March 24, 2008
Baird Auditorium – Museum of Natural History
Shannon Emamali: Good evening, I am Shannon Emamali and I am the executive director of the Recording Academy’s Washington, DC Chapter. Welcome to our first actual Producer and Engineers event we’ve had here for the Chapter. We’ve had it in other cities but we actually haven’t had it here in Washington, DC, so I first want to welcome all of our Academy members. For all those non-Academy members, I think tonight is tonight is a great inkling of the type of programming that we are doing 364 days of the year, outside of our Grammy ceremony. Before we get started there is a couple of people I want to acknowledge: I first want to give major, major thanks to the co-chairs of our P&E Wing here locally, Mr. James McKinney (long pause for clapping) and Richard Burgess, who will be serving as our moderator later on, but also has graciously opened the doors of the Baird Auditorium for us to hold this event here tonight. I also want to want to acknowledge, we have a special treat, all the way from our national office, in Santa Monica, we have Ms. Maureen Droney who is the executive director of our Producers and Engineers wing (pause) and she will be here with us all evening, all night. So, I really encourage all of you to get to her, pick her brain, she is just so brilliant and knows this so, so well. Before we get started I want to bring to the stage our VP of Government Relations and Advocacy to deliver a couple of messages about some really important initiatives that we are doing and with us being here, right here in Washington, DC some things that we can really grasp hold of and take a leadership role as far [as] of a couple of initiatives that we have our hands wrapped over. So if you could please welcome Mr. Daryl Friedman.
Daryl Friedman: Thank you, thanks for being here tonight and thanks to Shannon and the Chapter for allowing me to say a couple of words about what we are working on. You are here for a very specific reason, you are here to hear from these experts about how to make money and get compensated by your work as producers. And they are going to talk to you about how you can get paid, how much you should get paid, what mechanism collects, and how often they should be paying out, things like that that are very important issues. But what if I told you there was one instance where a user of your music said they don’t have to pay you at all. And they are saying furthermore, to add insult to injury, that not only are we not going to pay your for your music, but we are actually doing you a favor by not paying you for your music. And, to make things even worse, they got the law written in a way that actually makes what they are doing completely legal. And, that’s not fiction. This situation actually exists today in America, only, and that’s with AM/FM radio broadcasters. They are allowed to use sound recordings and not compensate artists, background session players, singers, producers of course, and anyone who makes those sound recordings. This is unique in the world. The rest of the developed world broadcasters pay to use the records that make them the advertising and make them money. Here it is different. Even in America, satellite radio pays you when they play your work, internet web casters pay you when they play your work, so why should the richest and biggest platform of all, AM/FM terrestrial radio have an exemption? Well, the answer is simply they have power and they muscle and they have managed to write this into the law for decades. And, since I would say the ‘30s, people like us have been trying to change this and said, “This is an injustice, let’s fix it.” And, since the ‘30s, they failed. Until, a couple of months ago. Our campaign, The Music First Coalition, got two bills introduced in Congress, one in the House and one in the Senate, bipartisan bills, sponsored by the highest folks in Congress that will finally rectify this injustice. But, we need your help to get this done because we are up against a pretty powerful foe and they have a lot of money, they have lot of people and they have broadcasters all over the country who are trying to keep their exemption in place and make sure that they don’t have to pay any music creator for using their work and for bringing in 21 billion dollars a year, which is what they bring in off of your creations. So how do we change this and how can you help? Well, I’ll give you a quick example, last, two weeks ago on Capitol Hill the broadcasters had their Lobby Day. They brought in 600 broadcasters from around the country to fan out on Capitol Hill and make sure their message was heard loud and clear. We compiled, the Academy and other music organizations, AFM and AFTRA and others, got together about 40 musicians. They had something that the broadcasters didn’t have, I’m not gonna say talent, although that is probably true, but they had musical instruments and they had the passion to go out through the Hill and actually got more attention on Capitol Hill to our side of the cause than those 600 broadcasters because they were the individuals who make music, and they actually matter, you matter to Capitol Hill. So I want to encourage you to be a part of this campaign because we need you to carry this over the goalpost, and its going to be a hard fight, but there is information that you got when you checked in. Please look it over. The MusicFirst Campaign is really designed to finally bring in millions of dollars to music creators who have never been paid when their works are being played. It’s time for a change. You could do something tonight when you get home to help us. You can go to Grammy.com/musicfirst, and that information is in the handout you got. In two seconds, you can send a message to your member of Congress telling them this is important to you as their constituent, as you are their boss, they’ll listen to you, and hopefully get enough momentum going where these two bills will become law and music creators will be able to be compensated for everything they do, including airplay on radio. So, I encourage you to look this information over, I’ll be around in the back of the hall if you have any questions and thank you for the support, please enjoy tonight’s panel, and here is Shannon again. Thank you.
SE: Thanks, Daryl. It was probably about, at least, 8 months ago when James, Richard and I we hosted a P&E meeting with local producers and we said, “How can we better service you?” And so this idea and concept said, you know, tell us about compensation models, how are they doing? The music industry has changed so much. Help us navigate through this. And it really took us about 8 months to figure out the key individuals who were seasoned, but were willing to be open and honest and talk about how they maximize their dollars right now as a producer. So we are really, really thrilled to have hand-picked every single one of our panelists, they come from all over the country, with us this evening. As our moderator, we have Mr. Richard James Burgess who is currently the director of Marketing and Sales for the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. With over 40 years of international music business experience as a multi-platinum record producer, artist, musician, engineer, manager, label and booking agency, he is the owner and author of the book, “The Art of Music Production.” Please help me to welcome to the stage Richard James Burgess, who will be our moderator.
Richard James Burgess: Thank you Shannon. And, I’d also like to thank Maureen Droney for everything she does for the Producer and Engineer wing, it’s absolutely fabulous Maureen. It’s wonderful of you to come in, and of course, James McKinney who is the co-chair of the Producer and Engineer Wing for the DC Chapter. But, of course these events don’t happen without a lot of behind the scenes effort and Shannon Emamali, who just introduced me, has really been absolutely sterling and gone above and beyond the call of duty to do this. And, I also must notice Wendy Cherry and Nina Harley from the DC Chapter office who have also done a great deal to make this happen, so thank you to those people. And while we are in the thanking mood, I really want to say thank you so much to Daryl Friedman, who just spoke to you about the legislation for issues because Daryl does so much to move things forward in this area and it’s kind of an un-sung thing that he does. But, he is making a difference for everybody and I think that this legislation, if it goes through, will make history for the music business in America. So, please do what he said and log on and tell your reps that this is something that is important to you and important to the music business. Well, we are very fortunate, as Shannon said, to have a panel of such high-profile guests tonight and the Producer and Engineer Wing is extremely grateful to each of them for taking time out of their busy schedules, and I really want to thank you gentlemen. I am personally really excited to hear what they have to say about this very hot topic of producer compensation. I am sure everybody in this room is sure that the music industry is undergoing some drastic change and it is becoming quite difficult to continue doing what we love to do and to actually make a living at it. The four people on this panel, as Shannon said, are all very successful. They all have a cutting edge grasp of what’s happening in the industry and I think tonight we will walk out here with some real insights into how they are dealing with these changes and how it is possible to deal with these changes in the industry. We are going to have a Q&A session at the end of the discussion and we have two mics, one over there and one over here, I think we will move them into the aisles. So, if you want to ask a question we are recording everything here and videoing everything for possible webstreaming later and so we would love to get your questions on tape as well, so if you could line up at the mics, we would appreciate that. Now, it’s my pleasure to introduce our panelists, and I want to start on the far end with Sandy Roberton, who revealed to us tonight that this is the first panel that he’s ever done. So we are really honored to have you Sandy and Sandy is a long-time veteran of the industry. He started out as a producer himself in the ‘70s and then he actually began managing other producers in the ‘70s as well. He is now the president of World’s End Producer Management, which is really one of the biggest producer management companies in the world and one of the first as well. His clients include a who’s who of producers and the artists they produce in many cases are household names. He actually represents, Joe, sitting next to him, Jack Endino, David Kershenbaum, Larry Klein, Danny Kortchmar, Nick Launay, Steve Lillywhite, Tim Palmer, Jason Goldstein to name a few and some of the artists his producers have worked with include Neil Young, Ozzy Osbourne, Shania Twain, Bob Dylan, Nirvana, Pharrell, Beyonce, Herbie Hancock, U2, the list goes on and on. It’s absolutely immense. I am not even scratching the surface of it. So, thank you very much Sandy and I know Sandy has a lot of really wonderful insights into what is going on. To Sandy’s left and your right is Joe Blaney. Joe is a New York based engineer, producer, [and] mixer. He’s done an incredible range of eclectic and multi-genre projects. He started out actually as a guitar player and an electronics technician. He started as a tech at Electric Lady Studios in their heyday in New York City. His first gig was actually mixing The Clash’s single, “Radio Clash,” and then he recorded the album Combat Rock, which featured the classic rock hits, “Rock the Casbah,” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” He’s worked with The Ramones, Keith Richards, Prince, Will Party, Soul Asylum, Tom Waits, Blues Traveler, Shawn Colvin, Lauryn Hill, The B-52’s, Roseanne Cash, The Raveonettes, and comedian Dennis Leary, again, just to name just a few. But what is also interesting about Joe is that he has this international side of his career and he’s done work for Warner Music Spain, Sony and Universal Japan, and he has produced or mixed over 25 rock en espanol albums. So, we are going to be talking about that in a second as well. To Joe’s left is the legendary Jimmy Douglass. Jimmy has a who’s who resume as well as a producer, engineer and mixer, stretching from classic rock to hip-hop. He’s worked with The Stones, Aretha Franklin, Billy Cobham, Justin Timberlake, Jay-Z, Cassandra Wilson, Roxy Music, Foreigner, Jodeci, Aaliyah, Ginuwine, Timbaland, Missy Elliot, in the varying genres of pop, electronic, jazz, R&B, funk and rock and roll. Jimmy began in the early ‘70s while he was still in kindergarden, I believe, actually he was in high school at the time, and he was smart enough at that young age to get himself in a position to observe and work with some of the greatest producers and engineers of all time. And, three of my personal favorites, Tom Dowd, Jerry Wexler and Arif Martin. And, Jerry Wexler let him use the facility to make demos, and apparently he never looked back. And then, last but not least we have Rob Finan. Rob is an attorney, based in Atlanta, with the firm Greenberg Trauwig. Greenberg Trauwig was ranked USA Law Firm of the Year last year and Rob’s speciality is giving advice and counsel to high-profile multi-platinum recording artists, producers, managers, publishers and songwriters, regarding the various legal and business transactions within the entertainment industry. In particular, what we are interested in tonight is that he negotiates and drafts agreements for record producers, record mixers, licensing agreements, motion picture soundtrack agreements and recording agreements. So, as you know, the title of the panel is “Making Cents: From Beats to Bank Accounts: Maximizing Your Income as a Producer,” and what we are going to be talking about tonight is how to be successful and make money in this business as it stands today and going forward. We will also try to look at how to balance the creative aspects of what we do with the business side, because, as you are probably are aware, they are interdependent, and I think becoming more interdependent than they ever have been. I want to start with Sandy because Sandy has this bird’s eye view of what’s going on. He deals with all the major labels, he deals with the independent labels and he sees pretty much all genres of the production and engineering business. And what I wanted to ask you Sandy is, “Who is today’s producer? What elements make for a successful career as a producer or engineer in the current environment, in your opinion?”
