Gary Powell, Composer/Producer

by Gary Powell

If you finally get the call for the job or the opportunity you’ve worked for, it might be a good time to realize that healthy business relationships are born of mutual understanding, mutually earned respect, mutual reliability and mutually earned loyalty. Notice the omission of the word trust. These new business relationships are never born from a bilateral adoration of you, the artist. If you really believe it is all about you, then prepare to stand in a very long cue while enjoying a very short career on the latest thrill ride called SEDUCTION. Next, order any one of these books written on the topic of “One Hit Wonders” before your story ends as a chapter in the latest edition of one of them.

Most of our early opportunities in the performing and creative arts come to us by way of the often used seduction business model. Perceiving how you are being seduced now in business should help you identify the dangerous patterns within your future business offers. Recognize the pattern and be conscious of how new business proposals couch illimitable opportunities. Keep in mind that seduction is nothing more than the act of using influence to excite hopes and desires without regard to fair and equitable returns for your participation. Any business relationship that honors your contribution should offer you a financial participation bearing some resemblance to how your work has effected their bottom line. Of course, this is also after you acknowledge and place a value on the risk and expense that your employer is taking. But then, and maybe after briefly enjoying the flattery, take the deal or don’t take it, but always try to understand who is doing what to you, why they are doing it, and for how long they intend to keep doing it. It is your job to understand these strategies and it is your job to take care of yourself. Be armed with the knowledge of these common practices in order to make prudent decisions that will yield you uncommon wealth and happiness.

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Gary Powell writes “Seduction as a Business Model in the Arts”
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Filed by Gary Powell at 6:16 pm under Music Business Insight
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by Gary Powell

Copyright law regarding songwriting is written in a way which upsets the balance of musicianship and credentials. You, as a songwriter can be easily compromised by the law lending support for all kinds of pretenders to lay claim to the intellectual property they had little or nothing to do with. For example, a song has three major components: the melody, the lyrics, and the chords under the melody. Chord structure is musically understood as the harmonization of the melody. For every one melody note, there are two handfuls of notes giving the melody its meaning and place. Thus, a melody and lyric can be masterfully harmonized any number of ways to broadly effect their color and tone. In that regard, harmonization plays a compositional role that melody and lyrics cannot alone achieve. Yet, the United States Copyright Office only recognizes melody and lyrics as official parts of a song. Really? That’s right! All those years spent in the study of music theory can be cast off just that easily with one bad law. And whom does this oversight favor? Thanks to the copyright office having been taken hostage, just humming a little ditty with a lyric like “Happy birthday to you” is all it takes to lay legal claim to being a songwriter or even a composer. This favors anyone who has ever hummed a tune, which for the good and the bad of it, is all of us. Professionally, however, composers disaffectionately call these people hummers.

“…one of the criticisms of the current system is that it benefits publishers more than it does creators.” – History of Copyright Law, Wikipedia

In the meantime, answer this question before you start hijacking the credit you don’t deserve: If left alone with only a piano and staff paper, would you be able to deliver a musical composition ready to be played by an orchestra waiting for their parts in the rehearsal hall next door? If not, then you’ll need a team of lost-voices or some very cleverly designed music-making software – of which there is plenty to choose from. But remember, if you can hum or even be in the room when someone else is humming, the the law is on your side. So, what happened to the music itself after the adoption of these copyright laws? Turn on the television or radio and listen, and you’ll immediately know.

Next I’ll be writing about how we are unwittingly supporting a system which progressively lowers the bar for the arts and ultimately in society.

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Filed by Gary Powell at 4:41 am under Music Business Insight
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by Gary Powell

The role of the music educator is being transformed. Music education has always offered a rich environment for listening, analyzing and experiencing the most masterful compositions in history while students study under expert tutelage. Transitioning a student from academia to a global market economy, however, presents new and specific challenges for us as educators which we are seldom able to wholly grasp. Why not? Higher education emphasizes and demands compliance, not just for the student, but for any person working within the institution. The successful student, in order to prosper within this educational, system, is unconsciously creating a thought process that will most certainly work against success in the less compliant world – a world where your ever maturing and less compliant self actually lives. You will probably, like me, find yourself needing to turn the page quickly, without even knowing you are being taught from the wrong book. In this societal time of personal imprudence, systemic corruption and waste, and the uncertainly of leadership, the teacher and the student now find themselves as unlikely roommates in their freshman year at WTF University!

Listen inwardly, then express outwardly by nurturing relationships with individuals who are fair-minded and also your equals in intellect, passion, and talent.

Compliance by definition requires action, not of your own choice, in applying learned quantities to known stimuli. Formal education is built on the wealth of accumulated human knowledge. Educators teach what is known. Obviously, they can’t teach what is not known, so who or what, exactly, is going to teach you the future? Sorry, but this next college degree is going to be up to you. Hopefully, educators will at least have the capacity to forecast and teach technological and market trends. If you are studying the arts, then the news for you is even worse. However, experiencing the historical perspective which education offers the music student is where you as the student have the most to gain. Conversely, most professors will not have experienced any of these paradoxical paradigm shifts in the market or emerging production technologies first-hand. Most are either not aware that changes or shifts have occurred or they abhor these career threatening inevitabilities altogether.

