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Playing For Life
(18 Feb 04)
Empower Yourself
Don't wait for a break - This is my advice for those of you who want to satisfy your artistic needs. No matter how much money you make teaching or doing gigs as a hired gun, the truth is, your dream since you started playing probably has been to be rewarded for your playing and your own music.
In the past, most artists would make a demo, and shop it around hoping that a record label would pick them up. Those where sad times. Artists had absolutely no power whatsoever. Even today, there are still plenty of artists doing the same thing; they have yet to see what great times we live in.
Because of technology today, releasing a CD is a simple thing to do. If you are well rehearsed, you can be in and out of the studio in three days. That includes the mix down. I recorded, mastered and pressed my own CD, "Prospects" for about three-thousand five hundred dollars. That includes the money I paid for the studio musicians to do the session. If you have a band with permanent members you probably don't have to pay them, so you can do it for less.
Recording tips - Be totally prepared. The trick to getting the session done inexpensively is speed. The misconception that you need a month in the studio to do a good recording is completely false. If you are well rehearsed, you can knock each song out in two takes. After that, you decide which take you like, punch in any parts you don't like and move on to the next tune. The difference with my newest CD is that we never rehearsed. I hired studio cats who just read the charts. We ran through the tune once, recorded two takes for each song and never did any punch-ins. The musicians where top notch players. If you get in the studio and start rehearsing, you are never going to get done in time.
Selling the thing once you get it done - In the old days, the only way to sell a record was to get a contract with a record company and a distribution deal to get the product in stores, advertise, tour and wait for you measly royalty check.
Royalty rates vary slightly from company to company, but I'll just tell you, you have to sell at least a million records to be able to pay your rent. That's the sad truth about "a major deal". But now we live in glorious times thanks to the internet. Once you get your CD done you can sell it from your web site (I'll get to that after this).
You can also send it to cdbaby.com and/or guitar9.com and/or a bunch of other sites that will sell it for you. You just put the link for cdbaby.com or guitar9.com on your site and they will be directed directly to your page on those sites. Guitar9.com, cdbaby.com and most other similar sites such as Amazon.com will sell customers the cds you send them by credit card and they in turn will send you a check from time to time. They take four or five dollars from your sales and everyone walks away happy.
You are basically doing your own distribution. With a "major deal" you would make about a dollar on a CD sale, this way you make about ten dollars, about fourteen on the ones you sell at gigs or from your site by personal check. You only have to sell ten percent of what you would with a "major deal" to make the same money. But the most important thing as that you are empowered; it's your own motivation, dedication, footwork that moves your CD. Do it yourself and learn a bunch in the process.
Rave Reviews - In the mean time you can send your CD to some different sites that will review it for you. If you do a good job on your CD, you should be able to get some good reviews from sites that specialize in just that.
Other people looking for new music will go to these sites, read your review, go to your site and buy your CD. You can also use quotes from the reviews to put in your "press pack" that you send out to radio stations or to other review sites. I used godsofmusic.com and some other sites.
Your Site - If you think putting together a site is way more than you know how to deal with, your wrong. Buy yourself software like Dreamweaver for a few hundred bucks and you are on your way. You don't have to know anything about code to do it. It's as easy as "Word" or "Powerpoint".
It'll take you about half an hour to install it and have your first few pages going. The other thing you need to do is get yourself a domain name and someone to host it. That's easy too. Just type in "domain names" into your favorite search engine and you are on your way. I think mine costs me about seven or eight bucks a month for 50MB. I need at least 50MB because I have mp3s on my site available for people to download. You may or may not need that much.
The only other problem is graphics. Your site will be dull without cool graphics. If you are into that kind of thing you may want to try to do it yourself using "Fireworks" which is included in the "Dreamweaver" package or some other software such as "Adobe Photoshop". Or, (shameless plug) you can purchase your own custom graphics and web-pages from a company like ominousgraphics.com for next to nothing. Yes, ominousgraphics.com is my own company that does web graphics for artists for cheap.
Once you get your site going, have as many sites as you can add your link and you'll start getting traffic. Include in your site: audio files, your bio, a cd page with links to cdbaby.com and guitar9.com, a links page, a news page, a schedule page so you can get people to come to your shows (and buy your CD) and photos, etc. It's important to do it yourself. If you don't, information will always be slow and your site will be a big bore. Like I said before, do it yourself and learn something in the process. Check out my site if you have a chance. You may get some ideas.
Green
Managing your money - This will probably be the first time you are going to get financial advice from a guitarist. A lot of musicians give up playing as a professional for money reasons. One of the tricks in surviving in the business is to manage your money.
No matter what happens, pay yourself first. Before you pay your rent, bills, buy your girl a watch, pay yourself first. Whatever you can swing is okay. Let's say, two, three, five hundred dollars a month. No matter what happens, every month, you put it away first and you don't touch it. What if you can't make ends meet? You make ends meet! If you can't come up with the car insurance at the end of the month, you'll work that much harder to find a gig.
If I had started doing this when I was eighteen, I would have about a million bucks today. I'm serious. I started doing this in my late twenties; I put the money into a mutual fund that earned me, on average, about twelve percent a year. Here is a rule that you probably never heard before. They never taught me this formula in school:
72 divided by yearly interest earned on any investment = the amount of years it takes the investment to double
Let's say you are eighteen and invest six thousand dollars ($500 x 12 months) into a mutual fund that earns you ten percent a year. 72 divided by 10 equals 7.2 years for your six-thousand dollars to double. It will double again in another 7.2 years. Let's just make it an even seven years for demonstrational purposes:
Age Investment
18 6,000
25 12,000
32 24,000
39 48,000
46 96,000
53 192,000
60 384,000
You would retire with three-hundred eighty-four thousand dollars from only one year of properly invested savings. Figure out what you would have if you had done this every year of your life starting form when you where eighteen. You would be a millionaire! You don't have to believe me, do your own math. Go to yahoo finance and do some mutual fund historical research.
Making a living as a guitarist has been one of the greatest joys in my life. I hope that sharing some of the things I learned along the way will help you to be successful in the music business. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to e-mail me anytime.
© 2002-2004 Chris Juergensen/chrisjuergensen.com. All Rights Reserved.
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Native New Yorker, long time studio musician and session guitarist Chris Juergensen is in constant demand as a sideman, front man and clinician. He currently divides his time between Tokyo and Los Angeles where he continues to write, record, play and teach at Musicians Institute. He has released three solo CDs to date plus two published instructional books. Visit his website
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