9 ms·

A friend of mine decided to pursue music production around the same time I started in software engineering. We're both 20 somethings. We swap war stories now an

A friend of mine decided to pursue music production around the same time I started in software engineering. We're both 20 somethings. We swap war stories now and then. I get to hear about how he's working with his mentor to do vocal production on a track getting pitched for Maroon 5, The Chainsmokers, etc. Sometimes the tracks take -- the artist likes them and decides to move forward. Usually they don't and it's a lot of getting your hopes up for nothing. These major artists have lots of songs getting thrown at them on any given day. To date some of my friends biggest credits are vocal production credits on a couple billboard top 100s. A single track will have 50 names on it between writing, production, studio performance, etc. My friend's mentor is late 30s and mainly does songwriting. He's been trying to do a solo thing but just isn't marketable. However, just recently he "made" it with a feature on a top 100 song and a couple songs picked up by major artists. The checks cleared this last year but the songs came out a couple years ago. He went from "how do I pay rent" to 7M literally over night. He moved to WA to dodge CA income tax. My friend has been able to tie a couple big checks together over the years, but it's been tough. One year it's 100k, the next it's 20k and all from ads and random tv shows. I'm consistently shocked when talking with my friend just how little music matters in the music industry. The people who make the most look good, sound good, and hell they're crazy talented. But they aren't the people who've written the lyrics or the melodies that define our culture. We probably can't name those people.

