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| Clay Aiken is a manufactured pop star, where is his career now? |
The illusion of fame and fortune is indeed just that, an absolutely wicked illusion. There is a reason the casino's in Vegas are glamorous and beautiful as they rely on a majority of folks to lose their money in a staged bilking draped in a veil called entertainment.
Notoriety can be born overnight but not when the cards are clearly stacked against success in terms of financial gain and or freedom for an individual or band. Signing a hefty contract with a corporate entity that intends to manufacture pop hits, not careers may be for more pop oriented acts or ones that enjoy swimming in shallow pools. Bands and acts that want to insure a long career path with their music should really vet all the folks that come along their path. If anything is askew or seems odd, walk away as much of entertainment business that we all seem to know and love, is purely an illusion.
Below is a great read we found over on Cracked.com and is co-written by hip hop artist Spose and Robert Evans, about Spose's dealings with a major label.
Read more great articles on Cracked
"Getting a record deal is the musician equivalent of a high school
ball player making it pro, only with fewer head injuries and lower odds
of an overdose. Two albums into my career as a rapper, I had a hit song,
and the recording industry whisked me off to Hollywood. My fairy tale
lasted 11 months before they abruptly dropped me from my recording
contract without ever releasing my album, despite my first single going
gold (selling over 600,000 copies in just a few months).
In that short time, I got a crash course in the recording industry:
how it works, how they exploit and manipulate young talent, and how to
go from having nothing to everything to nothing again in a very short
period of time. My name is Spose, and this is an inside look at how the
sausage is made.
7. Labels Hunt For Unique Voices
My first hit song blew up on the radio first. "I'm Awesome"
got picked up by the local alt-rock station in my town, the radio
station I'd grown up on. It quickly became the most requested song there
and then jumped to the local pop station. Keep in mind I'd only
self-released two albums at this point. I was very new to the game, and
suddenly the two biggest local radio stations were playing the shit out
of my stuff, which was unprecedented. No local artist had ever broken
through at pop radio in my area (Portland, Maine, is not exactly known
for its burgeoning rap game).
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We lost a lot of guys during our East Coast/West Coast beef with Portland, Oregon.
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The way the world works now, if you're blowing up on the radio,
you're killing on iTunes, too. I think there's an intern at Universal
who goes through the regional iTunes charts every week, from Des Moines
to Albuquerque, and looks for outliers.
"We know all the other guys on here. Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, Ke$ha ... who the hell is Spose?"
So this intern looked at the Portland sales and saw that I had the #1
song. I doubt I cracked the top 200 nationwide, but that was enough to
get their attention. At this point, I was 24 years old and totally
broke, delivering pizzas and raising a newborn. The day Universal sent
me a $35,000 check for signing on with their label, my bank account was
at -$800. I couldn't even buy gas for my car without overdrafting my
account again -- one generally doesn't hear Jay-Z rapping about bank
fees and bus passes.
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| 99 overdraft fees, just doesn't have a ring to it |
6. They Have Minions For You
The labels do a great job of making you feel like the center of the
universe when you're recording. Every studio I've worked at in LA and
New York had runners. Usually we'd arrive at 3 p.m. and go till 3 a.m.
Sometimes we'd make one song, sometimes four. The runners were there to
keep us from needing to ever leave. We'd say, "We need Heineken,
Seagram's Seven, ice cubes, a venti iced coffee with whole milk only, a
quarter ounce of weed, Backwoods cigars, and we're also going to need
sushi." A half hour later, the runner would come back with a bag full of
all that stuff, courtesy of Universal. That means Universal has a designated weed guy.
I mean, at least try to look surprised.
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| Can a bag of weed be a business expense? |
I met a lot of people who were caught in the record label game. This
dude Matt Toka was one of the writers they brought in to help us. He
could play guitar and sing and had some cool ideas. We wrote a song
called "Party Foul" together. I think a lot of guys like Toka get signed
for their writing abilities, even if the label doesn't see any star
potential in them. But they don't say that, of course: These guys all
want to be stars, but writing lyrics FOR stars and up-and-coming artists
pays the bills. There's probably a thousand musicians who could've been
like the biggest star in Duluth, or wherever, but chose to play the
label game in LA instead.
They're not foolishly throwing away their lives or anything -- it's
just that they get barely enough hope to carry on in the background
instead of doing what they really want to do. And they do carry on,
because not all of these dudes wallow in label limbo forever. For
example, my lawyer also represents Bruno Mars, and for almost 10 years
Bruno Mars was one of these writers, contributing his ideas and scratch
vocals to other people's hits, before ever getting his shot at personal
stardom. They'd take Bruno's vocals and search for a "real star" to
replace them. The irony is that now those same A&R dudes would kill
to have Bruno Mars singing their hooks, because he won the "background
guy" lottery.
5. The Major Labels Convince Naive Kids They Are Rock Stars
Labels definitely seek out young people, and they are extremely good at
making you simultaneously feel like their top priority and like you're
fighting against a ticking clock. When they called me the first time,
they offered to fly me to NYC. I was at Suffolk University at this
point; I stepped out of class and saw that I had like 15 missed calls
and voice mails. I Googled the name of the dude from the voice mails,
because that is the gift the Internet gave to the antisocial, and
eventually called him back. He picked up and immediately gave me both
barrels of enthusiasm: "We'll fly you and anyone else you want out,
first class, to NYC, right now." If my Myspace had said "I like the Celtics," they would have had me courtside that very night.
