Inside the Music Business

Tony Barrow, Julian Newby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134777174
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is a comprehensive guide to a career in the music industry. Offering advice as to how to get into the business, it explains the main features of a wide range of jobs, such as management, production, promotion and merchandise through to the working lives of recording artists and session musicians.

1

Introduction

Tony Barrow

The Beatles revolutionized the recording business. There, I’ve said it.

I still find it hard to credit the full extent of The Beatles’ impact on the machinery of the modern music industry. It’s not that I have any deliberate desire to underplay the massive songwriting talents of Lennon and McCartney or to understate the innovative musical achievements of the group, but I believe I stood too close to the core of Beatlemania to be completely objective about the wider significance of the whole phenomenon, namely the direct and forceful influence which The Beatles exerted on established industrial practices. Once they became sufficiently successful to wield the necessary power, The Beatles made specific proposals and demands which led to lasting and dramatic changes in some of the traditional strategies employed by UK record companies, particularly in their relationships with artists. This all had the effect of making the music business a more comfortable workplace for the recording artists who came after them.

All those years ago in the so-called swinging sixties, I worked at the centre of the small artists’ management team which surrounded The Beatles in the London headquarters of Brian Epstein’s NEMS Enterprises. Between 1963 and 1968, from my unique viewpoint as the Epstein organization’s in-house publicist for The Fab Four, I saw John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr learn the craft of recordmaking. I watched as their musical experiments threatened to outgrow the relatively lo-fi facilities of the studios where they worked. Gradually, they took control of their own recording sessions. They matured from rebellious and professionally untutored youngsters into more knowledgeable, individually ambitious and adventurous musical explorers. They didn’t know it at the time, we didn’t, but The Beatles were also pioneers who were rewriting the basic rule books of the music business and changing the ways in which future singers, songwriters and their bands would prepare finished product for the public. To that extent, they were at the cutting edge of an industrial evolution, some would call it revolution, which was to give the business an entirely different look and a contemporary infrastructure which we will depict and examine section by section, job by job, in the chapters of this book.

The world of music revolves around its artists—they are the shining stars and their creativity and ingenuity generate the industry’s main sources of income. Music business profitability depends upon the popularity of its performers. Therefore the success of work done in many sectors of the entertainment industry depends on the artistic strength of musicians and composers, singers and bands or a combination of all four.

This book deals in some detail with the career opportunities that are available in the music business of the nineties. If you have not examined the situation until now, you may believe that all the most rewarding jobs in support of recording artists are within record companies. Some of them are, but many others are not. The skills and interests needed are wonderfully varied. Note one basic point at the outset: this book does not attempt to discuss or assess styles or standards of music. In fact it is less about music and more about the structures of the ‘backstage’ business set up behind the star players.

It is very possible to carve out a successful career in the music business without knowing how to compose a tune, how to sing, how to play any instrument or how to read music. Of course an interest in music helps, but the majority of job situations are not concerned with the actual making of music but with the spread of hands-on industrial activities which bring about the sale of records, music videos, concert tickets and other peripheral merchandise. Therefore it is about real people and their working lifestyles rather than faceless companies and their corporate business affairs. Without popular recording artists there would be no music business and without record companies there would be no musical product to be bought in the shops or delivered to the home. But perhaps the most essential element of all is the personnel factor. It is the people who work in the music business at a whole range of levels who are the VIPs, the celebrities, the shining stars of this book.

Some of the jobs on offer appear particularly attractive to the outsider because they provide the chance to work for or at fairly close quarters with performing artists, sometimes with well–established international superstars. If you want to get inside the music business, by all means keep some stars in your eyes and dreams in your head, but don’t be fooled into thinking that the glamour and glitter of show business will become any regular part of your daily routine. Some people who work closest to major artists earn relatively little money. Only the highest echelons of senior management in the music business make fortunes. Those a little lower down who make a good living often put in an awesome number of working hours compared with similarly paid executives in other lines of business. Be prepared to work very hard if you want to stay in the music business.

Although the rest of this book devotes relatively little attention to the recent history of the music business, this introductory chapter gives a valid opportunity to fill in a little background information.

If we take the introduction of weekly popular music sales charts in the UK as the beginning of a new era, it’s fair to say that my generation, the teenagers of the fifties, became the first fans of modern pop music. The earliest pop chart we knew was called a Hit Parade and the first Top 20 we followed was broadcast each Sunday night by Radio Luxembourg and was based on sheet music sales data compiled by the publishing houses of London’s Tin Pan Alley (Denmark Street), not on actual retail record sales.

