How Creators Killed the Music Business

Today's video I'm filming on my phone like I did at the beginning of my channel, really because anyone can film videos on their phone with just Lo-Fi. It's easy to do this to become a creator and I'm going to tell you a story about how the

creators

brought down the

music

business

, but it's not really the

creators

, it's actually you, the public brought down the

music

business

, but come on Let's do this while we take a walk in the park because it's a beautiful sunny day, it's a little windy, come on, so it's 1996. I'm living here in Atlanta.

Living with my Buddy Rich and three other musicians in this house. We have bands that come and go. Rich also books the city's top clubs. My friend Mark and I decided to start this project, so I borrowed a da-88. digital tape machine we started writing songs with the idea that we are going to form this band that eventually became billionaires in February of that year 1996. Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Because of that, these huge media companies like Clear Channel cumulus started buying all these radio stations and the homogenization of radio started happening, they bought all this stuff, they fired the program directors, a lot of the program directors that broke up the local bands and the local bands used to be broken by the local radio stations back in the day when they had autonomy to do things like that, but then there are people who don't even come to the cities running the radio stations and making the playlist which is more of a generic playlist , Atlanta is not one of the ones we had 99 times more than my dear friend Leslie.

Fram programmed and had the autonomy to create artists, you can play whatever you wanted, but that was unusual, so we didn't realize what was coming, so we started our band and finally got a record offer in 1998. We went in and we make our first album with a major label. We spent 483 thousand dollars on a record. Let me play a song here so you can get a vibe of what we sound like. I have never been to that place and these are the reasons for today's seasons. Today, as you can hear, this is a really cool song, but it's not commercial, we're not a commercial band at all, so the fact that we got a record deal when we didn't have any radio songs was quite unusual, but the Record labels accepted possibilities for artists back then in 1998, but in 1999 we released our album and I got this call from our lawyer.

Hey, were you watching the news today? I said no, why did Universal just buy Polygram, so what does that mean? The guys fell, so I went back to the hotel room where we were staying. I think it was a small rock, so I woke the guys up and told them this. We got in the van and drove back to Atlanta. Those guys got jobs. but the broader thing that was happening in the music business that we were realizing was right around the time we were dropped. Napster started. You know, kids started sharing files through Napster. The year 2000 was the biggest year for sales in the music business. labels is when you had the Backstreet Boys in sync with all this stuff and then Rocky and Lincoln Park and you had Creed and you had all these bands that were selling millions and millions of tens of millions of records and um and I start producing and I started have success with some bands.

I worked with Van Shinedown in 2002 on some of his early records that ended up going double platinum and that's one of the reasons I have equipment in my studio, it was actually from that record. It was a long time ago, at this point it's been over 20 years, but I didn't realize it until probably two years later in 2004 when major label budgets started going down. I was buying major label records at the time, but then to be like instead of having 250,350,000 to make a record where you'd go into a studio, they'd pay me three thousand dollars a song plus three points, three points per point, which which means three percentage points you get from the artist. the artist, a new artist back then would get 13 percentage points, so records sold for $10 that didn't sell, sold for $20.

The CD, so if a record sold for ten dollars out of that ten dollars, the band got one dollar Thirty thirteen. percent of their 13 they pay me, the producer gets paid by the band, so I got another 30 cents of that, okay, so they paid me, so they really got a dollar record. I got 30 cents per record, so if you had a platinum record, uh, you'd make three hundred thousand dollars if you had a triple platinum record, which you would have to have a big record. You would win a million dollars. We're close to a million dollars.

So nine nine hundred thousand dollars. Future Rick here. I forgot to mention one thing, so not only is it outrageous that the labels only paid the artist 13 and of that the artists paid the producer three percent, but that the mixer received one percent, so the artist was actually making nine percent, so we were making 90 cents a record, not a dollar a record, one of the reasons I started my studio in 2005. I opened my studio was because there weren't budgets like that anymore, basically it started to have budgets of 150 thousand dollars, that's all where I had to mix the record.

I would deliver the mixed album. There was no money for rent. There was no money for session musicians. And all the bands had to have people who wrote songs with them. Now I was one of those who got a job. because not only could I write songs with the bands but I could also play their parts if needed and I could play any auxiliary parts if I needed additional guitar parts if I needed organ Parts keyboard Parts pads if I needed a string arrangement I could write the arrangement and I would hire to a small group of people and then we would triple it so it wasn't like a string orchestra, whatever the size needed, could and would provide a finished record for maybe a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. at that time eh, that would be 75,000 so it would be fifty thousand dollars and by the time 2008 came around that was pretty much it with the major label. completely and then around 2012 rock completely disappeared from mainstream popular music, basically there were still popular bands, but the era of all those hard rock bands, the nickel bands you know, that sold millions of records in Lincoln Parks, they pretty much ran their course, so there was no work, no money could be made for the labels from it.