ryantgtg 6y ago
Anecdote: My dad was in the music industry in the 80s, and he knew song writers. He joked about how funny it was to hear, for example, a (male) friend singing a demo of “Like A Virgin.”
BitwiseFool 6y ago
Fascinating, can you share which song(s) he "made it" with?
- tohnjitor 6y ago
  Nice try, California department of revenue
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    "Actually, we're called the CA Franchise Tax Boa- ahh fuck"
Johnny555 6y ago
He moved to WA to dodge CA income tax If he waited for the big check before he made that move, CA will find him - it's not where you live when you got the check, it's where you live when you earned it.
- thanhhaimai 6y ago
  +1, moving intentionally to avoid this is asking for a lot of trouble, especially for a bill that large. I hope he consulted his financial advisors.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    No kidding! CA’s tax man is among the most aggressive I’ve ever encountered. If you move to the Sahara desert to try to avoid paying, they’ll have someone waiting in a sand dune to jump out and hand you the bill as you walk by.
  - vmception 6y ago
    > I hope he consulted his financial advisors and if he did, he'd learn that 5 minutes of estate planning makes it ridiculously easy to avoid having any trouble, especially for a bill that large so if you know, you know if you don't, then you might find yourself bombarded by misinformation regarding the music industry, and state taxes on a programming forum
    - Johnny555 6y ago
      What is the 5 minute fix that would allow someone to escape tax liability for income earned (but not yet received) while working in California?
      - vmception 6y ago
        It would take 5 minutes to synthesize the answer after a much longer time of studying the universe of possibilities. The financial advisor should be able to provide that.
asah 6y ago
so you're saying it he needed a little sweetness in his life? (ducks)
dv_dt 6y ago
I thought songwriters had some sort of union or industry group that went to bat for them? The article and this discussion makes it sound that doesn't exist. edit: hmm, ASCAP and Songwriters guild are a couple names that come up... though this might be something of a dispute within different groups within ASCAP..
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  There is nothing to bat for i.e. no royalties until the song has been sold. No song can be sold in significant number until it has been recorded by a famous artist backed by a well resourced record company. By the time a song has been sold in significant numbers, it is too late for ASCAP or the Songwriters Guild to act, because the song has already been credited to an artist who didn't actually write it, because the songwriter signed away his or her rights in order to bootstrap the song. You may think "that's not fair", and you may be right, but the difficulty is that a famous artist can make as much money selling a song that is not quite as good as a "great" song, and the supply of OK songs far exceeds the supply of "great" songs. What even is a "great" song? It is difficult to tell, and even more difficult to prove, until it has been recorded by a "great" artist, and bought by millions of fans of said artist. By that point, a contract exists crediting the "great" artist with writing or co-writing the song. This contract can be defended in a court of law by an ordinary lawyer working for a "great" record company, or better still, by a "great" lawyer working for a "great" record company. When it comes to greatness, the medium is the message.
  - dv_dt 6y ago
    Issues of fairness and pay are the very reasons unions are formed. Setting fair boundaries on jobs is within the scope of many unions touching the entertainment industry.
throwaway1777 6y ago
I have a few friends in the business and they are basically all broke except for one. Music is like the game industry. Hits based and there are far more talented people pursuing it than there are hits. Being talented isn’t enough, you need to be well connected, good looking, lucky, etc. The internet has made it better than ever to carve out a niche and get a few thousand fans, but it’s still hard to get people to choose you over the millions of other things screaming for attention.
- offtop5 6y ago
  The music industry is much worse in my opinion. If you spend half your life learning to program so you can make games, you can always give up at 38 and start working on boring enterprise software. If You're a 38-year-old self-taught musician you can't exactly walk into a company and get a job. I still make music as one of my main hobbies, but I've accepted that no one will ever know who I am, and I'll never make a single cent. There's nothing in the world like making a song for your friends though.
  - jfengel 6y ago
    That is precisely the story of a close friend. It really messed her up for several years. She was genuinely amazingly talented but her band never managed to be in the right place at the right time. She did land on her feet, after literally going all the way back to college as a freshman. (She was fortunate to have the resources for that.) Best anecdote though, on the 18 year olds who she befriended in the program: "The good news is they think I'm 28. The bad news is they think that's old."
  - Jasper_ 6y ago
    There's plenty of "working musicians" not in the industry: playing gigs in jazz clubs, at weddings. If you're a composer or a songwriter, you can find work in films and TV and commercials (lots of ad agency work to go around), or become an in-house composer at a stock music house, or another production staff, like a game studio! If you try to find stardom, you won't succeed.
whycombagator 6y ago
> I get to hear about how he's working with his mentor to do vocal production on a track getting pitched for Maroon 5, The Chainsmokers, etc. Sometimes the tracks take -- the artist likes them and decides to move forward. Usually they don't and it's a lot of getting your hopes up for nothing This lines up with stories I’ve heard from a friend who had some success in the music industry (2 gold records), was signed to a major label, then dropped so went into song writing. It’s a hyper competitive industry to operate in
saurik 6y ago
> My friend's mentor is late 30s and mainly does songwriting. ... He went from "how do I pay rent" to 7M literally over night. > The people who make the most look good, sound good, and hell they're crazy talented. But they aren't the people who've written the lyrics or the melodies that define our culture. I am confused by the story: isn't the person who made the big bucks here a person who "mainly does songwriting"?
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  > I am confused by the story: isn't the person who made the big bucks here a person who "mainly does songwriting"? The law says the songwriter is entitled to songwriting royalties. In practice, famous artists' managers negotiate with poor unknown songwriters to take a percentage of the songwriters royalty by pretending that the artist co-wrote or wholly wrote the song. This is made possible by supply and demand, and asymmetrical market access. Famous artists can sell millions of recordings, even if the songs aren't so great. They have long queues of songwriters trying to offer them material for that reason. Great unknown songwriters can't sell great songs unless they are recorded by someone famous or connected, because nobody will hear them. To resolve these dynamics and make deals, mangers since ancient times have made talented unknown songwriters offers they can't refuse: Give away a percentage of the songwriting royalty (by crediting an artist for co-writing or writing the melody or the lyric) in exchange for jumping ahead of other talented unknown songwriters in the queue to get to market.
  - dctoedt 6y ago
    > famous artists' managers negotiate with poor unknown songwriters to take a percentage of the songwriters royalty by pretending that the artist co-wrote or wholly wrote the song. That might not be strictly necessary, because in the U.S., there's such a thing as a performer's copyright in the (recorded) performance itself, separate from the songwriter's copyright in the song. [0] [0] https://www.ip-watch.org/2014/11/24/us-courts-recognise-new-performers-rights/ https://www.ip-watch.org/2014/11/24/us-courts-recognise-new-...
    - 6y ago
sorokod 6y ago
In what way are they "crazy talented" if they dont author the lyrics or the music? Is it meant cynically to describe the situation where the performer is just packaging for someone else's talant?
- hammock 6y ago
  They kind of say: "look good, sound good." Having worked in this industry myself, is it definitely a talent to have good stage presence, good presence in front of a videocamera, photogenic and modeling skills. Not to mention charisma when dealing with radio and TV interviews, fanbase, etc. It's also a talent to sing well, to sing consistently, to be able to channel inflection and emotion on command in a studio or on a stage. There is more to being a pop star than the songwriting. (Note I'm saying all this while still holding huge respect and value for the songwriters and producers themselves. I'm a total music fan.)
  - sorokod 6y ago
    But that was always the case. I have the (perhaps incorrect) impression that over time, pop performers perform someone else's materials more and more.
    - philmcc 6y ago
      It wasn't really always the case. If you scroll back, so to speak, a generation or so, the further and further you get, the less necessary it was to win the trifecta of being Attractive, A Dancer, and a Live Performer. Let alone songwriter. There's only so many people that are all 4 and you know all of them by name. You could be VERY plain looking, and unable to dance at all, and chart in in 1965.
      - WalterBright 6y ago
        Fred Astaire's original audition allegedly was noted as: "can act, can sing, can dance a little."
      - 6y ago
WalterBright 6y ago
> He moved to WA to dodge CA income tax WA is closing that loophole. They just passed a gigantic capital gains tax.
- mannerheim 6y ago
  Where are the capital gains here?
globular-toast 6y ago
> A single track will have 50 names on it between writing, production, studio performance, etc. This is something I've noticed more and more lately. The list of credits on everything is huge. I happened to see an episode of Family Guy the other day. I haven't regularly watched it for years, but noticed on this one there were literally minutes of credits at the beginning. It went on and on and on. I don't know why this is or what it means, but it's interesting. > I'm consistently shocked when talking with my friend just how little music matters in the music industry. The people who make the most look good, sound good, and hell they're crazy talented. But they aren't the people who've written the lyrics or the melodies that define our culture. We probably can't name those people. I don't think this is a new phenomenon by any means. I was reading the other day about The Beatles and how, when they became big in the USA, the professional songwriters of the time were worried because these guys wrote their own songs. Apparently it was almost unheard of at the time.
musicale 6y ago
> We probably can't name those people Excepting songwriters who are/were also recording artists (The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Danny Elfman, Elton John, Randy Newman, Sia....) How about Max Martin? Stock Aitken Waterman? Lieber and Stoller? There are of course many well-known song composers and lyricists in contemporary musical film and theater, for example Alan Menken, Andrew Lloyd Weber, Stephen Sondheim...
dsr_ 6y ago
Find some episodes of The Muppet Show. Late 1970s, with a entertainment-related guest on each episode. Sometimes the guest is an actor or actress, and they're very nice looking. Sometimes the guest is a musician... and they look funny to modern eyes. Then they pull out their instrument or open their mouth, and you can hear the same (or better) quality as today's musicians. The Muppet Show ended in 1981. MTV launched in 1981.
- olivermarks 6y ago
  @DSR_ I used to be in the music world last century. Even then there was show business (visual appeal, dancing etc) and there was musicians (people who can play and/or sing really well). This is very accentuated today, with a tremendous amount of effort put in by artists to be visually appealing/charismatic on instagram etc, which has replaced the top 20 chart position marketing trick. There is little to no time to create music, the emphasis is very much on sound bites and visual marketing...
lumberingjack 6y ago
I took a job recently client basically twisted my arm I didn't need to work. One of the guys on the job is a live country musician, a big one. They're not on tour right now and he doesn't just sit around he works so he's out laying tile doing whatever carpentry work he can during the covid lockdown with no live shows. He hates country absolutely can't stand it, but fell into the country crowd early in his career and now that's all he plays. So this guy's up there playing big huge amazing country shows hates every minute of it.