The New Musical Express published a Top 12 list for the first time towards the end of 1952 and a Top 20 2 years later. When rival music papers in the consumer sector began to run their own charts, there was always the suspicion that figures were being ‘cooked’ to create the impression that each one was based on the most up-to-date market information—fans wanted to be first to know about the best bets for next week’s number one, the latest climbers and new entries, always good topics for conversation over coffee among like-minded young friends.

Most of us heard our new releases first via crackly medium–wave transmissions from Radio Luxembourg which faded to and fro in and out of earshot. English language pop programmes were broadcast each evening from the Duchy using DJs from Britain and involving whole shows which were prerecorded in London. By the middle fifties, large brightly lit jukeboxes freshly imported from America were being installed in our local coffee bars. This pay-per-play facility gave some initial indication of a new single’s sales potential, and each time someone played a new release it also acted as an extra ‘plug’ because others overheard it for the first time.

We bought our first singles either on 10-inch records which revolved 78 times per minute and broke if you dropped them or on the newly launched 7-inch ones which went round more slowly at only 45 revolutions per minute and did not crack as easily. The majority of pop hits played for only 2 or 3 minutes and the B-sides of singles tended to be shorter still. At home in our bedrooms, we listened to our music on record players built into austere wooden boxes with turntables which went at variable speeds at the turn of a knob. These included 33 1/3 rpm to accommodate 10-inch and 12-inch long-players, the albums of the day, and sometimes at 16 rpm too for ‘talking books’.

The output of recorded popular music in Britain came almost exclusively from a handful of so-called ‘majors’. Large record companies such as Decca, EMI, Philips and Pye not only controlled home-produced product but distributed recordings made by American artists, for example Decca had the Warner and RCA labels in the UK, Philips released repertoire from the US Columbia label. The only radio station giving UK listeners a non-stop supply of pop music was Radio Luxembourg. Record companies sponsored many of the commercial station’s primetime programmes and were allowed to use them to plug new singles. On television, in the days before the Beeb introduced Top Of The Pops, the choice of programmes offering the record industry useful promotional opportunities for new product was exceedingly limited, Kent Walton’s Cool For Cats on ITV and David Jacobs’ Juke Box Jury on BBC being among the most popular.

In the fifties, it was not unusual for several British artists to record ‘cover’ versions of an original US hit, and two or three rival singles featuring the same song could be listed in the same week’s chart.

One basic difference between the output of The Beatles in 1963 and that of their predecessors and contemporary competitors was the Liverpool group’s heavy reliance upon self-composed material in an age when the singer—songwriter was a rarity. By writing their own material, The Beatles bypassed the industry’s traditional full-time songwriters, the tunesmiths of Tin Pan Alley. Nor had they any need of the network of songpluggers, the salesmen of the new songs. Song-pluggers were employees of the London music publishing houses who touted their latest tunes around the record company production departments in the hope of getting a star name or a promising new singing discovery to record some of their wares.

Prior to the meteoric rise of The Beatles during the mid-sixties, record company people, particularly the in-house producers who supervised the studio sessions, imposed their choice of raw material on recording artists. By assuming personal responsibility for the selection of their own songs, The Beatles shifted a significant amount of creative control from record company to artist. Their record producer at EMI was George Martin, who set a trend of his own by renegotiating his deal with the company and going independent. Before this, very few recordings were made by independent producers—Joe Meek, who made an extraordinary instrumental hit called Telstar with The Tornados in 1962, was an early exception, but he handed his work to Decca for release. Without the clout of such a major record company he felt it was unlikely that his single would get adequate promotion or be distributed efficiently to the retail trade around the country. It was not until the seventies that independent producers became commonplace, giving the industry a far wider spread of creative ideas than had existed during the heyday of the ‘in-house’ record producer. The more successful and/or prolific of the new ‘indies’ set up their own labels, although most still tended to use the facilities of major record companies for the machinery of manufacture, marketing and distribution.

In the fifties and sixties, the pop record market was singles led. An artist who scored with a hit single was rushed back into the studio to make an LP consisting of 10 or 12 more tracks. Inevitably, the album was given the same title as the hit single, or something very similar. The Beatles completed the recording of their first Parlophone album in 1 day of concentrated sessions, and it was named after their first chart-topping single, Please Please Me. Today the system works in reverse—an album is recorded first and then one or more singles which are taken off it for separate release are used as marketing tools—almost like the cinema industry’s promotional trailer for a feature film.