I wasn't making that kind of music. I was doing mostly metal bands and metal was going underground again. Now I made other bands. what metal bands, I worked with a band called Need Debris, I made three albums with them, they're a rock band that, you know, was more American, maybe you'd call them and I was writing with bands, well, one of the bands I wrote . with a bit was a band called Parmley in 2007. I've told that story here. Parmalee had a song called Carolina that we wrote in 2007 in 2013 they got a record deal as a country band.

They cut this song half a step lower and in February it went to radio and amazingly the song went to number one on December 9, 2013. The number one song sold in the millions, so I had a number one song as a writer, a country song, the only country song he had written, so I went to Nashville and started. I wrote with the best country writers and I did it for probably three four months and I realized that if you didn't live in Nashville there was no future in it, so I left it, so we're talking about 2015. I'm basically working with independent artists, from I suddenly had this video with my son Dylan in December 2015.

What is this? Well, he sings A B flat very well. What is this Gordon? Great singing F sharp. Excellent. What is this chord? Brilliant. What is this chord? the next day. The video exploded on Facebook. I also put a copy on YouTube at the same time. I didn't go back to my YouTube channel. I had no videos on YouTube other than videos of my kids and that video ended up getting 22 million views on Facebook during That week, well, I went back to YouTube about three days later and it was at 500,000. Now, at that time, since I didn't have no other video, I had 47 subscribers so I actually started my channel with 47 subscribers so I started from scratch with these videos I made all the videos you know and then it became this channel so I was thinking about this when I was on my walk, if you weren't on a major label back then, was almost impossible.

I'm talking all the time. until about 2008 it was almost impossible to be successful, you had to be on one because you couldn't be on the radio and you couldn't get it in the record stores, they owned the distribution, they owned the radio stations, basically because of social networks. You can reach millions of people, my channel has had 540 million 550 million views over the last six and a half years. My channel will be seven years old in June of this year and I will be 61 years old soon. There are artists that have broken into YouTube through Tick Tock through Instagram through Facebook but mainly through YouTube and through Tick Tock when I say broken I mean they've gone from here to some of them being on major labels I mean, Justin Bieber was really a YouTube.

Star of the day before he was a big star, there is a singer Tate McRae, an artist who had a number one song, is on RCA records, has 32 million monthly listeners on Spotify, is a pop artist and had great success , but she started on YouTube when she was 14 years old. She's probably 19 or 20 now, and then you can be known as a music teacher, like this channel, you can be known for having a music channel because YouTube, Tick Tock, Instagram or Facebook are distribution. networks that are open to anyone who wants to publish content. The amazing thing about this is that you don't have to be part of a large corporation.

I mean, these are big corporations. YouTube is a big corporation that is part of Google, but I make whatever content I want here and people can choose to watch it or not if it's interesting to watch, but I can get my videos to millions of people, my channel has been successful enough that to be able to interview many well-known people. legendary musicians and that's because you guys go back and watch the videos. I think we're in a much better place now than we were. The only good thing about the old days. I don't mean to be old manuals on the clouds, it's just that there used to be these Gatekeepers, that was the good and bad part.

The Gatekeepers were the people. There were some good people in the past who found great bands. There were some people who hired Led Zeppelin. You know, they're saying that our people. signed to Genesis and yeah and whoever I'm talking about, people signed all those bands that we know and love Radiohead and they promoted them and that's why we know about them, if they didn't promote them we wouldn't know about them, they needed to put up that money . there and make you know them well enough, so that's the good and the bad of this. Now there are the Guardians, basically you are you, you decide how long you watch the videos, you decide what videos to watch, what channels to watch, what channels to stop watching, whatever it is.

That is my reflection today. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I always come back to this: how amazing is this. You know, being on YouTube, for example, and really anyone can do it. That's the amazing thing if you have something that people are interested in, it doesn't matter, you can get followers, you can, you know, you can be successful at this anyway, don't forget to hit the subscribe button. There are more people unsubscribing from my channel than subscribing and, uh, leave a comment, let me. I know your opinion. Thanks so much for looking.