Interview with Randy Chertkow
Randy has played music all his life, including jazz, rock, and classical music. He plays all the saxophones, flute, clarinets, guitar, and bass, and performs both music and comedy improv with theater companies around Chicago. He is a musician, author, journalist, public speaker, and teacher. He studied at the Berklee College of music and Bloom School of Jazz, and completed a bachelor's degree in business, and a masters in Computer Science. During the day, Randy is also an enterprise-class IT professional with over 20 years of experience as an infrastructure architect in Fortune 500 companies, and a sales engineer for a major software vendor.
Randy records and performs with Beatnik Turtle, a remarkably-productive independent indie rock band from Chicago that produced 19 albums and released an original song every day for a year. The book he wrote with his business partner Jason Feehan entitled The Indie Band Survival Guide: The Complete Manual for the Do-It-Yourself Musician, now in its second edition, is the most complete book of its type on the market, and highly recommended for anyone who wants practical guidance on networking and the web, playing live, and getting noticed.
RW: Thanks for taking the time to have a conversation. I really enjoyed your book. It is so full of useful and practical information. The one I’m writing covers more theory and aspects pertaining to the Midwest, so I see the two books as complimentary. I am glad that you and Jason Feehan covered the material so thoroughly and laid it out for independent musicians so that other people don’t have to try to reinvent the wheel.
RC: I’m glad to help. It came from trying to explain it to a lot of musicians in ways that make sense. It wasn’t written off the top of our heads, it was the result of talking with a whole lot of people.
RW: It’s also very well-organized, with a consistent and logical structure and layout, which makes it more digestible and easier for the reader to process. You must have spent a lot of time planning it and figuring out the order in which the topics were presented.
RC: Yes, it’s just as you would expect. We spent even more time with the second edition, sort of like step-by-step recipes, where by the end you’ll have registered the copyright for your work, things like that. I’m glad that you found it handy.
RW: I just interviewed Ariel Hyatt, she speaks highly of you guys.
RC: She’s awesome and a sweetheart. We love Ariel.
RW: The contribution she makes in helping musicians improve their marketing is great. Her books like Music Success in 9 Weeks are thin but very nutritional. It would take me nine years to go through it, since I have so little time to work through it.
It’s been five years since your book came out. What do you think is the most important change, biggest surprise or problem that’s taken place in that time?
RC: One of the bigger trends is that five years ago most music was sold as files directly to consumers through iTunes downloads. We do a lot of reading on trends and a lot of people were talking about moving to a subscription model instead, and sure enough, that’s where we are today, where people subscribe to a service giving them access to a huge library of music. They expect it to such a degree that the few holdouts like Adele made the news, but they eventually put their stuff into the pool. That trend isn’t complete. If you compare the U.S. with Europe, they have a much higher percentage of people subscribing to streaming. They are about at 70%, whereas we’re at around 50% in the U.S., so that trend will continue. A lot of what has changed is how you have to deal with fans, and how you deal with income and your music as it relates to streaming.
RW: You wrote in your book that nobody can predict what will happen during the next five years in the music business. You’ve taunted me and laid down the gauntlet, so I have to ask you, what is going to happen during the next five years?
RC: (laughs) The interesting thing about our point of view is that there were other books out when we released our first edition which decried how the whole industry was awful, mostly written by people who were inside the industry. Sure enough, their business models were falling apart, but there were new ones that were opening up. We, as musicians are not big enough to stand in front of the train and stop it, but what you can do is grab it as it goes by. We’ve never been as much for trying to predict the trends except in the broadest sense. Instead we try to take advantage of the things that do catch on as soon as possible, and make the most of that. The safest predictions right now are that video will continue to become even more and more important for promoting your music. I think it’s a big mistake not to tap into that as a way to promote your stuff. As far as fan engagement goes it seems like that can only deepen, with more ways for musicians to interact with their fans directly.
RW: I saw an interview with Jimmy Iovine before he went to Apple in which he said that the recording industry could be turned around by providing a service that would engage fans, by helping them discover new music, and find out about artists. Spotify’s algorithms are nice for discovery, but it doesn’t seem like anyone has gone into deep curation. Do you think, as an IT professional, that anyone like Apple or Spotify can take it on to make a platform where you can, for example, find all the demos, rough and remixes, artist influences, their favorite playlists, interviews and the stories behind their songs?
RC: Wow, you’ve really done your research! (laughs) I am, in fact, still in the middle of IT. The thing you have to remember about Apple Music, Spotify, and every other service is that it is aimed at being really efficient about the one thing that they want out of you, whatever their business model is.
RW: Is it going to be the user’s data that they are after? Are they detecting your preferences from the songs you listen to, when you switch to another, what your friends are listening to, how often you play each one, what you’re up to.at the time, etc. and then trying to connect that to your buying habits?
RC: Yeah, it’s often about data, but it’s not about deepening the relationship with an artist, that’s just not what Spotify would do, and Apple even less so.
RW: It seems like that’s a niche that someone could take on that couldn’t compete with Apple Music, like an indie label that picks a style that is underserved. If we’re moving from products, where every genre of music bumps up against every other in a shuffled environment to services, then it comes down to whose services users like better, and how you can lock a listener into your ecosystem by having them help build up its worth to them. For example, if they’ve spent a lot of time creating and following playlists in Spotify they may not be willing to start over with Apple Music. It’s something we can do on a small scale with our Middletown Radio, by curating playlists and offering listeners an alternative to the incessant barrage of overly-produced pop music. We can help people who are interested in Midwest music find out what’s going on, like DJs used to do by bringing in material their audiences might not have had the time to discover on their own.
RC: Definitely. I think that’s what the general idea needs to be, since they are not going to be our platform. They don’t really have an inclination to do more than what they do. I think that Spotify in some ways did more than the original iTunes. They have a “Follow” button with a few extra features on it. It sends you an email every time the artist drops a new release.
RW: I like that. It’s something simple but still useful. I usually like the way they tell me when an artist that I’m following is going to be playing a show in my area. I think I need to find a way to turn those notifications off sometimes, as it depresses me that I don’t have the time and money to attend all the shows I’d like to see. I was having a pretty good day last week when suddenly Spotify reminded me that Jacob Collier is here his first U.S. tour. I had been moping around over it but had gotten pretty close to forgetting about it since I don’t have a way to get to Los Angeles, Montreal, or New York right now. The new notification brought it back to my attention and interfered with my concentration for a while afterwards. Pretty soon I found myself crafting an email to my inner circle about his music in case they didn’t know how amazing he is.
RC: We just got back from giving a talk in New York where this topic came up. We discussed how people today behave, not just music fans, or the younger generation, but everybody. If they’re are at a stoplight waiting for the light to change, they’re probably going to take out their phone and look at something, whether it’s the latest text from their friends, or a news feed to see what’s going on. There’s an insatiable, constant hunger for new things.
RW: I think it’s an addiction to addiction. You’re looking for that little dopamine drip that comes from someone liking your last tweet, or just the little lift you get from scrolling the page and controlling your device. I’m afraid that we’re just becoming servants to our little devices and while they’re busy collecting our data, and that it won’t be long before bots are composing songs computed especially for each one of us individually. It’s going to go way beyond what Spotify does of picking the next song for you based on who you are following. The system will compose music based on your listening habits, avoiding situations in which you typically turn it off, after it noticed that you often turn off a song if there's no guitar riff within the first two minutes. It’s going to become increasingly harder for real musicians to penetrate the cozy feedback loop we have with our portable computers.
RC: That’s an intriguing idea. I read some research that you might be interested in. Like you, we do a lot of research into how people work, and go beyond just looking at what’s going on in the industry to try to figure why that is the case. I read an interesting article that talked about the fact that people are addicted to this stuff because it anaesthetizes them to the pain of boredom. A lot of habits are not addiction to the thing that releases dopamine, it’s the avoidance of pain.
RW: I think that the pain rises from anxiety, worrying that you're missing out on something that’s happening on your device. I saw some research that looked at what happens to people when their phone beeps. While they wait to check it their anxiety noticeably rses. I think people might have turned to their devices in the beginning out of curiosity and boredom, but now they need to keep that drip going, or the pain will return and make them unhappy.