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| Straight up ballin'! |
They flew Monte Lipman in to meet me in NYC. He's one member of a
tiny group that runs the record industry, and he came over to chill with
me and have dinner. Because that's not going to inflate a broke
24-year-old's ego. He asked, "You wrote this song all by yourself?"
I said yes and he started flipping out, telling me to get my passport ready because I was about to be huge, flying all over the world in a private jet fueled by raw hip-hop.
Then he sent me an email on the weekend, mainly to let me know that
he never sends emails on the weekend. "I want to get this signed by
Monday morning. Your song played huge when we tested it in Miami, we
want to sign you and fly you down." But at the same time, he was like,
"These references are VERY current and your record will expire really
soon. YOU HAVE TO SIGN IMMEDIATELY."
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| Hurry up and sign the deal! |
I'm sure that's a common trick. (Although the record industry does shut
down completely by 5 p.m. on Friday. That's a fact. Hip-hop apparently
keeps DMV hours.) It was all just smoke being blown up my ass. Monte
sent excited email after excited email about how big I was about to be
and how we were "just getting started." I think the last "just getting
started" email hit about a week before the label dropped me. I guess he
was trying to type "We're just getting started on the process of firing
you" and hit enter too soon.
4. They Are Casting A Role
When I was making music by myself, I'd make a song and show it to my
friends, and if they liked it, that was enough. I'd do it in my live
show, put it on an album, and then roll about in piles of literally
dozens of dollar bills.
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| Cash Money Records showcasing the jewels |
But in the recording industry, you might make 25 songs and none of them
ever see the light of day. You develop real thick skin. I'd pour my
heart into a song, spend all day making it, everyone in the recording
room would be feeling it ... my friends, my family, management,
engineers. We'd all be stoked, and then I'd send it to Universal in an
email, and a few minutes later: "Ehhhh ... not really what we're looking
for." To get that response to my work for the first time was A)
shocking; B) disheartening; C) a wake-up call; and D) oddly erotic if
you get off on unhelpful apathy. I realized then that we were at the
"you either win a Grammy and sell lots of records or get the fuck out of Hollywood"
point. I sent them songs that are now somewhat classic fan favorites,
and my A&R dude responded with "Yeah, that's not it" more often than
not. Super helpful criticism! I didn't realize I had sent you the "not
it" song, when I clearly meant to attach the "it" file.
I grew up idolizing Biggie and Jay-Z, artists with real, intricate
lyrics. And that's part of what I love about music -- great descriptions
and verses. But that's the opposite of what my label wanted. I got in
the studio for the first time and spent like five hours writing what I
thought was one of my best songs yet, only to hear:
"The lyrics don't even matter, write that shit tomorrow. We just
need the hook. All Universal really cares about is a catchy chorus."
And that's what the industry runs on. The label comes up with a
chorus, a pre-chorus, and a melody, and then they fill in the blanks
with people like me. In pop music, artists are like those Styrofoam
packing peanuts, just there to make sure nothing shifts around too much
in transit. When it comes down to the music, the labels have a very
narrow idea of what they want, and no new artist is going to change
their minds. The producer they paired me with did a lot of dance music.
You know -- "bottles in the club, bitches on my junk, Cadillacs
literally infesting my house" type stuff. I don't do that, and the song that got me noticed was nothing like that. But once I was signed, that's the only thing they wanted from me.
Universal picked me out of the crowd because I had a unique style. Like a fool, I thought that meant they wanted me to keep making my style of music.
But they just wanted to take my name, my sorta-notoriety from one hit,
and plug "Spose" into a bunch of pop songs. Probably because it's really
easy to rhyme with "hos." They're playing the long game, those keen,
strategy-minded record producers.
3. You Write Songs By Committee
Music is a big business, too big for something as expensive as a pop song to hang on the shoulders of just one
dude. We all like to imagine the songs we like being penned with a
shaking hand by some weeping artist staring out at the sunset and
letting the muse guide his soul. But when it comes to pop, it's much
more likely that those lyrics were banged out by a conference room full
of writers trying to rhyme "make it rain" with "hand grenade" because
it's late and they're working against a deadline. I'd always written my
own verses before, but when I hit LA, they invited me to a session with
Mike Caren (the head of A&R at Atlantic), a producer, and four
writers.
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| Dilbert explaining the complexities of design by committee |
It seemed like a weird way to do things, but I gave it a shot.
Sticking a bunch of creative people in a room together and letting them
write can work pretty well. Just ask Breaking Bad. But it's the kind of thing that only works out when everyone more or less has the same vision for what they want to write. Stick Vince Gilligan in a room with all the writers from Glee and you'd wind up with a real different series. Perhaps ... a better one? Who doesn't want to see Mike rock some Journey?
Anyway, when I came in for my first session, the other guys were
already clustered around the table, listening to the melody they'd
picked out and trying to figure out what sort of song should go with it.
