Peter M. Thall - What They’ll Never Tell You About the Music Business, Third Edition: The Complete Guide for Musicians, Songwriters, Producers, Managers, Industry Executives, Attorneys, Investors, and Accountants

We are the music makers

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams,

World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world forever, it seems

ARTHUR O SHAUGHNESSY

There are enough agents, accountants, attorneys, managers, and music publishers, not to mention friends and family, who are more than willingfor love or moneyto advise young artists (musicians, singers, and songwriters) in the pursuit of their careers.

Most of this advice is well-intentionedand it may even be timely and helpful. However, it may also be irrelevant to a particular individuals circumstances. The reasons for this are manifold.

Not the least of the problems in offering advice to young artists is the fact that they customarily have limited knowledge of the music industry. Unlike participants in other industries, the major players in the music business often enter the arena with neither a clear understanding of its workings and history nor the means to obtain the information that would convey such knowledge to them. The people who make up the heart and soul of the music industry do not usually know a break-even point from a producer point, a royalty from a prince, or a mechanical license from a synchronization licensein short, they dont know their business. In the course of writing this book, I have discussed various chapters with senior executives in different departments of major music business companies. At the end of the discussion, all of them told me, in so many words, You know, I learned a thing or two today. This is not to criticize them. As an attorney who has practiced in the music industry for more than forty years, I learned long ago that managers and executives in the music industry, unlike their highly trained peers who choose to work in the financial or real estate worlds, rarely have the requisite background to function in the industry at an optimal level. Yet these managers and executives are ultimately responsible for making the decisions that will make or break their companies.

The music industry executives strength is enhanced only when the company he or she joins has an established and tested management training program. Although the institutions that form the music publishing and recording industry today are very well set up for precisely this kind of training, it is unlikely that these companies will also give the fledgling executive the information that I am seeking to impart in this book. For the personal manager and business manager in whose hands the artist and the record and publishing companies place their trust, this book is intended to provide not just informational data, but also a perspective that will help them to become more aware of the parts of the business which no one will teach them, but which they must nonetheless understand if they are to perform their functions effectively.

Ironically, when it comes to artists, it is widely accepted that really creative people do not know their business. After all, arent they living in the realm of the ideathe eigenweltthe world that is interesting precisely because it is not the mitweltthe shared world, the concrete, tangible world that can be objectively evaluated? The late Northrup Frye, one of the 20th centurys preeminent literary critics, and a noted commentator on Canadian society and culture, gave an acclaimed series of lectures at the University of Toronto several decades ago. In these lectures, published as