you stay at their messy own homes while they secretly make thousands of bucks from the 10 people who came and payed to see you play.
(should be continued. feel free to do so.).
(Dedicated to whoever carelessly said they miss the massacre rants. 🙂 )