Sandy Roberton: Well, I made some notes this afternoon and this is how difficult a time we are going through and how much it has changed, that in America right now, in the major labels, there are probably only 20 people who can authorize the signing of an act. So you imagine if you are starting off as an act and trying to get a deal how difficult it is when there is only 20 people in major labels can make a decision to sign you. Producers now have to find eggs, and develop eggs and not think they are coming into the business to be hired. I think producers have to go back to the way there were perhaps in the ‘50s and ‘60s and be entrepreneurs. I think it is the only way forward for producers. It is so easy now to put out your own records. Why sign to a major? You can put records up for nothing on iTunes, eMusic, soon it’s going to be Amazon, and the only money you will need to promote those records is the marketing money. Now, you can probably get that from the bands playing live or an investor, but to sign away on some of the deals we were talking about today, these 360 deals that labels are making you sign, I think it’s probably better for producers to try and find acts, develop them and produce the records themselves.
RJB: Thank you, and we’ve talked about this a lot in the past and so you are encouraging your producers to go out and find artists and develop them at this point, is that correct?
SR: Well, I’m gonna be honest here, this year in the same period of time, compared to the same period in 2006, in 2006 we did 49 contracted projects, this year, same period, we did 23. So, you can see the drop of projects. And, the money is even down. So, if a producer is going to survive in the business right now, he’s got to think of a different way. Just thinking that the phone’s gonna ring and he’s going to get hired, I think that is over. The producer has to think on his feet, he has to find a band, develop it, and shop it. Work out a deal with a band, become a partner with the band, and shop it. Or, put it out yourself. I mean, I’ve got two labels now, which are just digital, and through those labels, any producer I represent can put out records and we market them ourselves. And we hired some companies to market. But, the days have changed so much from when I was a producer.
RJB: Yes, and how have they changed, how have you seen them change? Back then, how was it for you?
SR: Well, there were multiple projects you could choose from. When I came to America, 21 years ago, someone like Tim Palmer, who I was representing, I represented Tim for around 27 years, from when he was a tape operator. And he might have a choice of 15 projects to choose from and you would go through the projects and think, “Who is the manager? Who is the label?” trying to pick the best one. Now, you don’t have a choice. If there is a project and it’s a good band, you have to go for it. Because I went to a show this week, or last week in LA and I think there must have been about 10 producers there, chasing down this one project. It’s very, very competitive now to get a gig.
RJB: Well, Jimmy you’ve been in the business in the early ‘70s, you’ve seen a lot of changes. Can you talk about what’s happening now and how you are managing to stay alive?
Jimmy Douglass: Well, I actually have a question, an interesting question. Because it seems like an audience that really, how many people here have been to the record store in the last two months? (surveys audience) So, that’s like half the crowd.
SR: No, a quarter.
JD: A quarter of the crowd basically. So first of all, that whole way of doing business is actually changing very much because most people don’t go to the record store anymore. So, the other part of what he was describing is the fact is the money is less because the way the revenue stream is coming in, is less. And they are not really selling records anymore. The one thing that I agree with him on, with you think of production, all these words are now blurred, by the way. I see people come to me all the time they say, “Production, engineering, mixing,” all this stuff, and its all the same job. It really has become, you know, “I’m a mixer, they say I’m pretty good,” but I do that but then, I look and I listen and I go, “You know what?” many times somebody who is working on something should probably be responsible for finishing up because they have the vision and the tools are available, you know, unlike the old days where you had the big board, you had the big thing, everybody couldn’t afford that, they couldn’t afford the time, they couldn’t afford the knowledge, you know, to be able to work a big studio and all the mystery involved with that. Now you go to the store, you spend a couple of grand, you sit, you work at home, you figure out that you can get good at that particular part of the craft. You can now see your vision to the end, pretty much, and have a competitive product. I’m not gonna say that it’s gonna be the same as the man who spends a lot more money with a lot more input but I think, my phrase is, you either get it or you don’t get it at the end of the day when you are making a product. People either get it or they don’t get it. If they don’t get it, they don’t get it. You can spend another 100,000 dollars if you want to and they are not going to get it. So, the thing is I really believe that, the word ownership keeps coming to me, and maybe you don’t own but you share with the band. You find a band, you find an act, band, act, singer, whatever it be, and you basically partner with them because inside of the talent lies what you are going to end up selling and whoever is attached to the talent has to be dealt with. If not, they have a million choices as to where they can go. You know, as Sandy was saying, I dare to say how many people in this room actually own studios?
SR: Wow.
JD: Well, I’m done, I’ll see you later. But, you know, that basically is the point that everybody and their brother has a studio and you know, they have different talent, but you know, when it comes to a label and trying to find out what they need, the act is the only thing that they really do have.
RJB: Right. Well, you said an interesting thing once in an interview once about how the studio was a mystery back when, back in the ‘70s it was kind of a magical place, you trusted the people there and now that is not the case. You know, people come in and they know about EQ, reverb and compression . . .
JD: Well, they think they know. . .
RJB: That’s very true. But that’s really changing the relationship you find in terms of things?
JD: Well, the relationship has changed because theoretically, they can do what I can do. Anything I can do, they can do and hopefully they can do it better, so they believe. And so therefore it has leveled that whole part of the playing field. It’s not as important to worry about the how anymore, you know, when you had a big studio and you couldn’t afford it was like “How am I going to get this idea to sound like that?” but you can do that now. I mean, I can do it, half of us here can probably do it in the next hour. And it will sound like that. So that’s no longer the issue, the issue is really, what do you have to bring to the table? What do you have to bring to the table? Not what do you have to come to me to tell me that your stuff is so great, I mean, let me cut to the chase a little bit. I get a million people telling me about these great beats they have but, you know, we can all make beats and they are not all so great. They are just beats without songs attached to them. I’ll give you a better story. I was working with Timbaland and Dr. Dre, and Dr. Dre came to Timbaland for something, that’s interesting right? And, we were there all night and Timbaland he’s whacking away, and he’s making all these great things and Dre is cool, he’s like, “Yeah, that’s hot, that’s hot,” and they are going on and on. And he said, “Jimmy, you know that thing I did the other day over at the other studio?” and I said, “Yes.” “Put that up,” so I put it up. And on that particular track, Timbaland had already done his vision of the track with the vocal line and the whole thing and Dre went, “That’s what I came for!!” He said, “We could have gone home hours ago man!!” And then Timbaland said, “Well, take this beat here,” and he said, “Man, I have 50,000 beats! I can make beats!” My point being, without the songs attached to it, all you have is a beat and anybody can make a beat. I’m done.
RJB: Thank you, I wanted to turn it over to Joe because Joe, you have come up with some pretty innovative ways to vary what you do on projects. You like to work on interesting projects, and sometimes there is not a big budget attached to those projects.
Joe Blaney: I have changed my business model a lot. When I first started, it was always things for major labels and even a new band would have over 100,000 dollars to make a record and now I do things from making EP’s for 2,500 dollars and a whole album of a rock band in nine days. I just try to find artists who I feel have the potential and try to work quickly and efficiently and you know, trust your intuition, you know, bring the most out of what they have and generally look for something that is special in what the artist has to offer and you know, just bring it out and if you spend too much time on it now you are losing your shirt so you have to work quicker and do it like that. I still occasionally do records where you have a big budget and you can spend 6 or 7 weeks and take your time. But, I kinda believe what is missing now are the, there is a lot of music out there but you have to find the really special artists who have good music and good singing and good songs and try to help them along.
RJB: And you are able to do that with the kinds of budgets people are coming to you with?
JB: Yeah, well I opened my own studio about 10 years ago and I do all-in deals and I still want to be a perfectionist and spend more time on it and get it better, but you just have to learn how to work quicker and be efficient and do a good job in a shorter amount of time. Good planning and get to know the material, you know. It’s a little more difficult, but you can do it.
RJB: Very good. Well, I wanted to move over to Rob because Rob works on really, really high end projects in terms of the kinds of deals, major label deals and so forth, but obviously being on the legal side he has a good feel for the producer compensation models so, I wondered if you would like to talk about what you see in terms of what producers are getting these days and points, and advances, what the range is, and how much work you are seeing. Are you seeing a decrease in the amount of work coming across your desk?