RC: In any case, tying it back to the earlier part of the question, how often can people drop tracks? I think a track a week would be too much for a musician, but it might not be enough for a fan that is looking for constant updates.
RW: For mere mortals, maybe, but not Beatnik Turtle!
How were you changed by your Song of the Day project? Did you grow more as a songwriter or as a producer? Did you speed up the writing songs, or were the biggest changes in your workflow and pushing a song through to a stereo mix? I can’t imagine repeating the process every day for a year that you could stop the ideas. If you don’t have Beatnik Turtle anymore, what do you do with all that irresistible energy bubbling up?
RC: That’s a really good question. It went beyond our workflow, which got really, really efficient. It became a machine in which ideas would go in one end, and full songs come out the other, to the point where after we got done with the Song of the Day challenge at the end of 2007, we took on the RPM challenge and in 2008. We thought that it would be easy, after writing a song every day for a year, to make an album with 10 songs in a month. It changed how I think of music, and how I market it.
RW: I’m really curious about the process, even if you didn’t release all those songs to the public, the process by itself would be so stimulating, and change the way your brain is wired.
RC: It did. It actually changed our brain chemistry. One of the lessons we learned about it was that, first of all, there’s no such thing as a stupid idea. The songs often started out pretty dumb, and the reason they got to where they were, the songs that we were really proud of, is because someone would play a lick, and then someone else would jump on that idea and take it a step further. We had one guy who came out of Second City who just wrote lyrics, based on song titles that another group did. The lyrics had no melodies, sometimes we’d sing them, sometimes people would play them, and we’d build from these tiny little things into these majors songs.
Do you write songs?
RW: Yes, but I don’t consider myself a songwriter. I think of myself more of an explorer, who starts with one of those ideas that you mentioned, and by playing it and paying attention, find out where wants to go. I try to be faithful to the idea and to not overwhelm it. It’s like I’m in a little boat out there, watching which way the seagulls are flying, in hopes of following one to the New World. I don’t usually think about technical things like song structure too much, although having learned tools like rhyme schemes, point of view, story development, the function of a pre-chorus’s lift, extended harmony, and changing to a new point of view for the bridge, I will at some point turn on the analytic side of the process and alternate between hemispheres, drawing on the collective consciousness and intuition, and applying the tools to give the song a better form. I write out the score when I want to work with patterns and construct harmonies. My strongest skills are in arranging and recording the songs when they’re finished. I’ve had situations before where it’s not until I’m listening back to the final mixdown that I realize that the song’s in an odd time signature of 7/4.
RC: I totally understand. Sometimes we do things that way, other times we don’t. The most recent song I wrote was weeks ago. A friend of mine was getting married and wanted to write a song for his wedding. He came in with pages of lyrics and no real idea. I asked him if he had a sounds-like example he could share to help get us into the right ball park. He gave me a song that happened to be in 3. He didn’t know what I meant by that, so I explained what a waltz is and tapped it out: ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three. Then I played some chords, put them into Ableton, looped it, and tried singing. We adjusted the lyrics that he’d written out to be something that you could sing, and then my friend who’s a guitarist and has done a lot of production started to use some of the tools you were talking about, suggesting that a bridge be added in one spot, and extending another. That’s the same sort of approach that we used for Song of the Day that turned into a production line. The song grew out of the tiniest starting idea. You’re so right about tools. We developed some of our own and gave them special names.
RW: Cool!
RC: One of them was called the “Kong”—not for the most recent King Kong, but for the version that came out just before we started the Song of the Day project. The main character would start out one way or the other on an empty set with a green screen. We noticed that every time he would dodge or duck the other way, there had to be something there that would push him that way, things that they added afterwards. It ended up looking like he was just barely dodging all these things that weren’t present while he was acting, that were added afterwards in post-production. What we found was that, because we only had so much time, we had things that people would play that we later decided needed a setup, like a drum fill. That’s what we would call a “Kong”.
RW: That reminds me of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies deck. Each card has a different statement written on it, some sort of like Zen koans. If they arrived at an impasse in the studio, they might pull a card randomly out of the deck and look for inspiration from it. A card might say “Don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do”, “How would someone else do it?” or “Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency.” I can imagine you guys jamming, what to do next, and somebody suddenly hollering “Kong!” to break the stalemate.
RC: I don’t want to lose this thread, because it was one of the most important things that we learned from Song of the Day that is transferable, and useful whenever you are writing, and it’s something you might want to convey to your songwriting students. We learned that we weren’t able to judge our own music. I don’t mean that you can’t write something and then say “Well, that kinda sucks!” or “That’s a really good song.” You can judge it for yourself, but only the world can decide whether they like it or not. I saythat for a more prosaic reason, not anything huge or noble. We had some songs that we loved and had a lot of meaning to us that didn’t do anything for other people that heard them. We also wrote some really stupid songs for fun or as a joke, and people loved them. I’ve learned that you have to lower the bar and not take yourself so seriously.
Every creative urge you have, no matter how small, there’s a reason for it. You don’t know what the reason is and you may not even be able to see how it’s touched your creative side, but know that it’s more important to flow and get it out there than it is to polish it and make it perfect. We couldn’t believe how that simple things that we did as a lark caught on with people.
RW: That reminds me of Bobby McFerrin’s song “Don’t’ Worry, Be Happy”, which started out as a throwaway tune he started whistling at the end of a recording session, and later became his only hit song.
Having a deadline each day to finish a song could help you be creative, by making you keep up the momentum and not stopping to over think it. Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way suggests a technique where you fill up three pages each morning with whatever comes into your mind, and claims the process frees you up and quiets some of your inner critic.
RC: I’m familiar with that.
RW: What’s in your portfolio of skills? What are you good at, and what do you do with it as an entrepreneur?
RC: In our band, we had eight members but there were only a handful that contributed much to the business side. There were people we could bring in who played trumpet, but that was it. There were others who were OK with telling their friends on social media what we were up to, and that was all the promotion they did. Jason and I wrote our book based on all the things we talked about after practice. My background in IT had a lot to do with the organization of the book. It’s an adaptation of the approach used in O’Reilly books.
RW: I’ve seen some of those, it’s a well-known series of technical books on computer technology topics.
RC: Exactly. I find their style a very natural way to write. Communication is one of my key skills which I use in professional speaking. I write constantly and have a weekly column. I’m good at marketing and PR, and also thinking of ideas we could try. Jason is our music business = lawyer, and is very good at setting a direction. He’s also the battery and energy. He's the one that got us through Song of the Day. He’s also good at project management, making a spreadsheet, and keeping things on track. I think all of those skills are necessary if you want to succeed.
RW: It sounds like you’re an idea generator and Jason is more of an implementer, and that your skills are complimentary and you could function well as a team. I’m like you and am better at divergent thinking and dreaming up lots of ideas, I’m just now trying to develop a better balance, by using convergent thinking to pick one or two of the most auspicious options, and then follow them through to an excellent conclusion. I like how you generated 365 songs that year, and then took your favorites, polished them up, and released them in a double album.
RC: Jason is the one that can narrow things down to a handful. I can come up with a lot of ideas and don’t to implement any of them. He is the type of person who can decide what we’re going to do. I really believe now that it’s just about teaming up.
RW: How important is it for an independent band to fill all the niches that the staff at major record label staff would? Are there some things that you could prune away now that we’re we don’t have to try to reach person in every city?
RC: No it’s not. If you try to do everything, whether you’re an individual or in a band, you’ll probably fail if you spread your energies too thin. The bands who succeed are the ones that have a handful of things that they do really well.
RW: I’m starting to feel overwhelmed with everything that could be done. My grandmother used to have the quote from the White Rabbit on her wall: “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.” She’s been gone for thirty years and it’s just starting to make sense to me. I like your idea of doing a handful of things well, it’s more realistic.
RC: I’ll give you an example. If all you do is YouTube really well, you can win. You don’t need to do anything else if you don’t want to. If you can manage to make the thing that is consonant with their algorithms, more people will see your stuff. There are ways to boost your ranking if you’re smart.
RW: How do you apply your experience with improvisation to music and business?