ryantgtg 6y ago

Anecdote: My dad was in the music industry in the 80s, and he knew song writers. He joked about how funny it was to hear, for example, a (male) friend singing a demo of “Like A Virgin.”

BitwiseFool 6y ago

Fascinating, can you share which song(s) he "made it" with?

tohnjitor 6y ago
Nice try, California department of revenue
- renewiltord 6y ago
  "Actually, we're called the CA Franchise Tax Boa- ahh fuck"

Johnny555 6y ago

He moved to WA to dodge CA income tax If he waited for the big check before he made that move, CA will find him - it's not where you live when you got the check, it's where you live when you earned it.

thanhhaimai 6y ago
+1, moving intentionally to avoid this is asking for a lot of trouble, especially for a bill that large. I hope he consulted his financial advisors.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  No kidding! CA’s tax man is among the most aggressive I’ve ever encountered. If you move to the Sahara desert to try to avoid paying, they’ll have someone waiting in a sand dune to jump out and hand you the bill as you walk by.
- vmception 6y ago
  > I hope he consulted his financial advisors and if he did, he'd learn that 5 minutes of estate planning makes it ridiculously easy to avoid having any trouble, especially for a bill that large so if you know, you know if you don't, then you might find yourself bombarded by misinformation regarding the music industry, and state taxes on a programming forum
  - Johnny555 6y ago
    What is the 5 minute fix that would allow someone to escape tax liability for income earned (but not yet received) while working in California?
    - vmception 6y ago
      It would take 5 minutes to synthesize the answer after a much longer time of studying the universe of possibilities. The financial advisor should be able to provide that.