Rob Finan: Yeah, I think the music industry has changed more so in the past five years more than any other time in music history. Before going into private practice, I worked in Sony Music which has Columbia Records, which has one of the deepest catalogs of any of the labels and you could see throughout history there was relatively consistent until about 5 years ago when [there was] the downturn in the industry. He touched on the 360 deals where the labels are trying to take a piece of ancillary income of artists. It’s not going to impact the producers as much, but because of that, we are seeing a lot of our producer clients, you know, the work is not as vigorous as it once was. The days of the 150,000 dollar track are probably gone, they are gone, and as crazy as it sounds it was not too long ago, probably 5 years ago where there were quite a few $100,000 or 150,000 tracks that were being produced. That doesn’t happen much anymore.
RJB: And that was just the advance, right?
RF: That would be the advance. So it’s really impacting right now the amount of work that’s happening for producers.
RJB: With the different kinds of deals that are happening now, with the 360 deals you say are not affecting producers at the moment because there is no way for them to participate in the merchandise or touring income, which I don’t think would be right anyway, but what about these new kinds of deals, well digital for instance. Are you doing all digital contracts at all?
RF: Yeah, a lot of labels are testing the waters with just doing digital type deals and digital releases. It’s kinda interesting, over the last year or so, you see Wal-Mart coming out very aggressively on physical CD’s sales and I think it was in September they released a statement to all the record companies that effectively, disproportionate amount of shelf space to their sales and because of that they are going to start pairing back. I would envision that someday you are going to walk into all the big box distributors, the Best Buys and the Wal-Marts and it will probably be a rack on the back wall. All the physical, it will be the top 100, the top 50. They have already talked about aggressive pricing campaigns out of Wal-Mart for their top 25 where it will be released in the sub $10 range. So that’s a big hit to the artists and obviously it trickles down to the producer. But, I mean, I think the compensation model is pretty much going to stay the same from the major standpoint. You are still going to get points on a record: 2, 3, 4, points, a superstar artist could get as much as 5 and 6 points on a record, although that is really high. There’s mechanisms in there that will account for the different digital distribution models that are there and all the ancillary things that are happening right now.
RJB: As far as the points go, you are seeing an average royalty for a producer is still around a 3 to 4 percent range?
RF: Yeah.
RJB: And that’s 3 or 4 percent of retail, right?
RF: Correct.
RJB: But based on the same way that the artist deal is calculated.
RF: Correct. A producer deal is typically piggy-backed off the artist deal so the producer is compensated and his royalties are calculated in the same way that the artist he is producing is calculated.
RJB: And what about these split-profits deals?
RF: That’s happening more and more now. There is one label now, in particular, that is offering profit split deals, not necessarily 50-50, but a true profit split model which is somewhat new. Before profit splits were typically offered to labels, independent labels, or that type of thing where they would do label deals. But now they are offering them to artists which does make the compensation for a producer that much more difficult. Historically when you had a points deal, you piggy-backed off the artist. The computation was the exact same, in fact you used the extracts from the underlying artist deal and there is no negotiating that. But now with the profit-split deal, the artist might not want to give the producers a piece of that profit split. And so you are left with negotiating royalty terms and actually doing almost effectively the same negotiations you would under a recording agreement between an artist and a label, and you are now forced to do that between the artist and the producer. The alternative to that would be to do a split where the producer would be receiving some percentage of whatever the income that the artist gets, whether it be 15 to 33 percent of whatever the artists’ in-pocket would be. That’s a way to simplify the negotiations than basically have to do a full-blown agreement where, if you have ever seen a recording agreement, the calculations are pretty onerous.
RJB: Yeah. I have a question actually, how many people are producing in some form or another at moment? Ok, so a lot. The second part of the question is how many of you always have a contract when you produce a record? Ok, not so many. Well Sandy, I am interested to know, I know as a manager that is an important aspect of what you do correct? You always make sure your producers have contracts before they go into a situation?
SR: Absolutely, and it’s quite difficult to get lawyers who are representing the band to deal with this because normally a lawyer, if it’s a new band the lawyer will do the band’s contract and then he is getting paid for that, and then when you try to get the producer contract done he doesn’t really want to do it because he is not getting any extra money. So, it’s always a slow process, if you are representing a producer or the producer is representing himself you have to get your contract done as soon as possible and make sure that you get what is called a Letter of Direction so that you get paid direct from the label. Because most bands are unrecouped and have no money to pay you, and if you are being paid by the band you’ll never get the money. You have to be paid by the label. So that’s what you get. You get a Letter of Direction which is a direction from the band telling the label to pay you and once the band signs that, at least you can chase the label to get your money.
RJB: And actually there is a second Letter of Direction which you need to get which is to SoundExchange to make sure you receive your digital webstreaming royalties, which is something that is super important, because producers cannot access the money from web radio without having that Letter of Direction from the artist and your best chance of getting that Letter of Direction is right at the time when you do the deal. If you try to go back and do it later, it’s going to be extremely difficult to get it. And I believe, the Recording Academy, or SoundExchange actually is offering a sample Letter of Direction on their website.
SR: One other point I want to make. I think the more and more of these 360 style deals that labels are insisting on, that is going to drive producers and artists to just forget the majors and just do it themselves. Because frankly, if they can do it themselves and sell records, they will make a lot more money than they would if they were signed to a major.
RJB: On what basis are you suggesting that producers sign artists, to their production company, as a production deal?
SR: Well, if a producer’s got a studio, he’s taking the risk. I think, you know one thing that Rob was saying, I think producers should get a piece of the action more than just a royalty. When I represented The Matrix, Avril Lavigne was about to be dropped by Arista. They had completely tried to do tracks with her with a number of people and they had it all wrong. They thought that she was going to be a country act. They were about to drop her and I was sitting in George Shearivin’s office and he said, “We’ve got this girl, I think we are going to drop her,” and I said, “If you pay for the airfare out to LA, put her up in the Oakwoods, its very cheap, The Matrix will spec some tracks.” She arrived at the studio, they didn’t know what to expect, and she walked in, she was very grumpy and very miserable, she said, “I don’t want to be a country act, I want to be a punky act.” Well basically they said, “Go back to the hotel, we’ll come up with some stuff.” And then they wrote, that day they wrote, “Complicated” and they wrote, the other song was in a movie, I can’t remember, it wasn’t on the album, “Falling Down,” I think it was called. And she came back the next day, she made a few changes, a few lyric changes and they cut the track and they L.A. Reid heard it and said, “That’s it. That’s the blueprint.” Now, they went on to write 10 songs with her and not all the songs made the album because she fired her manager the day that she delivered the record, she fired her manager and hired a new one and then he wanted to get more tracks that she had a bigger share of the songs. But, the hits, the three big hits were The Matrix and I felt really they should have gotten a bit more part of the action than they got. There’s an example where they really came up with a direction, they came up with a style and to this day, I mean, there was a headline in the New York Post on Sunday, saying, “Uncomplicated,” it was an article on her. They’re still going on about “Skaterboy,” “Complicated,” and “I’m With You,’ the three big hits.
RJB: I guess that’s why producers did get the $150,000 a track because they were the hit producers.
SR: They didn’t get that sort of money. They were just starting off.
RJB: Yeah, but they got the publishing and a producer royalty basically.
SR: I was the publisher, so. . .
RJB: But, now you would recommend that they do that on their own label or thorough a production company.
SR: Well, they got $35,000 to produce that record, that is not a lot of money for somebody who delivered those amount of hits.
JD: The question is, this is the question about those $150,000 tracks, you see, in hip-hop that is where those kind of numbers come from. . .
SR: Well, they don’t anymore. . .
JD: And personally, I’m gonna say personally, I don’t think, it’s just a studio, its just a beat. It’s a value that’s placed on it. But the question I was gonna ask you, because they only had so much up front, did those albums sell so that they got the money on the back end? Because those hip-hop people never see any money again. When they get the 150, they never see any money again because they took it all up front. You follow what I’m saying?
SR: Yeah, absolutely.
JD: So, did they ever get any money on the back end from selling all those units or did nothing happen.
SR: Who, The Matrix?
JD: Yeah, yeah.
SR: Oh yeah, they did, yeah.
JD: So, it’s equitable.
SR: She sold 16 million albums.
JD: Right, so I’m saying its equitable. So they got their money.
SR: Yeah, oh yeah.
JD: I just wanted to make sure.
RJB: So you are saying you would take higher points Jimmy, rather than a big advance up front.
JD: Well, that is definitely the way to go now.
JB: You prefer the big advance if you can get it.
SR: Not now.
JD: Well, there’s a lot to be said for that. You know, when you have a lot of big advances you make a lot of money now, you have to pay Uncle Sam a lot of money now, as opposed to when you have an album like you are mentioning which is going to go on and sell for however long, you have money coming to you in the bank for quite some time. And it makes it easier for everybody else to be a part of it and allow you to be a part of it because it is not straining anybody up front. And I say with the new age you have to sacrifice something and I think that professional or non-professional, you have to give up something now to get something later. You have to work hard, you know, get in there and put your skin in there and believe in yourself because if you believe that you are really that great and that it is going to be that good, you will win somewhere along the line.
SR: The problem now is that sales figures are so down even if you have a 3 or 4 point royalty, are you ever going to see anything? Because if a record costs $200,000 to make, you’ve got to sell 200 or 250,000 copies to recoup.
JD: But, does it really cost $200,000 to make?
RJB: Well, that’s the budget they are spending I guess. And then, of course, they take marketing dollars out of it and a video costs 300 or a million.
SR: In England and Australia, it hasn’t happened here yet and if it happens here, goodnight, but in England they charge producers back with TV advertising and in Australia they charge back the fair-share of TV advertising. So you’ll get bands, who was the recent band, it will come to me in a second, but you’ll get bands who are quite well established, who are unrecouped because they have done a lot of TV advertising and they get charged quite a big share. If that happens here, forget it.