Finally Mike said, "You gotta make it about a party ... a party you,
like, filmed. You filmed all these chicks! And the hook can be "... and I
got it on caaamera." They started getting deeper and deeper into
brainstorming this song.
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| Say my name! |
Then I pointed out that this wasn't at all the kind of music I
did. In fact, it was the exact type of song I'd gotten famous for
mocking. It was like I'd sucker punched the whole room. You get caught
in this downward spiral where everyone's a yes-man to the producer and
the producer's a yes-man to the label. A producer decides he wants to do
a "caught it on camera" song and no one wants to contradict him, so
they just build on this idea that has nothing to do with anything the
artist has said, thought, or even mumbled to himself in a stoned haze
and immediately rejected when the cold light of sobriety dawned the next
day.
So the next time you're barreling down the highway listening to some
overproduced piece of pop crap, don't blame the artist. If pop music is the aural equivalent of a sausage, most singers are nothing more than a clear casing ready to be stuffed.
That sounds way dirtier than I intended.
2. It's A Ridiculous Numbers Game
For people in the recording industry, the whole world revolves around
the "second single." I recall one specific email exchange between Mike
Caren and Imran Majid, who is now the head of A&R at Columbia. We'd
just made four songs in a night, and they were convinced that one of
them was my "second single." And in the course of a single week, they
made me do 60 revisions of this song. I have them all in my
iTunes still: "Don't Let This Be Over (Version 44)," "Don't Let This Be
Over (Version 5538438)," etc.
There was this guy named Owl City
who got signed around the same time as me. We reached out to see what
he thought about the label, because his song "Fireflies" had been a big
hit and he was in the midst of trying to find his second single.
Universal stuck with him, but he didn't end up finding it for a couple
of years. Then Carly Rae Jepsen came out with "Call Me Maybe," and on
her second big hit, he sang backups. I'm not saying that reflects on him
as an artist at all, just that it's weird. That was the big break the
studio wanted to wait years for: "Guy in the back of the Carly Rae
Jepsen song. No not that one, the other one -- you remember the other
one? No? Nobody?"
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| It's all a numbers game |
For every Macklemore who has a hit song and follows it up with another, there's at least 20 more who never have a second hit.
And I'm one of the latter. After 11 months, they didn't find a second
single -- even though a bunch of the songs I made then still sell well
today -- and a new VP came in and dropped me.
You can make great, heartfelt music with a sound all your own that
thousands of fans love, but none of that is going to convince Universal
that you know better than they do. If you want to break into pop music,
you'd better be ready for hundreds of hours of failure. The labels
aren't looking for brilliant artists to drop fully formed beats onto the
radio. They want someone who'll help them Frankenstein some hybrid pop
monster from the stitched-together corpses of originality. And that's
how we wound up with the Black Eyed Peas.
1. There Is A Blessing For One Hit Wonders In 2014
Today, failing to follow up on a big success with a second single
doesn't mean you're back to spinning signs for mattress sales on the
street corner. My first big video, "I'm Awesome," got something like 10
million views. When the single released on iTunes, 850,000 people
actually paid to download it. When I released a mix tape recently,
about 8,000 people bought it. So I was able to keep, like, 1 percent of
the fans that "I'm Awesome" attracted. It might sound grim, but do the
math: If you put out something for $10 and 8,000 fans buy it, that's a
pretty solid year's salary. My album The Audacity
came out in 2012 and sold the same number, $10 apiece. iTunes took a
small chunk, and then the cost of making that album (production,
printing, studio time) was probably $6,000. So I made a profit of
$70,000. And that's before royalties from Pandora, Spotify, and YouTube
come in quarterly for years to come -- hell yeah, that's where the real
"make a modest living" cash comes in. We're gonna make it rain! With
actual water -- because this motherfucker can afford his water bill this month, baby.
I reinvested about $40,000 in new projects, but that left enough to
cover rent and food and Scotch and a nice Christmas. It's not
small-yacht-in-the-pool-of-a-bigger-yacht money, but I don't have to
play that game of trying to keep up appearances with fancy clothes and
cars. That's part of traditional rap nonsense, and my fans don't expect
that. My "brand" is just being me. A regular dude. So, thankfully, for
my finances' sake, the more I relate to my brokest fan, the more albums I
sell. Which is good, because there's like a million things that rhyme
with "Hot Pockets."
I released the songs Universal hadn't wanted in a free album called Yard Sale and used that to advertise my Kickstarter. It brought in $28,000.
And now that I have that small, loyal fan base, I'm able to make the
music I want to make without spending 300 hours per song pleasing a
bunch of record executives. I make all the money from my iTunes sales
now, too. I pay $35 to list it and get close to $1 per sale. When I was
with the label, I made 16 cents per sale. If you're Lady Gaga or Ke$ha,
the recording industry is one big blank check for a life of unfathomable
luxury and custom-tailored meat clothing. For the rest of us,
connecting and selling to the people who like our music is a
little less soul-crushing and at least sort of profitable, and at no
point do you ever have to talk to a guy who describes you as "the next
Fred Durst" and means it as a compliment.