asah 6y ago

so you're saying it he needed a little sweetness in his life? (ducks)

dv_dt 6y ago

I thought songwriters had some sort of union or industry group that went to bat for them? The article and this discussion makes it sound that doesn't exist. edit: hmm, ASCAP and Songwriters guild are a couple names that come up... though this might be something of a dispute within different groups within ASCAP..

wombatmobile 6y ago
There is nothing to bat for i.e. no royalties until the song has been sold. No song can be sold in significant number until it has been recorded by a famous artist backed by a well resourced record company. By the time a song has been sold in significant numbers, it is too late for ASCAP or the Songwriters Guild to act, because the song has already been credited to an artist who didn't actually write it, because the songwriter signed away his or her rights in order to bootstrap the song. You may think "that's not fair", and you may be right, but the difficulty is that a famous artist can make as much money selling a song that is not quite as good as a "great" song, and the supply of OK songs far exceeds the supply of "great" songs. What even is a "great" song? It is difficult to tell, and even more difficult to prove, until it has been recorded by a "great" artist, and bought by millions of fans of said artist. By that point, a contract exists crediting the "great" artist with writing or co-writing the song. This contract can be defended in a court of law by an ordinary lawyer working for a "great" record company, or better still, by a "great" lawyer working for a "great" record company. When it comes to greatness, the medium is the message.
- dv_dt 6y ago
  Issues of fairness and pay are the very reasons unions are formed. Setting fair boundaries on jobs is within the scope of many unions touching the entertainment industry.

throwaway1777 6y ago

I have a few friends in the business and they are basically all broke except for one. Music is like the game industry. Hits based and there are far more talented people pursuing it than there are hits. Being talented isn’t enough, you need to be well connected, good looking, lucky, etc. The internet has made it better than ever to carve out a niche and get a few thousand fans, but it’s still hard to get people to choose you over the millions of other things screaming for attention.

offtop5 6y ago
The music industry is much worse in my opinion. If you spend half your life learning to program so you can make games, you can always give up at 38 and start working on boring enterprise software. If You're a 38-year-old self-taught musician you can't exactly walk into a company and get a job. I still make music as one of my main hobbies, but I've accepted that no one will ever know who I am, and I'll never make a single cent. There's nothing in the world like making a song for your friends though.
- jfengel 6y ago
  That is precisely the story of a close friend. It really messed her up for several years. She was genuinely amazingly talented but her band never managed to be in the right place at the right time. She did land on her feet, after literally going all the way back to college as a freshman. (She was fortunate to have the resources for that.) Best anecdote though, on the 18 year olds who she befriended in the program: "The good news is they think I'm 28. The bad news is they think that's old."
- Jasper_ 6y ago
  There's plenty of "working musicians" not in the industry: playing gigs in jazz clubs, at weddings. If you're a composer or a songwriter, you can find work in films and TV and commercials (lots of ad agency work to go around), or become an in-house composer at a stock music house, or another production staff, like a game studio! If you try to find stardom, you won't succeed.

whycombagator 6y ago

> I get to hear about how he's working with his mentor to do vocal production on a track getting pitched for Maroon 5, The Chainsmokers, etc. Sometimes the tracks take -- the artist likes them and decides to move forward. Usually they don't and it's a lot of getting your hopes up for nothing This lines up with stories I’ve heard from a friend who had some success in the music industry (2 gold records), was signed to a major label, then dropped so went into song writing. It’s a hyper competitive industry to operate in

saurik 6y ago

> My friend's mentor is late 30s and mainly does songwriting. ... He went from "how do I pay rent" to 7M literally over night. > The people who make the most look good, sound good, and hell they're crazy talented. But they aren't the people who've written the lyrics or the melodies that define our culture. I am confused by the story: isn't the person who made the big bucks here a person who "mainly does songwriting"?

wombatmobile 6y ago
> I am confused by the story: isn't the person who made the big bucks here a person who "mainly does songwriting"? The law says the songwriter is entitled to songwriting royalties. In practice, famous artists' managers negotiate with poor unknown songwriters to take a percentage of the songwriters royalty by pretending that the artist co-wrote or wholly wrote the song. This is made possible by supply and demand, and asymmetrical market access. Famous artists can sell millions of recordings, even if the songs aren't so great. They have long queues of songwriters trying to offer them material for that reason. Great unknown songwriters can't sell great songs unless they are recorded by someone famous or connected, because nobody will hear them. To resolve these dynamics and make deals, mangers since ancient times have made talented unknown songwriters offers they can't refuse: Give away a percentage of the songwriting royalty (by crediting an artist for co-writing or writing the melody or the lyric) in exchange for jumping ahead of other talented unknown songwriters in the queue to get to market.
- dctoedt 6y ago
  > famous artists' managers negotiate with poor unknown songwriters to take a percentage of the songwriters royalty by pretending that the artist co-wrote or wholly wrote the song. That might not be strictly necessary, because in the U.S., there's such a thing as a performer's copyright in the (recorded) performance itself, separate from the songwriter's copyright in the song. [0] [0] https://www.ip-watch.org/2014/11/24/us-courts-recognise-new-performers-rights/ https://www.ip-watch.org/2014/11/24/us-courts-recognise-new-...
  - 6y ago