RF: The way the compensation model works traditionally, is that producers get paid to record one, but that is retroactive to record one after the label recoups their costs, their recording costs on the album. We have a producer-client who is watching his royalty, he’s gets his statements, and it shows his royalty, which is a very large royalty just accruing. But, because the costs on the album were tremendous, he will likely never see that and we are trying to work, and that’s, I think, horrible because as you were saying, did he get it in the back, you know, this guy is going to get hundreds of thousands of dollars the day that another 150,000 units are sold, and then he will get all of his money. But he did not receive a big up front advance. The band sold millions of records, but not enough to recoup those recording costs and its difficult. Opening that statement and seeing that you have $200,000 sitting there, but not until, when you project out, that band still needs to sell another 100,000 records. That might be. . .
SR: The band was Snow Patrol. They were the band that decided that, you know, they had sold quite a few records and the TV advertising in the UK was so heavy that they were unrecouped. And they just, that’s why they changed out their manager because they realized that the only way they were going to make money is to get a manager who could get them touring in America and that’s when they switched to Q-Prime. So that they could get on the road and earn money that way because they weren’t making any money through records and they had a big record here.
RJB: Right, well Jimmy, I think you were indicating that these costs are kinda highly inflated right? I mean, you’ve worked with the greatest and yet you can make a record less expensively and so can Joe.
JD: Yeah, me and Joe can make expensive records. (laughter)
JB: Yeah, I’ve done it both ways.
JD: But are we suggesting to take the money and run?
SR: No, no. Again, I think that’s why producers and bands should just do it themselves, I really do.
JD: Control, basically control the whole thing.
SR: Yes, because then they own the record.
JD: Right, they own the record.
RJB: So how do you structure that then, because if a band does a record themselves it costs them a buck fifty to manufacture the record, you could probably produce a record for $10,000 if the band can play. So, you know. . .
SR: CD’s are over, its going to be digital only. I live in LA, there is one record store now. If you go to Best Buy you can get maybe the top 20 but there is only Amoeba Records. They closed down Tower, they closed down Virgin, there is nowhere to buy CD’s, it’s, everything is going to be digital.
RJB: So how does a producer get paid off of that then, because if you get a 4 point deal, 3 point deal whatever, it’s kinda a bit irrelevant at that point.
SR: No, Rob touched on that. You do a percentage of what the band is getting.
RJB: Right.
SR: You get anywhere like 25 or 30 percent of what the band is getting and that will be the appropriate royalty. Say a band is getting 16 and you are getting 4, it will be about 25 percent. So if a band is getting 7 bucks from iTunes, then the producer will 25 percent of that.
RJB: Right.
JB: Can I ask one question?
RJB: Yeah, please.
JD: And actually this is to Rob, I know that for the publishing and stuff the ringtones were counted for, but the production stuff is not. There is no percentage of the ringtone sale. I haven’t seen any.
RF: The mechanism for ringtones is going to be in, well, it depends on how it is accounted for to the artist. When ringtones first started coming out, ringtones were accounted for like third-party licensing. The way that third-party licensing works is the producer splits the bucket of money that the artist gets, they split it in proportion as Sandy was saying, 25 percent or whatever that ratio is. More recently, they have changed the agreement for digital downloads and streamings. Digital downloads are treated like a record and so you should receive some proportionate share of that.
JD: I am very curious, because you know, they get a lot of money for those ringtones, they get a lot of money for those ringtones. They get more than they get for iTunes downloads. They get as much as $2.50 for one of those suckers. That’s hefty.
RJB: And there are other sources of income too, these advertisting from P2P possibilities and these subscriptions from Rhapsody and eMusic and those kinds of things, how do you account for those in the producer contract?
RF: With subscription, it’s the same thing. It’s, money comes into a pot and gets allocated proportionately to the artist and then however, whatever that artist share of money is, if it’s a buck, the artist and producer split that in proportion of their points, so for example, 4/16, where the producer is getting four points and the artist is getting 16 points, they would split that bucket of money in that proportion. That’s the way it should work and that’s the way the mechanism is there to provide kind of a catch-all when you have a bucket of money that is kind of leftover. But that same thing with a sync license for film or television, $1000 comes in the door, the label splits that with the artist 50/50, now you have $500 to the artist and the artist will split that with his producer in whatever that proportion is.
RJB: I mean, there is this new iTunes initiative to have like some sort of all-you-can eat kind of. . .
RF: Which would be advertising based, presumably.
RB: Will that money find its way back to the artists and then find its way to the producer, via the contract?
RF: Yeah, the way that would work is, in theory, that all the money goes into a big pot and would get allocated to the various artists based on their percentage of streams.
SR: I don’t see how that is going to work.
RJB: I don’t either, but its an interesting question.
SR: If you’ve got an iPhone, and you can access all the music you want on iTunes, and you are paying say $20 a month, like you would do for a TV or cable whatever, how does that money, I don’t know how that money is ever going to get back to the artists and producers? Because it is just a lump sum, I mean, how are they going to allocate that to all the music you might have listened to?
RF: Like I said, the theory behind it is that, they are going to be able to track that. They can track anything with modern electronics now, so, whatever Avril Lavigne’s, her percentage of the overall streams she represents 20 percent of the overall streams, she gets 20 percent, or at least 20 percent goes to her label and then pursuant to her agreement, the label would pay her, and then the producer. . .
SR: There’s a million acts on iTunes, they are going to have to build a bigger computer.
RJB: I don’t think they have a problem with the size of the computer.
RF: But that’s how Napster works now. I mean, all these subscription based services they are able to determine exactly how many plays Avril Lavigne has, as a percentage of the all streams and her label would be allocated that proportion.
SR: The one good news is that all of us love music. You guys, girls, are all making music. That is still going to be the key. People are going to want to listen and make music. And we just have got to figure out a way in this perfect storm that has happened in the last year or six months of figuring out a way to make a living making music.
RJB: Absolutely, hopefully that is what we are trying to do today, and actually the sort of $64,000 question probably for a lot of people in this room with respect to contract is how do you afford to pay for that contract to be done, because obviously I know Greenberg Trauwig’s hourly rate is, and that’s more than the budget that most people in this room are probably getting, Joe you told me at dinner that you’ve done a project recently for $2,500, something in that range.
JB: Yeah, that one I didn’t even get a contract. I went on a handshake.
RJB: So you just did a handshake deal. But now, how would you feel if that sold 15 million albums.
JB: Well, it was an EP and I felt it would be something that might lead to the artist later selling records and I just did another one where I did a 12-inch vinyl for the band to get going on tour and they are going to make their album in May, so now I am going to get a contract with them for the album.
RJB: So how do you afford to pay for a contract out of that because I mean, contracts can easily cost a couple thousand dollars.
JB: Yeah, well you try to get them to issue it and you try to find a lawyer who realizes that you are not making much money and he gives you a good deal on it, you know? One thing that I have changed recently is I have often done production deals where I will find an artist I like and try and record a few songs and help get them placed at a label. I’m working with a guy now who has a group called Pure Horse Hair and he is very good. And he said, “While we are shopping this I put these five songs out as an EP?” and I said, “Yeah, but whatever you sell at the gigs, you have to give me 25 percent of it.” Now he is out there touring and playing and if he sells CD’s he has to pay me a percentage, so it’s not going be a lot of money but it’s something.
RF: A lot of times you can get the record company to pick up the producer costs as well. Often a lot of the independent labels will build that in as a part of the overall compensation, the majors you can finagle it out of the budget. . .
SR: You get labels to pay for the producer’s contract?
RF: Yeah.
SR: Gimme your card!!
RF: The more difficult ones obviously, if it is a rock act if you have one producer, you have one contract. If you have an R&B or hip-hop and sometimes there can be two agreements for each track. I had one album that was about you know, 18 different producer agreements, which is just horrible.
RJB: And a one track producer agreement costs as much as a whole album.
RF: Right, you are still negotiating the same.
RJB: So Sandy, you have a sort of captive attorney right, that does all of your contracts, right?
SR: Yeah, he does a bulk rate for me because I’ve got 60 clients, so he basically just struck a deal with me that he charges so much for an album and so much for up to three tracks. And, he’s been very good, he’s never changed that price. But he gets a lot of work, I mean, all the producers use him.
RJB: I’ve never understood why we couldn’t have a sort of form agreement for contracts, why couldn’t producers have a basic form agreement where you fill in the names and the percentages, I mean, is that workable?
JD: (to Rob) Because he wouldn’t have a job.
JB: I think that’s it.
RJB: That’s the real answer.
RF: The agreements are not overly sophisticated, I mean, they are all pretty much the same thing and you argue about the same five points but that’s what is. You are arguing over these same five points, you’re going back and forth and that time racks up.
RJB: Is there anything you can share with the people here [about] a resource that they could look at in terms of creating their own form agreements assuming that people don’t have the budgets to pay for contracts through a proper lawyer?
RF: I wouldn’t recommend going, I have seen people that have pulled agreements off the Internet, and they are no good. But, you know, often I will also see clients who will use producer agreements that they have secured a lawyer with and taken those and altered them and used them for subsequent deals, and when I say they are not sophisticated, they are not sophisticated for people that do this stuff everyday. Producer agreements can be 30 pages long. There is a tremendous amount of information in there, if you know what you are looking for. You know, when I say there are these five points, the worst thing to do is to negotiate a deal with a non-entertainment attorney or even a music lawyer, because it will take you four times the amount of time because they do not understand the different areas, and what is important, what is customary and what is not. And that’s just the worst.