RC: Honestly I don’t think there’s a time that I don’t use it. It’s a constant. For Song of the Day there’s a reason for every creative urge you have. Make the music, lower the bar, work with other people, and let it go. In improv, the most important moment I had during the whole series of Second City classes happened when we were talking one day about taking whatever your gave you and doing something with it. I asked the teacher what you do if they don’t give you anything. The teacher said they always give you something to work with. It’s amazing what you can do with nothing—that’s what improv is. You don’t know who you are when you stand up there. Your character changes. You could be a robot, a little girl, an 85-year old man, anything. You don’t know. You have to pick up the little clues. The best partners are the ones that set you up like a Wiffle Ball on a stand and let you swing at it with a bat. There’s so much in life about making things up. The ones who succeed in business are the ones who tried crap They figured out what worked, and made stuff up.
RW: I like the prime directive of improv that was handed down from Del Close and Second City, that you never deny what your partner gives you. It’s always “Yes, and…” I think one of the most important thing for an entrepreneur—or musician—to do is to be flexible and alert to ways to make a situation better. Sove problems, and add value.
RC: Let me be really clear about this. When you’re collaborating with people it’s “Yes, and…”. When you’re making a story, its “Yes, but…”. In a story, you need a character who wants something that they can’t get. You drive the story along by doing that over and over. If you’re making a bio for yourself, it needs to be a story. The bigger problems you start with, the more people are going to be interested to see how it all comes out.
RW: We have a project called “Middletown Music” at Ball State. We’re located off the beaten track in the Heartland and have taken on the mission of promoting music of the Midwest. Our project this year is to create a database of bands with Google map pins to identify cool oases to help band string together mini-tours. Do you have any suggestions for how we can find bands and involve them to identify where the best places to play in and between the big cities are?
RC: I think that’s a very good idea. One of the things that musicians need is to answer one question: “Who is going to write about me and give me any kind of exposure?” That first bit of exposure is important to get the ball rolling, and helping with that is a good niche to fill.
RW: I thought, trying to look at it from a band’s perspective, giving them some attention would be the thing that might make them want to participate. When a band gives a rating to a club we’re also going to link to their website. We’ll have some examples of who’s played where, and what style of music they play.
RC: That’s good. Here are some places you can research for venues. All three are sites that track local stuff.
http://indiesonthemove.com
http://songkick.com
http://bandsintown.com
RW: Some of the websites I’ve found look like they’re just scraping data from other sites, and not really creating their own content. I thought that was something we could do, since we have the people-power. The problem is when students turn in bogus data just to get credit for the assignment. If they don’t take it seriously the database won’t be worth using, if users have to sift through junk to get to the meat. Many students don’t want to make the effort to use their phone to talk to people on the ground.
RC: I tried to make the same kind of database you’re talking about but couldn’t keep up. The websites that I gave you are pretty good because you’ll find that the bands that they list are actually playing where they say they are.
RW: That’s good. Then we can reach out to those people and invite them to participate. The advantage of doing this with a class is that we have a large number of participants, and we can continue to do it over the course of future semesters and gradually improve and enrich the data. Anything else that you think would be helpful for bands, venues, or fans? There’s no point in spinning our wheels if nobody cares. We could try to maintain calendars for each city, but it would be a lot of work, and probably the people who live there would never find out that we were creating a listing.
RC: Sign up for an account with bandsintown. Let it scan your music collection. The first thing it will do is to tell you if any of the bands you are listening to are coming to your region. It’s kind of backwards to what you’re doing, but at least you’ll know that they like your kind of music. What are you trying to achieve with this?
RW: The database is to help small clubs increase their audience size, so that they can offer bands enough gas money to circulate through the region. The idea is to help the ecosystem from the bottom up.
RC: The problem that you are trying to solve here is, that from the point of view of the venues, they are trying to get people in to drink alcohol. Most venues are doing everything they can to just to bring people in. They actually don’t care what reason a customer has for coming in. There are a handful of club owners that care a lot about the music, like Bruce at Snyders’ in Chicago. It’s a great venue, I love playing there. One model you can try as a promoter is to find a place that has a sound system but isn’t hosting live music and offer to bring in a package deal with several bands each week and run it. So from the point of view of the venues, they just want people to come through the door. There is no such thing anymore as a regular crowd. People don’t tend to just go to a place and hear whatever music is playing. They go to hear a specific show.
What musicians need when they’re starting out is to get their first fans. If you’re an existing band and you’re drawing 20, then you’re trying to get up to 40, 50, or 60 and keep growing a regular draw. If you’re really big, then you’re just trying to manage your media to fill the major venues. At that level, it has more to do with PR and promotional stuff. At the level you’re talking about, which I assume is the smaller group with 20-100 fans, they need an audience. They don’t know where to get it or how to promote and bootstrap themselves up to a higher level. That’s the problem they are trying to solve. The less ethical thing to do is to pre-sell tickets to the bands and tell them anything they sell above that they’ll get to keep. That’s kind of lame. There’s a lot of that kind of crap that goes on. Unfortunately, the ones that do that will do is sell five shows out that night, and only let each band on stage for 40 minutes. The toughest thing to bridge is between those two things. The way it tends to work really well is to curate or help promote. Those are the biggest gaps out there in my opinion.
RW: What do you think is a reasonable aspiration for a very talented musician with grit and communication skills? If it was your daughter, would you recommend that she have a background plan? I realize there are too many factors to generalize, but after writing your book, it sounds like we’re targeting the same level. The ones with major label contracts don’t need your book…
RC:…they do actually…
RW: What would you tell someone that is starting out? Would you advise that they have a day job and do music in your hometown and where you can drive to on the weekends? And then if it gets bigger than that, great. You wrote that “There’s never been a better time to be in music” but how good is it?
RC: I still believe that, partially because people back in the heyday of music, even fewer people were making a living at it than today. It depends on the type of musician you are. In the 1950s you could find steady work playing live music. I still think there are more opportunities to make a decent amount of money in music. It never was the type of living that you could look at depend on. You can’t make a franchise business out of it, like you can with a restaurant. I can put up a McDonalds or a Jimmy Johns anywhere, as long as there are enough people in the neighborhood to sell it to, I know that I will have a fully-viable income that will pay the mortgage.
With music, there is no one formula that any two people will do. What Jason and I have done is in-depth research on how to make money with music, and we now have over 150 ways. We keep finding more and more methods. Most people only have 4 or 5 and are making their living with that. It is possible that people can do it, it’s easier in cities that have a high density of musical scene, like in L.A, Nashville, New York, and potentially Austin. That being said, you can get on YouTube from anywhere in the world. You could be at the North Pole and be doing great. The thing that sets the ones that do well apart from those that don’t is either focusing on a couple of items like a YouTube following, or having an experienced team behind them, and they just do music and the members of the team are grizzled veterans of the business who can make a life out of it. It tends to be along one of those lines.
RW: You didn’t mention any Midwest cities in your list of music centers. Are there anything about the Midwest music scene or special opportunities if you stayed in the Great Lakes region?
RC: Not too many of our 150 ways to make money are regionally-based. There are different ways to make money with merch, ways to monetize audio and video, licensing royalties, etc. You can do these things in any major city. In Chicago we’ve got 2112 and Fort Knox. Both of them are functiong as music centers. 2112 is a music incubator with a lot of interesting people. You need a community that has more than just creators. Another creator is not going to buy your music. They are not your customer, they’re your colleagues.
RW: How did those two organizations get started?
RC: There was a photographer who’d been doing it since the ‘90s. You wouldn’t have my book in your hands without the meetings we used to have. He was part of a group called CHAT (Chicago Harmony and Truth) that had meetups with venue owners, musicians, photographers, and speakers. That’s where I met Eric Sivers and started thinking about so many things that later made it into the book, ideas that grew out of that. That guy had been trying to create communities forever. Then Fort Know started to grow, it offers musicians a good rehearsal space. That led to the launching of 2112. People started to join and became part of it. It is a business incubator but centered around entertainment. Now there are movie and production companies that are part of it, music supervisors, photographers, people like me and Jason who are on the education side trying to help musicians, actual musicians, programmers who want to have a music business, and PR firms. The point I was trying to make earlier was that you need a community that includes both colleagues, customers, and supporters to do the things you can’t do yourself. Magic happens if you have the right kind of mix, with each person doing what they are good at.