Every studio recording done in the sixties was, in effect, a fullblown live performance. Artists simply rerecorded everything over and over again until the producer heard a ‘take’ with which he (I never came across a woman in a recording studio control room) was satisfied. It was not uncommon for this to involve up to 20 consecutive performances of the same piece by the artist, accompanied by assembled backing singers/musicians. Each studio session lasted 3 hours and was fixed like that to tie in with Musicians’ Union agreements—additional recording time involved substantial extra payments to instrumentalists. As a rule, several tunes or songs were recorded at a typical 3-hour session, two for a single and maybe one left over for possible use on an LP. The Beatles broke the 3-hour three-song rule by inaugurating open-ended all-night or all-day studio sessions during which finishing touches were put to new songs prior to recording. The Beatles provided most of their own vocal and instrumental accompaniments, so session musicians were not booked on a regular basis to sit idle through these open-ended sessions but were brought in only at the moment they might be required.

The average year’s engagement diary of a successful recording artist used to consist of about 10 months on the road doing concert tours and a few weeks in the recording studio. As soon as The Beatles cut short their career as stage performers in 1966 to concentrate almost exclusively on making records, they changed the established priorities completely, giving over 90% of their working time to recording sessions. This set the crucial and obviously very sensible precedent for studio time to become the most important, essential and prolonged part of a recording artist’s work schedule. The era in which sessions were slotted in on occasional free days during a concert tour had come to an end.

Another industry innovation which was down to The Beatles was the pioneering of the promo video in a fairly primitive form during the second half of the sixties. It was not a device they set out to invent. The truth is that they wanted to avoid having to visit the various BBC and ITV television studios performing their new product on pop shows. Their reason for this was twofold: they were unhappy about the poor sound facilities and variable production standards and they were unwilling to do more travelling than was absolutely necessary. On the other hand, they recognized the power of television promotion and chose to begin producing their own prepackaged TV appearances in the form of short clips. This involved hiring freelance directors of their choice, shooting everything their way in their own time and distributing the finished work to broadcasters all ready to be slotted into a programme. Pop videos for television, usually financed by record companies, became a widely used promotional tool in the seventies and eighties. Dedicated music television channels of today such as MTV Music Television and Country Music Television rely almost entirely on videos as the mainstay of their programming schedules.

At the height of Beatlemania, the launching of pirate radio in Britain changed the pattern of record promotion for the music business. Rival ship-based broadcasters Radio Caroline and Radio London dominated the pirate radio scene, each competing to be the first to play new singles by top artists. PR and promotion people found they could do very simple contra deals with the pirates: if a recording artist was willing to do a personal appearance for the radio station at a club or ballroom, his or her new release would be played regularly on the air at least for a week or so. Favours of one sort or another, such as providing an early copy of a new single by a big star, were repaid by the pirates in airplay on other singles which a record company was keen to promote. At a time when there was no Radio 1 and no local radio, Caroline and London were tremendously useful to the music business in providing a playlist made up almost entirely of new product. Nor did the stations take a negative attitude about playing material by virtually unknown artists and bands; on the contrary, they enjoyed breaking a new name. The rapport between the record companies and Radio 1 was never quite so close or mutually convenient.

Two types of technological development played a big part in altering and improving the creative environment of the recording studio and its editing suites, as well as changing the way in which songs were written, assembled and performed. One concerned the sophistication of the actual recording machinery; the other involved the arrival of synthesizers, enabling the keyboard player’s spread of instrumental sounds to became considerably broader. As new technology came to the recording studio control room, producers who used to have an initial two or four tracks of tape at their disposal were given a veritable superhighway to play with: 16, 32 and 48 tracks upon which to put sound from that number of different sources. This, for example, gave the session musician a more important role in the recording process. Retakes, whether for artistic or technical reasons, no longer meant total reperformance of a piece but the mere dropping in of single bars of music or vocal. Mixing down to make a final master tape became an increasingly complex artistic process which now involved the performer as well as the producer and engineer.