RJB: What do you think the least you could do a contract for, a producer contract, a good attorney, at a reputable firm could do it for? (laughter)
RF: I would say, from the market out there, (laughter) and like Sandy indicates, you can get obviously better rates if you are doing multiple contracts, although you are still doing the same work, you are given the better rate because you are giving volume business. I have heard of some lawyers charging $2500 flat, which I think is tough to do. I think I would lose money on any $2500 deal no matter who you are dealing with because the time to go back and forth and draft and even if it is plugging in everything, the percentage of just plugging stuff in and little negotiations, I mean there’s a [significant] amount of time to work with a 30 page document.
RJB: It makes you realize we should have all gone to law school right, instead of the music business. We picked the wrong business. Jimmy, you wanted to say something?
JD: Yeah, I actually just did a deal with somebody in Australia and it was very low budg, so I decided, I have seen enough contracts in my life, they said they didn’t want to spend on a lawyer, I said, “You know what? This is so low budg, we can do this amongst ourselves.” And you know, in the end, I ended up having to go to a lawyer. Because they kept changing little teeny things and the only recourse I had was the email trail. Because they would change what we had said and it was like, I was doing this, honestly from my heart, like saying look, “You don’t have a lot of money, you aren’t paying me a lot,” let’s not do this, we can do this. And they just kept doing little things and at the end I was like, “This is really a pain, this is not right.” And I ended up having to spend the money anyway. You know? And I ended up having to be the bad guy as well. Part of what you get with that paper is you get the bad guy.
RF: That’s true.
RJB: Yeah, yeah, that’s true.
JD: I mean, I had to get the point where I just said, “You know what, you’re actually doing this, you are making me feel so terrible, you know what, you can’t have the record, I don’t care, take the money back.” And that’s a terrible way to act, but that’s how they made me feel. But, you know, he wouldn’t do it that way. . .
RF: It’s important for the producer to stick with his creative, and just concentrate on the creative thing and that relationship and when you start getting that paper between the two of you, it’s a mess.
RJB: I believe that too, but I hate to see people like, people in this room going out there completely unprotected, as it were, you know, with no contract at all and sooner or later someone is going to have a big hit and they are not going to see no back end to it. So they are going to have made a record for maybe a couple of thousand dollars, game to them, maybe a $10,000 budget and it’s going to end up generating millions of dollars, and they are not going to participate in that, and that really hurts to see that happen. I mean you told me a story about that Sandy once I think.
SR: There are a lot of lawyers who just charge five percent. They don’t take any money, they just charge a five percent fee.
RJB: Of the deal?
SR: Of your earnings, yeah.
RJB: Right, off the back end or off of the front end?
SR: There’s no money in the front end, it’s off the back end.
RJB: So lawyers will do it for 5 percent of the back end?
RB: There are lawyers that take, like an agent would do, or a manager, and get a percentage. There are lawyers that take a percentage, especially if you have a young act or something, that has, you know, no money. Sometimes they will do that, we don’t typically do that.
RJB: Right, so like a business manager?
SR: The secret then, if you do that sort of deal, is to always cap it at a certain figure. In fact, The Matrix had a lawyer who charged them 5 percent and I made them go back and redo the deal because he was making so much money for doing like, 3 or 4 contracts. So they then capped the money he could earn in a year. And it was still a decent amount of money for him, but that’s one way of doing it.
RJB: Well, at least the producer winds up protected which is the most important thing. So Jimmy, do you fly without contracts very often, or you never fly without contracts.
JD: I’ve done so many different things, but the question I do have is like: How far, do you think in general, a letter of intention takes you? Like if you’re not going to go to a full-blown contract, you’re just talking about a form, you’re talking about a form, so to speak, right?
RJB: Well, I mean just a binding agreement, basically. It could be a one-pager, but you know, you were saying these ones you get off the internet are not really worth the paper they’re written on, I guess. Does that mean they wouldn’t stand up if they’re contested or you can’t enforce them in whatever way?
RF: Well, I’m sure they could be enforced but a lot of times people are taking documents that they have no idea, you know, what a mechanical royalty and a controlled composition is, and they’re plugging in blanks and they don’t really know necessarily what they’re doing.
JD: But, like, a Letter of Intention without getting that deep. In other words, that would kind of sort of say ‘Look, we agree that we’re doing this and we’re going to do a better thing about it once something happens.’ Does that do anything?
RF: Yeah, I mean, a lot of times you find that people have selective memory. And so a letter of intent would be good for those situations. But then there’s obviously with agreements, I mentioned there’s about five areas that are problematic. One of them is sampling, which you’re [Jimmy] probably involved in a lot, and you really have to hash out, if there’s a sample in something, how the producer has to contribute to either the money that it takes to clear the sample or any of the publishing issues that are involved in the sample, or even if you have a sample clearance from on the record side, the master side, whether he absorbs all that. So in that, you know, all of that stuff is very important to be detailed in any kind of document. But, I mean, I have seen quite a few producers do very short form producer agreements, but it’s also important to have all the indemnity provisions as well because quite often, especially, you know, I’m seeing it more and more where people are putting tracks out on spec and they’re sending them out to different people and the next thing you know they’re popping up with different voices on it and it’s uh, it can be difficult. I actually was, uh, when I was at Sony I handled all the clearances for all the samples for Sony repertoire. So if anyone wanted to use a clip from an Epic artist or something they would, um, have to come through our group and I had within one month two different record companies sending me in for sample clearance the exact same song with a different artist on it.
RJB: Right.
RF: And, uh, that would have gone back to the producer.
RJB: Sandy, you had something to say.
SR: Well, I’m finding in this climate that I’m doing a lot of deals where the producer will spec tracks. So normally what I do there is I just exchange emails with the band’s manager because, at that stage, it can go one of three ways, I think. You spec some tracks and you work out a deal with the band that, if they get a deal, they’ll pay you so much a track, or if they get a deal and the label doesn’t want to use you as the producer you can get a kill fee, just a variety of different things. And that way, the band or the label can’t use the tracks, you’ve got the drive, you’ve got the masters, so they’ve got to work out a deal if they want to use it. If they don’t want to use it, they’ve got an agreement with the band to pay a kill fee.
RJB: Right. And do you think, do they honor that because of the email exchange or…?
SR: To be honest, I’ve had no…the most problem I have is getting paid by labels. I don’t have any problem with bands, if you struck a deal. It’s when you’ve sold records, and you’re trying to get the royalties, that’s the biggest problem.
RJB: Yeah. I think a lot of…
SR: [interrupting] It’s like it was, you read about in the fifties and people saying, you know, you ask for royalties and they shoot you or something. You know? [laughter] It’s really, that’s the difficult thing: chasing down, if you’ve had a big record, chasing down and then every time I’ve done an audit, what you normally do is you can’t afford or normally they don’t give the rights to the producer to audit, they’ll let you piggy back with the artist. So when I audited, uh, Hootie and the Blowfish, I audited Atlantic with them. They found a million dollars in mistakes.
RJB: Yeah. “Mistakes” right? Yeah, yeah.
SR: It was something to do with club sales. Same thing with, um.
RJB: Have you ever noticed how it’s funny that the mistakes are always in their favor? They’re never, they never pay the band a million dollars too much, do they?
RF: And that’s also the reason why, like Sandy was talking about, the Letter of Direction, which is effectively a letter from the band instructing the record company to pay the producer, and it’s, the more simple that can be the better. And that’s why when we were talking earlier a points deal, where if it’s three points, four points, or whatever, the record company is set up to do that, and it works. Sometimes. It works most of the time. When you start deviating from that is when it gets really bad. So when we were talking about earlier doing profit splits and coming up with some sort of artificial royalty terms that you negotiate with the producer because the artist doesn’t want to pay him a percentage of his profit, it gets very messy because the record company doesn’t know how to handle that and inevitably it will get botched and you will have payment issues. So if you were doing a percentage, that’s why I’m an advocate of, you know, doing those percentage deals, you will likely get paid more often and better because you’re effectively getting %25 of what they would otherwise pay the artist.
SR: See, America is the only country where the label doesn’t hire the producer.
RJB: Right.
SR: They worked out very early on, ‘let’s distance ourselves from any problems. Let the act hire the producer and then they can tell us to pay them and if we don’t want to, we won’t.’ Every other country in the world, you sign a contract with the label, they pay you. It’s only in America where they’ve done it, they sort of stand back a little bit and you have to do the deal with the band and then get the band to direct the label to pay you. They’ve distanced themselves. I don’t know whose idea that was in the beginning but it’s very smart.
RJB: I’ll give you three guesses.
RF: There are a bunch of smart, smart people up there in the music business.
RJB: One of the things I’m interested in is Sandy, Joe, and Jimmy, is you guys have had extremely sustained careers, I mean for a very long time through a lot of different changes and I’m curious to what you attribute that, I mean apart from just talent, which is obviously there, but at the same time you’ve had to adapt to a lot of different environments. I mean, I know Jimmy, you’ve adapted to tons of different kinds of music, I mean it’s been quite incredible. Do you have any insights into how you’ve managed to sustain a career, because I think over the next ten or thirty years it’s going to be at least as changeable as it has been over the past thirty, probably a lot more.
JD: If I’m here over the next thirty years, somebody can just shoot me. [laughter] But no, to me the biggest change that I really saw was the changing over from analog to digital, that whole thing; that whole transition. And when I say ‘digital’ I don’t just meant digital digital, I mean the ability to, well, computerized tools in the music work place. That was the biggest thing; that was the challenge to me. And I guess for me, the only thing that really kind of drives me is the, is always wanting the ability to try to be ahead of the next, you know. When they were changing over analog, there was a machine called Synclavier. It was a digital new, like one of the first: there was the Fairlight and there was the Synclavier. The Synclavier cost like $250,000, and I happened to be at Atlantic and they happened to own one, and it was sitting in the closet doing nothing. Literally, they could afford it and it was doing nothing. And I saw a couple of demos of it and I went berserk because it could do all these amazing things that nothing else on this planet could do at the time. And I spent about…I worked for them and I asked them not to hire me on anything and I said ‘You know what, let me just learn this machine.’ And I started doing digital mastering for them at night so they wouldn’t put me on any other gigs because I wanted to learn this machine, and I learned this machine, I taught myself, I felt very proud of myself. And I was, you know, on the forefront, I was in the leading forefront; I did a couple of albums with a group called The System and it was really, you know, it was very rewarding. And you know, they started, these kids started coming around that said they could do the same thing with this cheap little thing called ProTools, or whatever [laughter]. And I paid no heed because, you know, this is $250,000 what can this little machine do? But, you know, as time went on, that little machine got better and better, and this was too much and it was just, it just got kind of outdated, and I found myself with all the little kids.