RW: That’s really exciting. In a post-industrial world where robots and AI take over all the jobs, we’re going to need to find things to do besides watch daytime TV. Forget about trying to write hit songs. Become part of a community, and get involved with education. I think that’s the only thing that makes sense moving forward.
RC: It definitely does. The reason that Song of the Day worked was because we ended up forming a community of 30 musicians, with a core of about 8. We’d pulled people in and gave them their own direction. The songs turned out to depend on who you had in the room. It changed everything, and was a lot of fun.
If I had a daughter or someone I was advising now, Jason and I often say that you should let the world tell you when the time is right to shed a day job, for example. It is very possible to hold a day job and to do music, and then once the music hits a certain point where the income is giving you enough to live on, then that’s the time to switch. You can go and dive headfirst, but the truth is that you can make a music video on YouTube and see if you can gain some subscribers without having to quit a job. You can make those at night. There aren’t many music gigs that happen during the day. You can play gigs at night, too.
RW: My calculator informs me that there are 168 hours in a week. If you can focus, and put away the cell phone sometimes you can carve out some blocks of time and get some work done on being a 10% entrepreneur and produce great YouTube content.
It sounds like you have a lot of jobs you can do in addition to playing saxophone that would be gratifying and rewarding.
RC: We’ve learned that what most people lack is the knowledge of how to do it. You can sit in a room all you want and squint at the wall, write on white board, and try to figure out what to do, but what most people really need is to give people the knowledge of what a bunch of other people have done to solve the problem. Pick the ideas of what you think would work for you. What we’re working on now is developing a method to roll out the ideas on a citywide basis.
RW: Do you see us moving into an experience economy rather than selling products and services? How do you make a show an experience rather just as way to the beer flowing and provide background music to fill the awkward silence in a room while people try to hook up?
RC: That’s a good question. First, I don’t know if the whole economic system is moving towards experiences, but I’m seeing activity in that area. When I was flying back from a business trip in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, I started talking to some people on the plane who turned out to be flying to Chicago for an EDM festival called “Spring Awakening” which is run as a type of musical tourism. They’d been to five places so far this year to attend EDM festivals. They’re not musicians, they’re fans. Cities love them, I can tell you because I’ve read the studies and have tried to help a few. The second part of your question was how you can create experiences.
RW: For example, if you’re in a band, you could facilitate selfies with members of the band instead of autographs, and make the purpose of merch be to reinforce memories.
RC: It’s a deep question. Have you ever heard of Tom Jackson?
RW: No.
RC: I suggest since you’re a professor that you check him out at tomjacksonproductions.com. What he teaches is how to turn a show into an experience. He claims, and I think he’s right, that people come to a show to be transformed, for the emotional connection.
RW: In Future Shock, Alvin Toffler predicted the coming “experiential industry” in which people will set aside a big part of their income for amazing experiences. In 1998 Pine and Gilmore used the term “Experience Economy” to describe the model they say we’re entering, and predict that businesses will move from experience businesses to transformation businesses.
RC: That makes a lot of sense. That is exactly the type of things that Jackson talks about. It turns out that some things can be built into a show without making it gimmicky. It’s about creating authentic connections between the audience and people on stage. Music is just a way to convey emotion and make that connection. More generally, there are ways to walk or get around on stage. There’s walking, running, the walk with authority, and skipping, which sounds stupid when you say it, but actually it’s very high energy. You have to find the place in the song that calls you to be more active. One of the things Jackson does if to film a band’s show. Afterwards he turns off the sound and fast forwards to some random part and asks the band which song they were playing. Most of the time they get it wrong.
RW: I like it.
RC: Now let me take it the rest of the way for you in your head. If the guitarist is taking a solo, the guitarist should be at front, so that the audience knows to look at them. That means that everyone else should be behind the guitarist or out of their way. Working backwards, that means that the guitarist needs time to move out front for the audience, which means you have to change the form of the song and vamp so that the person can get up there and take control of the stage and then actually start making the personal connection by looking at audience and making the connection.
RW: And the band will need a musical reason to coalesce somewhere else on stage behind them in order to give the guitarist their space.
RC: There you go!
RW: I’ve done research on using video direction as an application of the study of music theory. It’s frustrating to watch a wide shot of a band while someone is taking a solo. I think a musician should be the one operating the camera since they will recognize the form and zoom in on a soloist, and predict how many bars they have left before it will be time to move again. I was wondering yesterday what civilians perceive while they’re watching a band. Are they aware of 8 and 16-bar phrases? I played in a band for years in which the leader a weak player, but there was only one time that I saw someone’s jaw draw in disbelief the way it should have. Most people were impressed by his collection of sunglasses, perm, and screechy multiphonics he held in reserve to unleash during his extended break on “La Bomba”. I realized then that the general public is not hearing music the way that we do.
RC: That’s what Tom Jackson says. Audiences are ignorant. It doesn’t mean they are stupid or dumb, they just don’t know. He even goes further. They don’t know that you’re just playing a pentatonic scale a million miles an hour. If you’ve got a pained expression on your face they’ll assume it’s something that’s really hard to do.
RW: I used to love to go watch Jennifer Batten play funky jazz guitar in a little bar in San Diego. When she really started to dig in her lip would sometimes start to curl. One of the things I found so compelling was her cool, and the tension between what she was showing on the outside and what must have been going on inside. I lost track of her for a few years, the next thing I knew she had piled up an avalanche of white hair and was prancing around the stage with Michael Jackson in tow during his Super Bowl halftime show. What translated to the big stage and got general audiences excited was the posturing combined with costumes and electric guitar pyrotechnics.
RC: Tom Jackson was touring with a band in some city when the drummer broke his arm. The way he explained it, this drummer wasn’t particular great at playing in time in the first place even with his good arm. There was nobody that could fill in, so the guy played the set with one arm. How do you think the show went?
RW: Did he end up playing more in the pocket because he had to simplify his part?
RC: No, the guy played even worse than usual, but they got a standing ovation after every single song. What was happening there? The audience empathized with the band and connected with them. Jackson realized that he had been thinking about things the wrong way. 15% of the audience’s reaction is due to the music, 35% from the emotions, and 50% based on how it looks. You should take your 3-4 minute radio track, break it up into sections, and figure out what is going on in each part, and then use space and time to free your musicians to make connections with the audience. He’s a genius the way he works, but anyone can use the ideas. I highly recommend his book. It’s a little expensive, but it’s worth it.
RW: You need a stage director to create moments, and practice them like you do your harmony parts. We used to set aside specific rehearsals aside from our instruments just to work on vocals. I was talking with Katie Carlson, Walk the Moon’s creative director about the rehearsals the band is having as they prepare for their upcoming tour. She said that the lighting designer has marks for them to hit throughout the show in order to be in the spotlight at special times, and they're running through the entire performance two or three times a day for weeks to get tight. The music has to be great, but it’s the lights, staging, video, and all the other things that end up engulfing and overwhelming the audience.
RC: A group will spend six months making an album and six weeks rehearsing the music, but most of the money comes from the show. Jackson suggests focusing on the show development. There’s no question in my mind that putting on shows are where the money is.
You’ve got to always remember that music is about conveying emotion, expressing, and connecting. It can be learned and refined. It’s another language that musicians need to master.
RW: Of course it doesn’t hurt to have some incredible songs.
RC: It doesn’t hurt, but the music doesn’t have to be that great. There’s some music that isn’t great that is tremendously popular. It’s not about whether the music is good, its about finding an audience for it, whatever it is.
RW: Do agree that the magic number of fans that you need is 1,000?
RC: No. That’s bullshit. I’m sorry for using strong language here. It’s crap. The reason that I never like that is because if you have a thousand people buy your album it sounds like you’ve won, but it’s not going to provide you with a steady income. I think Patreon is a better way to go. You can have under 500 fans making small, regular contributions and make a thousand to three thousand per month. Then you can start to pay the rent. If you have some royalties trickling in and play live, and layer on all these methods combining active and passive sources, you can put together a livable income. That’s more effective.