I suggest bringing your teachers into your world of experience. Your experience will not be their experience and vice-versa. Because of these rapid technological and societal changes, you, the student, now share nearly equal responsibility with your teachers in your music education. You will now need to take on the responsibility of relating to your teachers and music professors in an inclusive, yet respectful way. Invite them into your world, and if they find it wholly irrelevant to their curriculum, then look outside the hallowed halls for what you know you need. This is your responsibility to yourself. They in turn, as your professors, have the responsibility of keeping their perspectives current and relevant. There is no subject that has not been touched by technological and sociological change. Taking on the personal responsibility for your education through awakening your insight beyond the ivory towers, will build relationships that should facilitate knowledge, and a cogent path for you to follow during the times when we all experience murky indecisiveness – a time where absolutely no one has the answers you need. Listen inwardly, then express outwardly by nurturing relationships with individuals who are fair-minded and also your equals in intellect, passion, and talent.

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Filed by Gary Powell at 6:46 am under Music Business Insight
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by Gary Powell

Austin psychotherapist, Amy Person, gave me the perfect metaphor for explaining how we might maintain a professional presence within our social networks, whether it is Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, or some other social site. She contends that your social networks are an ongoing 24-hour a day convention for your business. To make the point, I’ll write only about Facebook. Please apply this idea to all your social networks which you intend to use professionally.

Yes, your Facebook Wall is an ongoing 24-hour a day convention for your business. In that, the content you post on Facebook, or any other social networking site, should be tightly controlled and consistent with your goals and then purposefully managed for the benefit of your convention-goers. We all want to attract people who will derive some benefit from our services and therefore visit often, and possibly even hire us or buy our products. We want them to see us as a valuable resource, right? Think of your future business leads and then consider how you would like them to see you. Are they interested in ground-breaking facts about your new hair color? How about that fascinating esophageal laparoscopic surgery I had this year? Wait, surely your future client, and the one client you have always waited for, will want to be notified when you walk your dog, are warming a can of Campbell’s soup or when you are waiting for your hair to dry.

Worse than just not caring, if they are indeed looking to you as a serious business partner, they will be judging you through what they experience on your site. Therefore, I suggest keeping your Wall as clean as possible and sweep the convention floor as many times a day as needed to control the endless drivel and to keep your content relevant to your goals.

Some personal content at your convention can give visitors insight into who you are and even humanize you, but Facebook is notoriously permissive and indulgent of a ridiculous level of triviality. Maybe you don’t have a problem with that, but you probably don’t want it on your convention floor either. Scrub the floors with great purpose. Deliver positive, helpful information through all the media you have at hand. Post it on your Wall, Tweet it, Blog it, Flickr it, but don’t trivialize your life, dump your garbage, or air your laundry there. Once you run a well-organized convention, your Facebook audience will grow in a healthy way and keep coming back. And maybe, most importantly, Google will love you for your efforts.

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Filed by Gary Powell at 10:40 pm under Music Business Insight
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by Gary Powell

At full sail, we can realize and create our purest artistic vision at our highest performance level and understanding. We can then come to enjoy the benefits from the realization of working at that highest and best use. I’m suggesting that in between fate, hard work, discipline, luck, favoritism, and talent, we can occasionally find our wind and be at full sail. In these snippets of time when chance collaborates with our fullest and best expressions – we forget time, place and even the context of our artistic origins. Life floats on the gentle and effortless waves of creativity and success, and we have indeed found our wind.

This is a time when our individual character either out-smarts or out-works the stillness of misfortune.

Conversely, we more frequently find ourselves in a dead calm. While we own the best vessel with all our gear at the ready, we simply have no wind. These are the periods of Big Sails – No Wind, which can be most disheartening, or something worse altogether. Within this metaphor, rations become scarce, resources diminish, and emotions turn to despair. The solution is to absolutely know that this will happen and to provision for it. Before World War II, the precept of economic prudence was a core value of most Americans. Few of our grandparents ever bought anything on credit. Having a good credit rating is not a bad thing, but it is not provisioning for the dead calm.

The dead calm may also require the use of a paddle. This is a time when our individual character either out-smarts or out-works the stillness of misfortune. Regardless of whether the dead calm seems engineered through circumstance, is self-inflicted, or is being masterminded by people who would shield the wind from your sails, the antidote is to provision, provision, provision, and don’t forget to buy a paddle.

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Filed by Gary Powell at 3:30 pm under Music Business Insight
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I photographed this little shop window in September, 2007, while visiting Victoria, British Columbia on Vancouver Island. I’m not sure if this statement on their storefront window is true, but I found it appealing nonetheless. I walked in with cheery confidence and bought a groovin’ t-shirt which has indeed made me like myself more. Fortunately, there were no guitar stores on this street or I might have fallen into a narcissistic coma.

Photograph by Gary Powell

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Filed by Gary Powell at 4:40 pm under Music Business Insight
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