RJB: Right.
JD: You know, and just trying to keep up with all the changing technology has been a very very interesting challenge to me. Like even now, I listen to a lot of the records and there’s a lot of like, you know, all the effects and all that crazy stuff which has nothing to do with music but it’s there and it’s available and, you know, that’s what they want. They want to hear effects, they don’t want to hear just people play music anymore they want to hear all kinds of crazy, ‘what can this machine do? Let me see what it can do!’ you know? And it’s really, it’s a challenge but that’s what you gotta do if you wanna stay in the game.
RJB: Yeah, so you’ve been excited by the changes, really. The technological changes, that’s kept you excited.
JD: Yeah, I’m excited [ironically].
RJB: [laughter] And Joe, you come from a tech background, so, I guess that…
JB: Yeah, well, one thing is you have to keep aware of the technological changes another thing is you always have to be listening, you know, when we’re in the studio sometimes working 12 or 14 hours a day, you still have to find time to listen to the new records and find the things that you like, and listen to any good music that you’ve always liked and just stay in touch with music, is one thing. Another thing is if you just always do a good job and you give people a hundred percent, somehow it comes back, you know, when a few years later a guy who was a bass player in one group you worked with is in another group and, you know, when word of mouth and reputation. You know, I’ve been lucky because early on in my career in the ‘80’s I worked with people from Japan and people from South America and it just branched out into more people from those places. And you know, I guess luck is also a factor, but I think just always doing good work and staying in touch with what’s going on.
RJB: Could you elaborate on the international work a little bit? Because it’s unusual that you do so much international work.
JB: Yeah, well it wasn’t by design or anything. You know, I started working with a guy from Argentina who came knocking on the door of Electric Lady Studios in like 1984 and wanted someone to mix his record and he turned out to be a very legendary artist down there, his name is Charlie García. I made a few records with him and then in the ‘90’s the MTv Latino started making unplugged records and I did his and then they liked the way it sounds so they hooked me up with a couple other bands and then all those bands when I met them they wanted me to do their next studio records and it’s just, one thing led to another, and I’ve done about nine projects for Warner Music in Spain. And, you know, some of them were successful so they called me back for other ones.
RJB: That’s great. And Sandy, you’ve, firstly, you’ve been in the business for a very very long time.
SR: Well I’m certainly the oldest person here. I mean, I was an act; I was signed to Fontana Deca EMI as an artist in the ‘60’s in the UK and then, I just realized that I wasn’t going to make it so I decided to go and get a job in the business and I very luckily got a job working for Chess Records. And I ran their publishing company and got their records distributed in the UK, and it was great. And then I left there to start my own label with one of the producers at Decker and we formed Blue Horizon Records which was a very successful blues label. The first act we signed was Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer, and then Seymour Stein and Richard Gott came over from New York and they bought into our label. And then I got the bug: I just wanted to produce records and I left and I did fifty five albums back to back. And only seven of those records was I actually hired to produce. All the others, I found the bands, I signed them to my production company, I made the record, and then went and shopped it. And it was only like the last two records where I never got a deal. But every time I just walked into…with finished albums and got deals. And I know it’s risky to do that but now it’s less expensive to make records. You couldn’t have…I mean in those days, you couldn’t afford to buy a multi-track machine and sound-proof a room and all that. So I would be taking a risk, but nowadays you can make records for very little money. But my passion has always been about making records. And that’s, I just OD’d on doing it so that’s why I switched over and represented producers because I still love that whole passion about making records
JD: Making records or music?
SR: Music.
JD: Music, ok. Because we keep saying ‘making records’
SR: Well, you know.
JD: No, no, I, no it’s very important…
SR: It dates me by saying records because…there are no records anymore.
JD: No you mean making music, though.
SR: Music, yeah.
JD: Yeah, ok.
RJB: But it’s the recording, it’s the actual recording, the capturing of an event or a series of events or whatever and preserving it forever that…
SR: I used to know every player on every session I would, you know, I would memorize their stuff.
RJB: Yeah, well you said something to me earlier about not wanting your producers to be working all the time.
SR: No, I think that is, I think what producers should do, and it’s tough because obviously you’ve got to make a living, but the secret I think is picking and choosing, obviously if you’re starting off you’ve got to try and get your name going, but once you’ve got established a little bit you should try and pick the projects you do. And I know it’s tough because everyone’s got to make a living, but it’s so much better to work with great projects and great acts than just be doing it just to make the rent or the mortgage or whatever you want.
RJB: How do you keep your producers alive and I mean, do some of them have to do day jobs or other gigs in between?
SR: Well I mean I’ve got one guy who’s in his fifties and he’s struggled but now it’s really come through for him because he insisted, and we worked together on this, he insisted that he did not want to work on cheesy projects. And, uh, he just did the Nick Cave record which has done really well, it’s the highest charting record that he’s ever had; he’s in Texas now producing the Yeah yeah yeah’s. He’s, uh, Supergrass: he’s just done their record. So he’s really picking and choosing the projects he does, and the Yeah yeah yeah’s came to him or wanted to work with him because of the record he had made with a Nick Cave side project: Grinderman. So I think it all snowballs.
RJB: Well that actually was my next question: do you think it continuing to work, is it about relationships? Is it about reputation? Is it a combination? How does that work, is it about relationships with A&R people, with bands, or how does that, where does most of the work come from, well, from your point of view and from the producer’s point of view?
SR: Through me, oh, it’s changed. I have to go the extra mile now to get my producers work. I mean there was girl recently in Philadelphia who made her own record, and somehow she got it onto XM radio just herself, and it was played on The Loft and I was driving to work and I heard her, her name’s Melody Gardot, and I listened and I thought ‘she’s amazing.’ And I sort of basically got to the office and I started phoning around and Googling her. I found that she had made her own record and had it on her own little website. So I contacted her and said ‘Listen I’ve got this guy Larry Klein that would be a fantastic producer for you.’ She says ‘Well I don’t have a label.’ So I went and met her and she had a manager who was twenty one and he, you know, he didn’t even know the address for Sony, so he would never have got a deal. So I said ‘Look, if Larry can produce the next record, I’ll get you a record deal.’ And so she said ‘Great, cool.’ She didn’t have a lawyer and she just had this young manager, so I went out there and I shopped it and I got her a deal with Universal in London and Verve are putting out that record now and Larry’s in the studio this week started doing a record. So that’s what I have to do now in the old days you would be basically getting phone calls with people trying to hire your producers but I have to go out and do that extra thing. And there’s a girl who got signed, purely by making her own record, putting it on her website, and getting some guy on The Loft on XM to play it.
RJB: This is kind of going back to the days of John Hammond where the producers went out there and A&R’d and found acts and got them signed and so on and so forth.
SR: Absolutely. It’s what I said in the very beginning, I think producers should be finding the acts and working out a deal with the band and either putting it out through iTunes, EMusic, Amazon, whatever digital…they want, and maybe working it a little bit themselves, and then maybe going. Because shopping deals now is just impossible with majors. They just want a story, they don’t want a baby act that’s sold nothing.
RJB: Yeah, I mean they want it to be on the radio and have sold fifty thousand copies and, it’s crazy.
SR: I’ve got a guy now, who, I made a record with this guy, from Australia, and we made the record and it was sort of like, Jet meets Stacks. Had horns, it was a really cool record. And, nothing happened, so basically we just shelved the record and said let’s wait, let’s try and get you on the road. He drove down to San Diego himself and went on American Idol, and he’s in the last ten now, so I’m sitting on a finished record with this guy who’s in the last ten on American Idol. So he did all that himself, he just bit the bullet, auditioned, got on there, got right through, and he’s in the last ten. And he’s the only one on that show right now who’s got a finished record sitting on the shelf.
RJB: Yeah, if he wins, you’ll have to give it to BMG, right?
SR: I don’t know, for me I hope he doesn’t win because then we can put that record out, instead of Jay making a crappy record. [laughter]
RJB: He said he was going to be the Simon Cowell of the panel. So, Jimmy, how about you, I mean what do you, where do you think most of your work comes from? Relationships? Reputation? Combination?
JD: It comes from a combination of any and everything, and when I was listening to Joe, actually, I remembered one thing: one of the key places my work used to come from back, was, you know, when you work the big studios a lot of acts come around. They see you in the seat, they see you making the big record, they want you. That’s what that represents basically, but the era of the big studio has kind of come and gone. And a lot of us are making records in a vacuum, or at home in your own studio by yourself, and nobody’s coming around anymore. So, you know, the hardest thing for me, especially, I’m in Miami now a lot, and I work at a place called the Hit Factory where, like, you know, all the hip-hop people are, when I’m there it’s great, they all come through they see me, we do a slap hands, ‘I’m gonna work for you, I’ll do your mixes.’ But when I’m not there, trying to keep in touch with the rest of the world to let them know that I even exist, even though I’m making great records and my record do come out, you know, I’m in the hit parade hopefully, but still, on a daily basis, like Sandy was saying, somebody’s in somebody’s office talking about somebody else’s name and it’s not mine. And even though they know and love and respect what I do it’s just like I’m not there, I’m not in their mind at that moment, and this vacuum thing is really part of what is, uh, it’s a good thing and it’s a bad thing.