RW: Randy, thank you so much for your generosity, spending so much time, and sharing the wealth of information. It’s been so helpful and jam-packed, just like your book, I’m sure that readers will enjoy it. I look forward to reading your next volume, and hope to have a chance to hear you speak someday in person.
RC: Thanks so much, I really enjoyed this. I could talk about this for days, I love it.
©2017 Randy Chertkow and Robert Willey
Randy records and performs with Beatnik Turtle, a remarkably-productive independent indie rock band from Chicago that produced 19 albums and released an original song every day for a year. The book he wrote with his business partner Jason Feehan entitled The Indie Band Survival Guide: The Complete Manual for the Do-It-Yourself Musician, now in its second edition, is the most complete book of its type on the market, and highly recommended for anyone who wants practical guidance on networking and the web, playing live, and getting noticed.
RW: Thanks for taking the time to have a conversation. I really enjoyed your book. It is so full of useful and practical information. The one I’m writing covers more theory and aspects pertaining to the Midwest, so I see the two books as complimentary. I am glad that you and Jason Feehan covered the material so thoroughly and laid it out for independent musicians so that other people don’t have to try to reinvent the wheel.
RC: I’m glad to help. It came from trying to explain it to a lot of musicians in ways that make sense. It wasn’t written off the top of our heads, it was the result of talking with a whole lot of people.
RW: It’s also very well-organized, with a consistent and logical structure and layout, which makes it more digestible and easier for the reader to process. You must have spent a lot of time planning it and figuring out the order in which the topics were presented.
RC: Yes, it’s just as you would expect. We spent even more time with the second edition, sort of like step-by-step recipes, where by the end you’ll have registered the copyright for your work, things like that. I’m glad that you found it handy.
RW: I just interviewed Ariel Hyatt, she speaks highly of you guys.
RC: She’s awesome and a sweetheart. We love Ariel.
RW: The contribution she makes in helping musicians improve their marketing is great. Her books like Music Success in 9 Weeks are thin but very nutritional. It would take me nine years to go through it, since I have so little time to work through it.
It’s been five years since your book came out. What do you think is the most important change, biggest surprise or problem that’s taken place in that time?
RC: One of the bigger trends is that five years ago most music was sold as files directly to consumers through iTunes downloads. We do a lot of reading on trends and a lot of people were talking about moving to a subscription model instead, and sure enough, that’s where we are today, where people subscribe to a service giving them access to a huge library of music. They expect it to such a degree that the few holdouts like Adele made the news, but they eventually put their stuff into the pool. That trend isn’t complete. If you compare the U.S. with Europe, they have a much higher percentage of people subscribing to streaming. They are about at 70%, whereas we’re at around 50% in the U.S., so that trend will continue. A lot of what has changed is how you have to deal with fans, and how you deal with income and your music as it relates to streaming.
RW: You wrote in your book that nobody can predict what will happen during the next five years in the music business. You’ve taunted me and laid down the gauntlet, so I have to ask you, what is going to happen during the next five years?
RC: (laughs) The interesting thing about our point of view is that there were other books out when we released our first edition which decried how the whole industry was awful, mostly written by people who were inside the industry. Sure enough, their business models were falling apart, but there were new ones that were opening up. We, as musicians are not big enough to stand in front of the train and stop it, but what you can do is grab it as it goes by. We’ve never been as much for trying to predict the trends except in the broadest sense. Instead we try to take advantage of the things that do catch on as soon as possible, and make the most of that. The safest predictions right now are that video will continue to become even more and more important for promoting your music. I think it’s a big mistake not to tap into that as a way to promote your stuff. As far as fan engagement goes it seems like that can only deepen, with more ways for musicians to interact with their fans directly.
RW: I saw an interview with Jimmy Iovine before he went to Apple in which he said that the recording industry could be turned around by providing a service that would engage fans, by helping them discover new music, and find out about artists. Spotify’s algorithms are nice for discovery, but it doesn’t seem like anyone has gone into deep curation. Do you think, as an IT professional, that anyone like Apple or Spotify can take it on to make a platform where you can, for example, find all the demos, rough and remixes, artist influences, their favorite playlists, interviews and the stories behind their songs?
RC: Wow, you’ve really done your research! (laughs) I am, in fact, still in the middle of IT. The thing you have to remember about Apple Music, Spotify, and every other service is that it is aimed at being really efficient about the one thing that they want out of you, whatever their business model is.
RW: Is it going to be the user’s data that they are after? Are they detecting your preferences from the songs you listen to, when you switch to another, what your friends are listening to, how often you play each one, what you’re up to.at the time, etc. and then trying to connect that to your buying habits?
RC: Yeah, it’s often about data, but it’s not about deepening the relationship with an artist, that’s just not what Spotify would do, and Apple even less so.
RW: It seems like that’s a niche that someone could take on that couldn’t compete with Apple Music, like an indie label that picks a style that is underserved. If we’re moving from products, where every genre of music bumps up against every other in a shuffled environment to services, then it comes down to whose services users like better, and how you can lock a listener into your ecosystem by having them help build up its worth to them. For example, if they’ve spent a lot of time creating and following playlists in Spotify they may not be willing to start over with Apple Music. It’s something we can do on a small scale with our Middletown Radio, by curating playlists and offering listeners an alternative to the incessant barrage of overly-produced pop music. We can help people who are interested in Midwest music find out what’s going on, like DJs used to do by bringing in material their audiences might not have had the time to discover on their own.
RC: Definitely. I think that’s what the general idea needs to be, since they are not going to be our platform. They don’t really have an inclination to do more than what they do. I think that Spotify in some ways did more than the original iTunes. They have a “Follow” button with a few extra features on it. It sends you an email every time the artist drops a new release.
RW: I like that. It’s something simple but still useful. I usually like the way they tell me when an artist that I’m following is going to be playing a show in my area. I think I need to find a way to turn those notifications off sometimes, as it depresses me that I don’t have the time and money to attend all the shows I’d like to see. I was having a pretty good day last week when suddenly Spotify reminded me that Jacob Collier is here his first U.S. tour. I had been moping around over it but had gotten pretty close to forgetting about it since I don’t have a way to get to Los Angeles, Montreal, or New York right now. The new notification brought it back to my attention and interfered with my concentration for a while afterwards. Pretty soon I found myself crafting an email to my inner circle about his music in case they didn’t know how amazing he is.
RC: We just got back from giving a talk in New York where this topic came up. We discussed how people today behave, not just music fans, or the younger generation, but everybody. If they’re are at a stoplight waiting for the light to change, they’re probably going to take out their phone and look at something, whether it’s the latest text from their friends, or a news feed to see what’s going on. There’s an insatiable, constant hunger for new things.
RW: I think it’s an addiction to addiction. You’re looking for that little dopamine drip that comes from someone liking your last tweet, or just the little lift you get from scrolling the page and controlling your device. I’m afraid that we’re just becoming servants to our little devices and while they’re busy collecting our data, and that it won’t be long before bots are composing songs computed especially for each one of us individually. It’s going to go way beyond what Spotify does of picking the next song for you based on who you are following. The system will compose music based on your listening habits, avoiding situations in which you typically turn it off, after it noticed that you often turn off a song if there's no guitar riff within the first two minutes. It’s going to become increasingly harder for real musicians to penetrate the cozy feedback loop we have with our portable computers.
RC: That’s an intriguing idea. I read some research that you might be interested in. Like you, we do a lot of research into how people work, and go beyond just looking at what’s going on in the industry to try to figure why that is the case. I read an interesting article that talked about the fact that people are addicted to this stuff because it anaesthetizes them to the pain of boredom. A lot of habits are not addiction to the thing that releases dopamine, it’s the avoidance of pain.
RW: I think that the pain rises from anxiety, worrying that you're missing out on something that’s happening on your device. I saw some research that looked at what happens to people when their phone beeps. While they wait to check it their anxiety noticeably rses. I think people might have turned to their devices in the beginning out of curiosity and boredom, but now they need to keep that drip going, or the pain will return and make them unhappy.
RC: In any case, tying it back to the earlier part of the question, how often can people drop tracks? I think a track a week would be too much for a musician, but it might not be enough for a fan that is looking for constant updates.
RW: For mere mortals, maybe, but not Beatnik Turtle!