sorokod 6y ago

In what way are they "crazy talented" if they dont author the lyrics or the music? Is it meant cynically to describe the situation where the performer is just packaging for someone else's talant?

hammock 6y ago
They kind of say: "look good, sound good." Having worked in this industry myself, is it definitely a talent to have good stage presence, good presence in front of a videocamera, photogenic and modeling skills. Not to mention charisma when dealing with radio and TV interviews, fanbase, etc. It's also a talent to sing well, to sing consistently, to be able to channel inflection and emotion on command in a studio or on a stage. There is more to being a pop star than the songwriting. (Note I'm saying all this while still holding huge respect and value for the songwriters and producers themselves. I'm a total music fan.)
- sorokod 6y ago
  But that was always the case. I have the (perhaps incorrect) impression that over time, pop performers perform someone else's materials more and more.
  - philmcc 6y ago
    It wasn't really always the case. If you scroll back, so to speak, a generation or so, the further and further you get, the less necessary it was to win the trifecta of being Attractive, A Dancer, and a Live Performer. Let alone songwriter. There's only so many people that are all 4 and you know all of them by name. You could be VERY plain looking, and unable to dance at all, and chart in in 1965.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      Fred Astaire's original audition allegedly was noted as: "can act, can sing, can dance a little."
    - 6y ago

WalterBright 6y ago

> He moved to WA to dodge CA income tax WA is closing that loophole. They just passed a gigantic capital gains tax.

mannerheim 6y ago
Where are the capital gains here?

globular-toast 6y ago

> A single track will have 50 names on it between writing, production, studio performance, etc. This is something I've noticed more and more lately. The list of credits on everything is huge. I happened to see an episode of Family Guy the other day. I haven't regularly watched it for years, but noticed on this one there were literally minutes of credits at the beginning. It went on and on and on. I don't know why this is or what it means, but it's interesting. > I'm consistently shocked when talking with my friend just how little music matters in the music industry. The people who make the most look good, sound good, and hell they're crazy talented. But they aren't the people who've written the lyrics or the melodies that define our culture. We probably can't name those people. I don't think this is a new phenomenon by any means. I was reading the other day about The Beatles and how, when they became big in the USA, the professional songwriters of the time were worried because these guys wrote their own songs. Apparently it was almost unheard of at the time.

musicale 6y ago

> We probably can't name those people Excepting songwriters who are/were also recording artists (The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Danny Elfman, Elton John, Randy Newman, Sia....) How about Max Martin? Stock Aitken Waterman? Lieber and Stoller? There are of course many well-known song composers and lyricists in contemporary musical film and theater, for example Alan Menken, Andrew Lloyd Weber, Stephen Sondheim...

dsr_ 6y ago

Find some episodes of The Muppet Show. Late 1970s, with a entertainment-related guest on each episode. Sometimes the guest is an actor or actress, and they're very nice looking. Sometimes the guest is a musician... and they look funny to modern eyes. Then they pull out their instrument or open their mouth, and you can hear the same (or better) quality as today's musicians. The Muppet Show ended in 1981. MTV launched in 1981.

olivermarks 6y ago
@DSR_ I used to be in the music world last century. Even then there was show business (visual appeal, dancing etc) and there was musicians (people who can play and/or sing really well). This is very accentuated today, with a tremendous amount of effort put in by artists to be visually appealing/charismatic on instagram etc, which has replaced the top 20 chart position marketing trick. There is little to no time to create music, the emphasis is very much on sound bites and visual marketing...

lumberingjack 6y ago

I took a job recently client basically twisted my arm I didn't need to work. One of the guys on the job is a live country musician, a big one. They're not on tour right now and he doesn't just sit around he works so he's out laying tile doing whatever carpentry work he can during the covid lockdown with no live shows. He hates country absolutely can't stand it, but fell into the country crowd early in his career and now that's all he plays. So this guy's up there playing big huge amazing country shows hates every minute of it.