RF: You also see producers more and more getting hired to very high level positions in record companies.
RJB: Right.
RF: So obviously the people that run in those circles tend to get some business out of that. Jay-Z and Germaine Dupree and those type of…
RJB: LA
RF: Yeah.
RJB: But this is a cyclical thing, though, you know in my lifetime they go through phases where producers run labels and then it goes back to accountants and lawyers and then it flips over to producers again. I mean, unfortunately there aren’t enough labels out there to employ more than about six producers at this point are there? Here’s a question for you that I hope is meaningful to everybody here and that is: if you’re just starting out from scratch today, eighteen years old or twenty two years old, whatever, how do you get started in producing? What do you do? I’ll throw this open to anybody who wants to…
JD: Well, how do you get started in producing. You know, that question, I’ve been asked many times actually and matter of fact some kid came and asked me this it was some ProTools exhibition, and he came to me and he said ‘I’ve learned how to work all the stuff, I can do this and that and the other,’ he says, ‘but, how do I learn how to produce?’ And I thought, ‘how do you learn how to produce?! No, either you produce or you don’t.’ It’s not something you learn, either you have it or you don’t have it. I don’t think I’m wrong there. From what I’ve understood, from watching producers and being one, you either get it or you don’t get it. So when you say ‘how do you start out being a producer?’ well, I would say ‘well, if that’s what you are, you believe that you have the ability and the talent to be that.’ There’s so many, to me, I’m watching people get, I guess, seen that wouldn’t have been seen in the past because of the internet, basically. There really is, I mean as silly as it sounds, there is the youtube thing. People are putting stuff up there and people are seeing stuff that, you would’ve never known these people in the past. There’s no way they would have gotten past anybody’s gate, and now they’re, you’re getting a lot of that, between um, I guess just regular people in the street are being able to, there are channels that you can get out there. You don’t have to depend on the big boy to bring you through and let the world see you.
RJB: Do you use the social networking outlets like MySpace and Facebook?
JD: I actually have two or three writers that I’ve found on MySpace, I mean I really do go through, you know, a lot of people hit me up and I just, I listen, audition what they do, and some of it’s decent, you know and like and I’ll listen to the writers, I’ll check them out, see what they got, I’ll send them some tracks, they’ll send me some stuff back. You know, we can do that across the thing. I’ve even had a couple people fly into my studio and we’ve written some stuff. Um, it’s there.
RJB: Yeah. Joe, what do you think about how you get started.
JB: Well, I think to do this to begin with, you have to be passionate about music and you have to have some kind of skill, and I don’t it’s necessarily a technical thing or something, but just a good, good taste and a good ear. You know, and a good objective view point when you’re working with an artist to help them. You know, to me a producer’s job is really to bring out the best in an artist and hopefully that coincides with making a successful product. But, I think when you’re starting out you just got to find somebody who will let you work with them, and you have to believe in their talent and do the best you can, and if you can make something really good, you know like Jimmy said there are these channels on the internet and things, something that’s good will get noticed, you know, so.
RJB: Well there’s a second part to this question then. If, say you’re a pretty successful local or regional producer, how do you make the jump to hyperspace, as it were, or how do you jump up to the level of having hits? Any thoughts on that?
SR I think you, I really do think you need to get somebody to work for you. Because, when I was a producer I never had any manager until the very end. And I got a lawyer in New York called Marty Meshat who’s dead now and he said ‘Listen, I’m never going to find you work, but once you’ve found something I’ll do a good deal for you.’ And he would charge me fifteen percent for doing my contract. But, he would ask for money that I would be embarrassed to ask for, and he got it. He would never read the contracts, he always said, ‘Listen, forget about the contract. If the record’s a hit, I’ll go in and renegotiate.’ And that was his [laughing] his standard approach! But I think that labels are always looking for somebody new, I mean, they really are. I mean, people come out of the blue. Where did Mark Ronson come from? He came out of the blue!
RJB: Yeah.
SR: Tim Palmer, who I represent, he sent me, he was a tape-up at Utopia Studios, and he used to sneak back in at night after they had locked the studio and take bands in there and cut B sides and things, free. And he sent me, he worked with a band called…dreadful band called Kajagoogoo, you probably don’t even remember them. He did a B side with them and he sent it to me and it was just amazing, the sound was fantastic. And I took him on when he was a tape-up, because he just sounded fantastic. And not long after that, I got a call from Phil Carson who was working at Atlantic records and he said Robert Plant wants somebody new to work with him. He doesn’t want any name. And I thought, ‘I’ll put Tim up for this.’ So I put Tim up. Tim had never miked a drum kit before he had always worked on drum machines, and he got the gig! Robert said ‘I like you, come and…’ So he, I think Richie Hayward was the drummer, it was the first time he had miked a drum kit, he phoned me up and said ‘what do I do?’ Well, you can either put two overheads and [laughs] one on the kick. Or you can just double mike everything! And if you listen to the drum sound on that, it’s great. That’s Shaken and Stirred, that, Robert Plant.
RJB: Yeah, no, I remember.
SR: So I think it’s…you know, if you’re going to try and break into, as you said ‘go into hyperspace’, you’ve got to probably get someone to help you get there whether it’s a lawyer or a manager or someone like that. But, it you’ve got a great tape, and you get it to the right people, you’ll get, people are going to listen.
RJB: So you recommend mailing…[part lost]
SR …boxes in the corner and they’re so depressing. Because people’s whole hopes are sitting in there and some intern’s going to come in there and listen to it and maybe, and, that’s not the way to do it. You have to get somebody to work with you to get it, to get people to play it.
RJB: Yeah, but I mean, market yourself to managers and lawyers?
SR: Yeah, I think so, yeah.
RJB: So reach out to managers who manage…
SR: Yeah, or lawyers. Some lawyers don’t like to shop, but some do.
RJB: Jimmy?
JD: I wanted to say one thing, this is called ‘MySpace savvy.’ Just for those of you that really do it, cut the intros off, please? And I mean that in all sincerity ‘cause when I go on it to hear stuff I need to, it’s like if you multiply the amount of people in this room and if every one of you had four songs up there, and I have to sit through fifteen seconds of an intro on four songs, that’s a minute times however many people there are here. I would like to hear what you have to offer, but I’d like to get to the point. Um, I’m not trying to be arrogant about it, but sometimes I really do, I get excited by what I see and I’m like, ‘let me see what this sounds like.’ And then I hear ‘ku ku kgoon…kgoon.’ And I’m like, ‘ok…so…it’s gonna sound like what?’ And it’s just one of the things that I just, it’s just a piece of advice I give people because it helps people that might spend the time to listen to you. ‘Cause if I do two of those, and I realize it’s a lot of intros, then I won’t listen to the third and fourth song.
RF: And, to follow up on that, I mean, it needs to be your best stuff too. I hear so much ‘Well, it’s a work in progress.’ Or, ‘It’s not my best.’ Well it has to be your best stuff. I mean, that is out to the world and there have been, you know some people that have got some success, and, you know, you don’t want him [Jimmy] hearing just your mediocre stuff, it needs to be the best.
RJB: Yeah, I mean you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. I want to throw it open to questions now. I’m not sure if we have any questions, but if we do, does anybody have any questions? Would you possibly, Tom, do you want to stand on the mike, ‘cause we’re trying to record everything and capture everything, questions as well.
Tom: Hi, my name’s Tom, I’m an artist manager. I’ve had good success with major labels, but with the whole trend towards self releasing, from my clients I see both sides of that. And, I’m curious to hear what any of you have to say about that; Sandy in particular in the case of Melody Gardot, who I’ve been hearing a lot about lately, what made it a better decision for her to go with a major label than to stick with her independent record, which was already being played on XM, caught your attention, why was it not better for her to self release?
SR: Well, it’s down to funding. I mean, Universal in London have flown her to London two or three times, she’s already been on TV there, they’ve got whole press behind her, she couldn’t afford to do that. She just had her own website with a record up there, and she sent it to somebody at The Loft and got it played, and I happened to be just listening at that time.
Tom: Doesn’t that speak to the whole issue of ‘well, gee, you make more money per disc when you put it out yourself, so why don’t you put it out yourself?’ I think so many artists are being told that and they don’t understand, but then they’ll have to fund the marketing of their own recording themselves, and they don’t realize the whole business behind it. All they’re thinking is ‘gee, I’m gonna make more per disc’ and they’re not thinking about the business that goes into releasing a record.
SR: Right.
RJB: Any other questions?
Ward Kirkendal: Hi, my name is Ward Kirkendal and I’m a student at Omega Studio Schools of Applied Recording Arts and Sciences, and a good question for me is, I’m trying to figure out how to get into the business after I’m done with school and everything. How many of you all take on interns and entry-level positions? How common is that in the business today?
JB: Well, I own a recording studio so occasionally we get somebody to come in and in the beginning it’s things like answering phones or assisting certain sessions or the engineer’s pretty confident to do it himself and he just sort of, you know, watch and learn, and it can be boring a lot of times but you’re, you know, there are places you can do it. It generally doesn’t pay well until you work your way up to being an assistant engineer or something like that, you know.
Ward: Maybe just one more, if any of you guys can remember, how did you make your first dollar? Since we’re talking about money.
JD: My first dollar in the records or my first dollar?
Ward: Yeah, as far as producers or engineers.
JB: Well I was fortunate I worked in the studio in New York, Electric Lady Studios and I was their technician and I fixed the equipment, I worked the night shift and things. And I got friendly with a lot of the bands that worked there and one of them was The Clash and they came through town on a tour and they had a song that they didn’t finish, and they said ‘hey if we bring the tapes over here after our gig, can we finish this with you?’ And I said sure, you know, but I had never touched a fader or done anything like that, you know, I had the knowledge of that all because I was a fan of music and I had to keep the studio working and everything. But so I just fell into it and I was very lucky, but, you know, some guys are assistant engineers for a long time and they never get a break, and then some guys are there for two weeks and somebody doesn’t show up sick and they get to touch the faders and then they have a career, you know, so it’s, there’s a lottery element to it, you know.