How were you changed by your Song of the Day project? Did you grow more as a songwriter or as a producer? Did you speed up the writing songs, or were the biggest changes in your workflow and pushing a song through to a stereo mix? I can’t imagine repeating the process every day for a year that you could stop the ideas. If you don’t have Beatnik Turtle anymore, what do you do with all that irresistible energy bubbling up?
RC: That’s a really good question. It went beyond our workflow, which got really, really efficient. It became a machine in which ideas would go in one end, and full songs come out the other, to the point where after we got done with the Song of the Day challenge at the end of 2007, we took on the RPM challenge and in 2008. We thought that it would be easy, after writing a song every day for a year, to make an album with 10 songs in a month. It changed how I think of music, and how I market it.
RW: I’m really curious about the process, even if you didn’t release all those songs to the public, the process by itself would be so stimulating, and change the way your brain is wired.
RC: It did. It actually changed our brain chemistry. One of the lessons we learned about it was that, first of all, there’s no such thing as a stupid idea. The songs often started out pretty dumb, and the reason they got to where they were, the songs that we were really proud of, is because someone would play a lick, and then someone else would jump on that idea and take it a step further. We had one guy who came out of Second City who just wrote lyrics, based on song titles that another group did. The lyrics had no melodies, sometimes we’d sing them, sometimes people would play them, and we’d build from these tiny little things into these majors songs.
Do you write songs?
RW: Yes, but I don’t consider myself a songwriter. I think of myself more of an explorer, who starts with one of those ideas that you mentioned, and by playing it and paying attention, find out where wants to go. I try to be faithful to the idea and to not overwhelm it. It’s like I’m in a little boat out there, watching which way the seagulls are flying, in hopes of following one to the New World. I don’t usually think about technical things like song structure too much, although having learned tools like rhyme schemes, point of view, story development, the function of a pre-chorus’s lift, extended harmony, and changing to a new point of view for the bridge, I will at some point turn on the analytic side of the process and alternate between hemispheres, drawing on the collective consciousness and intuition, and applying the tools to give the song a better form. I write out the score when I want to work with patterns and construct harmonies. My strongest skills are in arranging and recording the songs when they’re finished. I’ve had situations before where it’s not until I’m listening back to the final mixdown that I realize that the song’s in an odd time signature of 7/4.
RC: I totally understand. Sometimes we do things that way, other times we don’t. The most recent song I wrote was weeks ago. A friend of mine was getting married and wanted to write a song for his wedding. He came in with pages of lyrics and no real idea. I asked him if he had a sounds-like example he could share to help get us into the right ball park. He gave me a song that happened to be in 3. He didn’t know what I meant by that, so I explained what a waltz is and tapped it out: ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three. Then I played some chords, put them into Ableton, looped it, and tried singing. We adjusted the lyrics that he’d written out to be something that you could sing, and then my friend who’s a guitarist and has done a lot of production started to use some of the tools you were talking about, suggesting that a bridge be added in one spot, and extending another. That’s the same sort of approach that we used for Song of the Day that turned into a production line. The song grew out of the tiniest starting idea. You’re so right about tools. We developed some of our own and gave them special names.
RW: Cool!
RC: One of them was called the “Kong”—not for the most recent King Kong, but for the version that came out just before we started the Song of the Day project. The main character would start out one way or the other on an empty set with a green screen. We noticed that every time he would dodge or duck the other way, there had to be something there that would push him that way, things that they added afterwards. It ended up looking like he was just barely dodging all these things that weren’t present while he was acting, that were added afterwards in post-production. What we found was that, because we only had so much time, we had things that people would play that we later decided needed a setup, like a drum fill. That’s what we would call a “Kong”.
RW: That reminds me of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies deck. Each card has a different statement written on it, some sort of like Zen koans. If they arrived at an impasse in the studio, they might pull a card randomly out of the deck and look for inspiration from it. A card might say “Don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do”, “How would someone else do it?” or “Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency.” I can imagine you guys jamming, what to do next, and somebody suddenly hollering “Kong!” to break the stalemate.
RC: I don’t want to lose this thread, because it was one of the most important things that we learned from Song of the Day that is transferable, and useful whenever you are writing, and it’s something you might want to convey to your songwriting students. We learned that we weren’t able to judge our own music. I don’t mean that you can’t write something and then say “Well, that kinda sucks!” or “That’s a really good song.” You can judge it for yourself, but only the world can decide whether they like it or not. I saythat for a more prosaic reason, not anything huge or noble. We had some songs that we loved and had a lot of meaning to us that didn’t do anything for other people that heard them. We also wrote some really stupid songs for fun or as a joke, and people loved them. I’ve learned that you have to lower the bar and not take yourself so seriously.
Every creative urge you have, no matter how small, there’s a reason for it. You don’t know what the reason is and you may not even be able to see how it’s touched your creative side, but know that it’s more important to flow and get it out there than it is to polish it and make it perfect. We couldn’t believe how that simple things that we did as a lark caught on with people.
RW: That reminds me of Bobby McFerrin’s song “Don’t’ Worry, Be Happy”, which started out as a throwaway tune he started whistling at the end of a recording session, and later became his only hit song.
Having a deadline each day to finish a song could help you be creative, by making you keep up the momentum and not stopping to over think it. Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way suggests a technique where you fill up three pages each morning with whatever comes into your mind, and claims the process frees you up and quiets some of your inner critic.
RC: I’m familiar with that.
RW: What’s in your portfolio of skills? What are you good at, and what do you do with it as an entrepreneur?
RC: In our band, we had eight members but there were only a handful that contributed much to the business side. There were people we could bring in who played trumpet, but that was it. There were others who were OK with telling their friends on social media what we were up to, and that was all the promotion they did. Jason and I wrote our book based on all the things we talked about after practice. My background in IT had a lot to do with the organization of the book. It’s an adaptation of the approach used in O’Reilly books.
RW: I’ve seen some of those, it’s a well-known series of technical books on computer technology topics.
RC: Exactly. I find their style a very natural way to write. Communication is one of my key skills which I use in professional speaking. I write constantly and have a weekly column. I’m good at marketing and PR, and also thinking of ideas we could try. Jason is our music business = lawyer, and is very good at setting a direction. He’s also the battery and energy. He's the one that got us through Song of the Day. He’s also good at project management, making a spreadsheet, and keeping things on track. I think all of those skills are necessary if you want to succeed.
RW: It sounds like you’re an idea generator and Jason is more of an implementer, and that your skills are complimentary and you could function well as a team. I’m like you and am better at divergent thinking and dreaming up lots of ideas, I’m just now trying to develop a better balance, by using convergent thinking to pick one or two of the most auspicious options, and then follow them through to an excellent conclusion. I like how you generated 365 songs that year, and then took your favorites, polished them up, and released them in a double album.
RC: Jason is the one that can narrow things down to a handful. I can come up with a lot of ideas and don’t to implement any of them. He is the type of person who can decide what we’re going to do. I really believe now that it’s just about teaming up.
RW: How important is it for an independent band to fill all the niches that the staff at major record label staff would? Are there some things that you could prune away now that we’re we don’t have to try to reach person in every city?
RC: No it’s not. If you try to do everything, whether you’re an individual or in a band, you’ll probably fail if you spread your energies too thin. The bands who succeed are the ones that have a handful of things that they do really well.
RW: I’m starting to feel overwhelmed with everything that could be done. My grandmother used to have the quote from the White Rabbit on her wall: “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.” She’s been gone for thirty years and it’s just starting to make sense to me. I like your idea of doing a handful of things well, it’s more realistic.
RC: I’ll give you an example. If all you do is YouTube really well, you can win. You don’t need to do anything else if you don’t want to. If you can manage to make the thing that is consonant with their algorithms, more people will see your stuff. There are ways to boost your ranking if you’re smart.
RW: How do you apply your experience with improvisation to music and business?