I have noted how artists gained some influential control of their record-making at the expense of in-house producers. To balance this, I should also note the eventual backlash which put fashionable and commercially successful independent producers of the seventies and eighties in very firm control of their recording artists. Some songwriters turned producer in order to get their material recorded in precisely the way they wanted. To achieve this they brought together custom-tailored groups solely for that purpose, some consisting of session singers and musicians who were quite unprepared for public appearances in concert or on television. The line-up of good-looking singers and musicians to be seen on Top Of The Pops or at Hammersmith Odeon was not always the same one which had recorded the hit single.

In parallel with the emergence of the powerful independent producer came a proliferation of small privately owned record companies. To service these, other independent specialists opened recording studios and record distribution outlets. Television advertising was used increasingly to promote record sales both by existing record companies and by specialist new marketing firms. The newcomers concentrated on ‘best of’ collections and themed album compilations containing recordings from more than one original source. Concert tours began to be linked more directly to album releases by timing, title, packaging and peripheral merchandising. This was the beginning of multimedia marketing in the music business allied to the recognition that continuity of image was very valuable in maximizing public awareness of product.

Increasingly in the eighties, as executives of the earlier days retired in the wake of mergers and restructuring, the role of the major record company shifted more emphatically towards the areas of manufacture, administration, marketing and business management. The business of recording music was left increasingly to outsiders, including a new breed of freelance producers who were also multiproduct packagers. More product was acquired in finished form from independent producers or from the small new labels with whom they had deals. At the majors, accountants and lawyers started to play more central roles, while the seeking out of new talent was left increasingly to the ‘indies’. Majors today in the nineties like to think that they still do their share of talent scouting, but the fact is that a large proportion of their product is bought in, via the picking up of artists already launched successfully on independent labels or even occasionally via the outright purchase of smaller concerns.

Meanwhile, the teenagers of the fifties and sixties had matured into the middle-aged record buyers of the eighties and nineties who were prepared to upgrade their existing collections of recorded music from LP discs and analogue tape cassettes to CD. The exploitation of back-catalogue became a new priority among the majors who held the product of the fifties, sixties and seventies—the golden oldies of yesteryear began to sell all over again in CD format.

The massive technological advances which have reshaped the music business during the past three decades are continuing now in the middle nineties with new sound and video carriers coming on the market and even newer methods of direct-tohome delivery imminent.

Many of the roles played by music business employees remain virtually untouched by such radical change; others have adjusted to suit fresh circumstances. Meanwhile, each new phase of industrial evolution has increased the variety if not the overall number of opportunities available today to those who want to bring their individual and special skills to some sector of the music business. In the chapters which follow, we hope to show a comprehensive cross-section of the jobs on offer. If you choose one of these, we wish you success and professional satisfaction in a constantly changing but consistently exciting industry.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

The music business is essentially about selling—or earning from—copyright compositions. The processes by which these compositions get written, become published, get made into discs which in turn get sold, get played on the radio and get performed in clubs and concert halls are complex.

A successful song, its writer and its performer, will become involved with a whole range of people and companies to maximize the exploitation of their copyright. Music publishers, booking agents, concert promoters, venue managers, artists’ managers, record company executives, lawyers, music journalists and radio DJs will all have a part to play at some point in the life of a successful song. Many of the people in this chain will be employed by quite separate companies. It’s quite likely that a lot of them will never meet the writers or performers of any of the songs from which they indirectly earn their livings.

This book is designed to give a broad overview of the music business in terms of the people who work in it. One chapter will look at the role of the artists’ manager, while at the same time touching upon the other people he or she might come into contact with in various working situations. Other chapters (such as the one on the artist, for example) will also touch upon the role of the manager, but each from a slightly different perspective.

Thus you, the reader, the person with an interest in becoming a part of the music business, will gain knowledge not only of many of the jobs involved, but also how they relate to each other. For example, an aspiring band manager might not have considered the extent to which managers have to deal with A&R (artist and repertoire) people, lawyers and concert promoters. Similarly, aspiring concert promoters might not have realized the extent of the financial risks involved in that profession. This book is not intended to put off those people who yearn to en...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Getting inside the music business
• 3: The record company
• 4: Artist management
• 5: The publisher
• 6: The negotiators
• 7: The A&R person
• 8: The producer
• 9: Marketing a release
• 10: Video
• 11: Press and public relations
• 12: Music and the media
• 13: The concert promoter
• 14: The merchandisers
• 15: The fan club
• 16: The artist
• 17: The songwriter
• 18: The session player
• 19: On the road
• 20: The star
• 21: The summing up
• Appendix A: Music industry addresses
• Appendix B: Music industry courses in the UK