RC: Honestly I don’t think there’s a time that I don’t use it. It’s a constant. For Song of the Day there’s a reason for every creative urge you have. Make the music, lower the bar, work with other people, and let it go. In improv, the most important moment I had during the whole series of Second City classes happened when we were talking one day about taking whatever your gave you and doing something with it. I asked the teacher what you do if they don’t give you anything. The teacher said they always give you something to work with. It’s amazing what you can do with nothing—that’s what improv is. You don’t know who you are when you stand up there. Your character changes. You could be a robot, a little girl, an 85-year old man, anything. You don’t know. You have to pick up the little clues. The best partners are the ones that set you up like a Wiffle Ball on a stand and let you swing at it with a bat. There’s so much in life about making things up. The ones who succeed in business are the ones who tried crap They figured out what worked, and made stuff up.
RW: I like the prime directive of improv that was handed down from Del Close and Second City, that you never deny what your partner gives you. It’s always “Yes, and…” I think one of the most important thing for an entrepreneur—or musician—to do is to be flexible and alert to ways to make a situation better. Sove problems, and add value.
RC: Let me be really clear about this. When you’re collaborating with people it’s “Yes, and…”. When you’re making a story, its “Yes, but…”. In a story, you need a character who wants something that they can’t get. You drive the story along by doing that over and over. If you’re making a bio for yourself, it needs to be a story. The bigger problems you start with, the more people are going to be interested to see how it all comes out.
RW: We have a project called “Middletown Music” at Ball State. We’re located off the beaten track in the Heartland and have taken on the mission of promoting music of the Midwest. Our project this year is to create a database of bands with Google map pins to identify cool oases to help band string together mini-tours. Do you have any suggestions for how we can find bands and involve them to identify where the best places to play in and between the big cities are?
RC: I think that’s a very good idea. One of the things that musicians need is to answer one question: “Who is going to write about me and give me any kind of exposure?” That first bit of exposure is important to get the ball rolling, and helping with that is a good niche to fill.
RW: I thought, trying to look at it from a band’s perspective, giving them some attention would be the thing that might make them want to participate. When a band gives a rating to a club we’re also going to link to their website. We’ll have some examples of who’s played where, and what style of music they play.
RC: That’s good. Here are some places you can research for venues. All three are sites that track local stuff.
http://indiesonthemove.com
http://songkick.com
http://bandsintown.com
RW: Some of the websites I’ve found look like they’re just scraping data from other sites, and not really creating their own content. I thought that was something we could do, since we have the people-power. The problem is when students turn in bogus data just to get credit for the assignment. If they don’t take it seriously the database won’t be worth using, if users have to sift through junk to get to the meat. Many students don’t want to make the effort to use their phone to talk to people on the ground.
RC: I tried to make the same kind of database you’re talking about but couldn’t keep up. The websites that I gave you are pretty good because you’ll find that the bands that they list are actually playing where they say they are.
RW: That’s good. Then we can reach out to those people and invite them to participate. The advantage of doing this with a class is that we have a large number of participants, and we can continue to do it over the course of future semesters and gradually improve and enrich the data. Anything else that you think would be helpful for bands, venues, or fans? There’s no point in spinning our wheels if nobody cares. We could try to maintain calendars for each city, but it would be a lot of work, and probably the people who live there would never find out that we were creating a listing.
RC: Sign up for an account with bandsintown. Let it scan your music collection. The first thing it will do is to tell you if any of the bands you are listening to are coming to your region. It’s kind of backwards to what you’re doing, but at least you’ll know that they like your kind of music. What are you trying to achieve with this?
RW: The database is to help small clubs increase their audience size, so that they can offer bands enough gas money to circulate through the region. The idea is to help the ecosystem from the bottom up.
RC: The problem that you are trying to solve here is, that from the point of view of the venues, they are trying to get people in to drink alcohol. Most venues are doing everything they can to just to bring people in. They actually don’t care what reason a customer has for coming in. There are a handful of club owners that care a lot about the music, like Bruce at Snyders’ in Chicago. It’s a great venue, I love playing there. One model you can try as a promoter is to find a place that has a sound system but isn’t hosting live music and offer to bring in a package deal with several bands each week and run it. So from the point of view of the venues, they just want people to come through the door. There is no such thing anymore as a regular crowd. People don’t tend to just go to a place and hear whatever music is playing. They go to hear a specific show.
What musicians need when they’re starting out is to get their first fans. If you’re an existing band and you’re drawing 20, then you’re trying to get up to 40, 50, or 60 and keep growing a regular draw. If you’re really big, then you’re just trying to manage your media to fill the major venues. At that level, it has more to do with PR and promotional stuff. At the level you’re talking about, which I assume is the smaller group with 20-100 fans, they need an audience. They don’t know where to get it or how to promote and bootstrap themselves up to a higher level. That’s the problem they are trying to solve. The less ethical thing to do is to pre-sell tickets to the bands and tell them anything they sell above that they’ll get to keep. That’s kind of lame. There’s a lot of that kind of crap that goes on. Unfortunately, the ones that do that will do is sell five shows out that night, and only let each band on stage for 40 minutes. The toughest thing to bridge is between those two things. The way it tends to work really well is to curate or help promote. Those are the biggest gaps out there in my opinion.
RW: What do you think is a reasonable aspiration for a very talented musician with grit and communication skills? If it was your daughter, would you recommend that she have a background plan? I realize there are too many factors to generalize, but after writing your book, it sounds like we’re targeting the same level. The ones with major label contracts don’t need your book…
RC:…they do actually…
RW: What would you tell someone that is starting out? Would you advise that they have a day job and do music in your hometown and where you can drive to on the weekends? And then if it gets bigger than that, great. You wrote that “There’s never been a better time to be in music” but how good is it?
RC: I still believe that, partially because people back in the heyday of music, even fewer people were making a living at it than today. It depends on the type of musician you are. In the 1950s you could find steady work playing live music. I still think there are more opportunities to make a decent amount of money in music. It never was the type of living that you could look at depend on. You can’t make a franchise business out of it, like you can with a restaurant. I can put up a McDonalds or a Jimmy Johns anywhere, as long as there are enough people in the neighborhood to sell it to, I know that I will have a fully-viable income that will pay the mortgage.
With music, there is no one formula that any two people will do. What Jason and I have done is in-depth research on how to make money with music, and we now have over 150 ways. We keep finding more and more methods. Most people only have 4 or 5 and are making their living with that. It is possible that people can do it, it’s easier in cities that have a high density of musical scene, like in L.A, Nashville, New York, and potentially Austin. That being said, you can get on YouTube from anywhere in the world. You could be at the North Pole and be doing great. The thing that sets the ones that do well apart from those that don’t is either focusing on a couple of items like a YouTube following, or having an experienced team behind them, and they just do music and the members of the team are grizzled veterans of the business who can make a life out of it. It tends to be along one of those lines.
RW: You didn’t mention any Midwest cities in your list of music centers. Are there anything about the Midwest music scene or special opportunities if you stayed in the Great Lakes region?
RC: Not too many of our 150 ways to make money are regionally-based. There are different ways to make money with merch, ways to monetize audio and video, licensing royalties, etc. You can do these things in any major city. In Chicago we’ve got 2112 and Fort Knox. Both of them are functiong as music centers. 2112 is a music incubator with a lot of interesting people. You need a community that has more than just creators. Another creator is not going to buy your music. They are not your customer, they’re your colleagues.
RW: How did those two organizations get started?
RC: There was a photographer who’d been doing it since the ‘90s. You wouldn’t have my book in your hands without the meetings we used to have. He was part of a group called CHAT (Chicago Harmony and Truth) that had meetups with venue owners, musicians, photographers, and speakers. That’s where I met Eric Sivers and started thinking about so many things that later made it into the book, ideas that grew out of that. That guy had been trying to create communities forever. Then Fort Know started to grow, it offers musicians a good rehearsal space. That led to the launching of 2112. People started to join and became part of it. It is a business incubator but centered around entertainment. Now there are movie and production companies that are part of it, music supervisors, photographers, people like me and Jason who are on the education side trying to help musicians, actual musicians, programmers who want to have a music business, and PR firms. The point I was trying to make earlier was that you need a community that includes both colleagues, customers, and supporters to do the things you can’t do yourself. Magic happens if you have the right kind of mix, with each person doing what they are good at.
RW: That’s really exciting. In a post-industrial world where robots and AI take over all the jobs, we’re going to need to find things to do besides watch daytime TV. Forget about trying to write hit songs. Become part of a community, and get involved with education. I think that’s the only thing that makes sense moving forward.
RC: It definitely does. The reason that Song of the Day worked was because we ended up forming a community of 30 musicians, with a core of about 8. We’d pulled people in and gave them their own direction. The songs turned out to depend on who you had in the room. It changed everything, and was a lot of fun.
If I had a daughter or someone I was advising now, Jason and I often say that you should let the world tell you when the time is right to shed a day job, for example. It is very possible to hold a day job and to do music, and then once the music hits a certain point where the income is giving you enough to live on, then that’s the time to switch. You can go and dive headfirst, but the truth is that you can make a music video on YouTube and see if you can gain some subscribers without having to quit a job. You can make those at night. There aren’t many music gigs that happen during the day. You can play gigs at night, too.
RW: My calculator informs me that there are 168 hours in a week. If you can focus, and put away the cell phone sometimes you can carve out some blocks of time and get some work done on being a 10% entrepreneur and produce great YouTube content.
It sounds like you have a lot of jobs you can do in addition to playing saxophone that would be gratifying and rewarding.
RC: We’ve learned that what most people lack is the knowledge of how to do it. You can sit in a room all you want and squint at the wall, write on white board, and try to figure out what to do, but what most people really need is to give people the knowledge of what a bunch of other people have done to solve the problem. Pick the ideas of what you think would work for you. What we’re working on now is developing a method to roll out the ideas on a citywide basis.
RW: Do you see us moving into an experience economy rather than selling products and services? How do you make a show an experience rather just as way to the beer flowing and provide background music to fill the awkward silence in a room while people try to hook up?
RC: That’s a good question. First, I don’t know if the whole economic system is moving towards experiences, but I’m seeing activity in that area. When I was flying back from a business trip in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, I started talking to some people on the plane who turned out to be flying to Chicago for an EDM festival called “Spring Awakening” which is run as a type of musical tourism. They’d been to five places so far this year to attend EDM festivals. They’re not musicians, they’re fans. Cities love them, I can tell you because I’ve read the studies and have tried to help a few. The second part of your question was how you can create experiences.
RW: For example, if you’re in a band, you could facilitate selfies with members of the band instead of autographs, and make the purpose of merch be to reinforce memories.
RC: It’s a deep question. Have you ever heard of Tom Jackson?
RW: No.
RC: I suggest since you’re a professor that you check him out at tomjacksonproductions.com. What he teaches is how to turn a show into an experience. He claims, and I think he’s right, that people come to a show to be transformed, for the emotional connection.
RW: In Future Shock, Alvin Toffler predicted the coming “experiential industry” in which people will set aside a big part of their income for amazing experiences. In 1998 Pine and Gilmore used the term “Experience Economy” to describe the model they say we’re entering, and predict that businesses will move from experience businesses to transformation businesses.
RC: That makes a lot of sense. That is exactly the type of things that Jackson talks about. It turns out that some things can be built into a show without making it gimmicky. It’s about creating authentic connections between the audience and people on stage. Music is just a way to convey emotion and make that connection. More generally, there are ways to walk or get around on stage. There’s walking, running, the walk with authority, and skipping, which sounds stupid when you say it, but actually it’s very high energy. You have to find the place in the song that calls you to be more active. One of the things Jackson does if to film a band’s show. Afterwards he turns off the sound and fast forwards to some random part and asks the band which song they were playing. Most of the time they get it wrong.
RW: I like it.
RC: Now let me take it the rest of the way for you in your head. If the guitarist is taking a solo, the guitarist should be at front, so that the audience knows to look at them. That means that everyone else should be behind the guitarist or out of their way. Working backwards, that means that the guitarist needs time to move out front for the audience, which means you have to change the form of the song and vamp so that the person can get up there and take control of the stage and then actually start making the personal connection by looking at audience and making the connection.
RW: And the band will need a musical reason to coalesce somewhere else on stage behind them in order to give the guitarist their space.
RC: There you go!
RW: I’ve done research on using video direction as an application of the study of music theory. It’s frustrating to watch a wide shot of a band while someone is taking a solo. I think a musician should be the one operating the camera since they will recognize the form and zoom in on a soloist, and predict how many bars they have left before it will be time to move again. I was wondering yesterday what civilians perceive while they’re watching a band. Are they aware of 8 and 16-bar phrases? I played in a band for years in which the leader a weak player, but there was only one time that I saw someone’s jaw draw in disbelief the way it should have. Most people were impressed by his collection of sunglasses, perm, and screechy multiphonics he held in reserve to unleash during his extended break on “La Bomba”. I realized then that the general public is not hearing music the way that we do.
RC: That’s what Tom Jackson says. Audiences are ignorant. It doesn’t mean they are stupid or dumb, they just don’t know. He even goes further. They don’t know that you’re just playing a pentatonic scale a million miles an hour. If you’ve got a pained expression on your face they’ll assume it’s something that’s really hard to do.
RW: I used to love to go watch Jennifer Batten play funky jazz guitar in a little bar in San Diego. When she really started to dig in her lip would sometimes start to curl. One of the things I found so compelling was her cool, and the tension between what she was showing on the outside and what must have been going on inside. I lost track of her for a few years, the next thing I knew she had piled up an avalanche of white hair and was prancing around the stage with Michael Jackson in tow during his Super Bowl halftime show. What translated to the big stage and got general audiences excited was the posturing combined with costumes and electric guitar pyrotechnics.
RC: Tom Jackson was touring with a band in some city when the drummer broke his arm. The way he explained it, this drummer wasn’t particular great at playing in time in the first place even with his good arm. There was nobody that could fill in, so the guy played the set with one arm. How do you think the show went?
RW: Did he end up playing more in the pocket because he had to simplify his part?
RC: No, the guy played even worse than usual, but they got a standing ovation after every single song. What was happening there? The audience empathized with the band and connected with them. Jackson realized that he had been thinking about things the wrong way. 15% of the audience’s reaction is due to the music, 35% from the emotions, and 50% based on how it looks. You should take your 3-4 minute radio track, break it up into sections, and figure out what is going on in each part, and then use space and time to free your musicians to make connections with the audience. He’s a genius the way he works, but anyone can use the ideas. I highly recommend his book. It’s a little expensive, but it’s worth it.
RW: You need a stage director to create moments, and practice them like you do your harmony parts. We used to set aside specific rehearsals aside from our instruments just to work on vocals. I was talking with Katie Carlson, Walk the Moon’s creative director about the rehearsals the band is having as they prepare for their upcoming tour. She said that the lighting designer has marks for them to hit throughout the show in order to be in the spotlight at special times, and they're running through the entire performance two or three times a day for weeks to get tight. The music has to be great, but it’s the lights, staging, video, and all the other things that end up engulfing and overwhelming the audience.
RC: A group will spend six months making an album and six weeks rehearsing the music, but most of the money comes from the show. Jackson suggests focusing on the show development. There’s no question in my mind that putting on shows are where the money is.
You’ve got to always remember that music is about conveying emotion, expressing, and connecting. It can be learned and refined. It’s another language that musicians need to master.
RW: Of course it doesn’t hurt to have some incredible songs.
RC: It doesn’t hurt, but the music doesn’t have to be that great. There’s some music that isn’t great that is tremendously popular. It’s not about whether the music is good, its about finding an audience for it, whatever it is.
RW: Do agree that the magic number of fans that you need is 1,000?
RC: No. That’s bullshit. I’m sorry for using strong language here. It’s crap. The reason that I never like that is because if you have a thousand people buy your album it sounds like you’ve won, but it’s not going to provide you with a steady income. I think Patreon is a better way to go. You can have under 500 fans making small, regular contributions and make a thousand to three thousand per month. Then you can start to pay the rent. If you have some royalties trickling in and play live, and layer on all these methods combining active and passive sources, you can put together a livable income. That’s more effective.
RW: Randy, thank you so much for your generosity, spending so much time, and sharing the wealth of information. It’s been so helpful and jam-packed, just like your book, I’m sure that readers will enjoy it. I look forward to reading your next volume, and hope to have a chance to hear you speak someday in person.
RC: Thanks so much, I really enjoyed this. I could talk about this for days, I love it.
©2017 Randy Chertkow and Robert Willey