Ward: Thank you very much.
RJB: Any other questions?
Stan Green: Hi, my name is Stan Green. I’m a songwriter/engineer. My question is directed towards Jimmy Douglas: you being a producer, engineer, and songwriter, how many times while you were tracking a song or mixing a song have you been involved in the songwriting/producing aspect and not received any credit for it? And how often does that happen and is that expected while you’re an engineer?
JD Um, it happens a lot. It happens a lot, I mean, it happened a lot back in the day because I didn’t realize my contribution as a producer… many times, like a lot of the funk groups I used to do, I’d help them kind of write, but there’d be so many people writing that I would think ‘well you’re the producer, this is your contribution to make the song better by contributing a word or two here.’ And you know, there are so many people I would be like ‘yeah, don’t…’ you know I felt kinda… And then sometimes I’d hear people talk about the song and they’d mention the line that I put in, they go ‘I love this line,’ and I’m like ‘shit that was my line.’ But, you know, that’s the way that it goes sometimes. More recently, I mean on one of the things that I do, a lot of the people I work with now, the reason they love me is because I am producer and I’m a really good vocal coach, and I do all that stuff from back in the day, and I am also a contributor. And there’s one artist I’m not gonna mention because the camera’s rolling, but there was one song that we kinda wrote together but he’s a little more clever than that; the way he wrote it was, he kinda asked me questions about the way to say things, and then he’d re-word it. So we would talk about the song, we were actually writing the song, and he would talk about the thing and say ‘well how would you feel if this…’ and I’d say ‘well, you know, he’s gonna feel this way, and the character’s gonna…’ and we’d talk about, like, writing the song and he’d go ‘you mean, kinda like, dadada…’ and I’d be like ‘ok but that’s not you’re words,’ but we kinda just, you know. So yeah, it happens, you know. But the record was very successful so at the end of the day, sometimes you give, sometimes you take, sometimes, you know. If you’ve got talent, you’ll get what you’re supposed to get.
SR: That’s a good question because it comes up all the time, because it must be like talking about a prenup, you know? [laughter] How do you get around to it? It’s so difficult because if you talk about song splits with a band before you start working with them,
JD: Oh god.
SR: it’s just, it’s a vibe killer right away.
JD: Kills it. Totally.
SR: But, after the fact, it’s always very difficult to go back. So that’s a good question because that comes up still now, every month there’s a producer who’s saying ‘listen I wrote some of that song.’ It’s so difficult. It’s a really difficult thing because there’s no real hard set way to deal with that. Maybe just go out for a drink before hand, wait for the right moment.
RJB: It’s particularly difficult because I think sometimes the artist thinks the producer is trying to get a piece of the publishing.
JB: It’s a grey area, though, because if you’re working on a record, you’re the producer and ultimately you’re in charge, and if the artist, you know, like has a song and one of the verses or something has some corny lyric or something and you say ‘well, why don’t you change it?’ ‘Well I can’t think of anything,’ and then you think of something and you give it to him or something then… but, no, but a lot of times you have to let it go, but if it’s a thing like ‘oh, this song needs a bridge,’ and then they can’t come up with it and you write it and they like it, then obviously you’re a co-writer. So it’s kind of a grey area, you know, but you also have to step in and help because you have to make a good record.
Stan Green: Thank you.
RJB: Did you have a question?
Unnamed: I’m probably working on my third independent project in the past fifteen years. Question I have to the Academy is about how do we, or what is the Academy doing to stop the illegal downloads?
RJB: I can’t speak on behalf of the Academy, actually, I don’t know if anybody else here does, but I, uh, I think, you know, it’s really an educational process more than anything because the Academy’s not an organization that can really stop illegal downloads but I think that, certainly for my part, you know, I try to put out as much information to people to say ‘you know what, you’re hurting the very thing that you love. If you download music for free, you’re hurting the business in general, you’re hurting artists who make their living, if artists can’t make their living from music, then you’re not gonna wind up with as much good music out there.’ And maybe that’s not true, you know, I mean there’s also the argument that people that download a lot of stuff also buy a lot of stuff, so, I don’t know. Do you guys have an opinion about that? About illegal downloads?
RF: I think it’s offering the consumer better alternatives. I think iTunes has done a tremendous job of that by giving them very simple way to download things. You know, the CD was actually a great period of time, the invention of the CD, because all the labels would reissue their catalog, there was a tremendous spike, and I think you can have that for the digital age as well if they do it right. Because everyone, even though you have the record down somewhere in your basement or the CD down in your basement, you know, we’re a society of instantaneous gratification and we will go and we will hit that button on iTunes and download the thing for ten dollars. And, uh, I’m seeing that more and more. So I think it’s important to give the consumer a very efficient way of getting the music.
RJB: Yeah, I will tell you this, I mean I see so many people out there with digital players and to me this indicates that there’s a massive proliferation in the use of music, and yet for whatever reason the industry’s declining each year in terms of revenue. So I think that it’s really everybody’s responsibility to kind of front up and say, you know ‘I enjoy this, I should pay for it.’ That’s how I feel about it, but on the other hand, I mean, if you could get gas free at the next gas station people would do that too. So it’s very hard as long as it’s free I think people are gonna take it. Any other questions?
Elyse Perry: Good evening, my name is Elyse Perry I’m a producer. You all spoke of a number of projects that are getting completed this year, how they’ve dipped, and I think that the industry looks at some of us producers that aren’t those twenty producers that are doing the six figure projects as on a different level. So we get a smaller amount of money. So my question to you all is: how do we potentially broker a deal with people who just have no money? Everybody wants to pay the studio, no one wants to pay the producer. They want us to go independent in with them and then they go out and they burn their CD’s and we have no way of auditing, you know, their independent releases. We do five songs, two songs, ten songs, they go out, they do a concert, they sell a hundred CD’s, everybody loves it, but we don’t ever get a cut. So we get our money up front as much as we can, and still don’t really get what we deserve. I mean, we want to broker a deal fairly, but it’s never fair enough. So my question to you is, and I was hoping I was gonna get something like this was, another production business model for low-balling. I mean, there’s so many things that people are doing out here, I call it ‘street brokering,’ where they rent beats. They rent beats it’s: they get out here and they do a beat for somebody and ‘you got this beat for six months and then it goes back out here for, if, Jay-Z wants his beat, you can’t have the beat anymore. If I do this beat for you for six months and you get picked up, then we renegotiate.’ You know, so there are all kinds of little street that we’re doing and some of them hold up and some of them don’t. I was just thinking maybe you all had an idea for some form of a production business model for the ground level until you become on Timberland’s level, or something.
JD: That’s called, uh, that sounded like that was called licensing to me, what you just described. Whether it’s in the street or whether it’s in the big offices, it’s the same process basically. The real fact, and I look at this many times from my positions, the “big money”, the Timberland’s and all those people, there is a handful of people making most of the records that you hear on the radio. Yes, there’s a handful, that they’re all feeding the same Ferrell, Timberland, and dadadada, and they’re sending all the money. But at the same time there’s also a crop of people like yourself that are coming up, that can’t really be regulated yet because you’re not really on the radar. But if you want to be on the radar and you want to have everything set straight up, they’re not gonna do it with you, they’re gonna do it with them. The thing is, your investment and your risk, that is what you’re investing in: yourself. And you’re investing in your future. And the fact that work that you’re putting into it right now, which you may not be being paid for, you will be being paid for at some point. One of the things that I do, remember when I was talking about that Australian deal, one of the things that I kept saying to this person, I said ‘you know, you’re getting crazy over this little little stuff. Either we make money, and we both make money, or neither of us really make any money and this really isn’t worth this shit anyway.’ And that’s what I kept saying over and over again and they weren’t understanding; I was saying ‘look, if we end up selling this many records, we’re both gonna make money, so stop it.’ And, you know, it’s kind of the same thing, you know: so, they’re selling a hundred CD’s here and there, so what are you gonna make of that? Probably, what, I don’t know what you’re gonna make. Whatever that is, you may be entitled, but look at the bigger picture, you know, look at some of the, think about somebody getting some sort of documentation that you’re supposed to follow this trail that, suddenly should blow up and really make some serious money, now we really want to talk about it. Now we want to talk.
RF: One thing that I’ve also seen more recently is, before, uh, ten years ago or so, record companies wanted to, they would listen to a demo and then they would go in and get one of these guys to re-do that track. For some liability reasons, they wanted to be able to control the sound, they wanted to be able to do it. I’m seeing more and more that labels will be interested in putting out the track that they receive. They’ll be putting out those demos. I’m doing a deal right now where it’s kind of this, we were talking about this earlier, a flow-rider situation which was just this one track that was serviced through iTunes, and it just blew up. Same type of situation where a major is going to do a singles deal, put it out, and it’s the same track the got, same producer such as yourself who hopefully will, if this track blows up, will be able to produce the album or at least, will be on that single, will have that credit to their name. And then, you know, and that’s the baby steps. So, you know, that’s a good thing in kinda where we’re going now, recently.
RJB: Thank you. Next question.
Bo Samps: My name is Bo Samps and you guys are doing a great job. I would like to know from you guys; can you guys elaborate on how long it takes an artist to come out? Because a lot of people don’t really realize just ‘cause you sign a record deal doesn’t mean you’re coming out the next day, and I just wanted you guys to kind of elaborate on that, and then, I also would like to make a comment that, you know, from the way radio does things now, things have changed and that has really affected you, producers, the artists and everything. The way you expose music is the only way, you know, that you guys are gonna be heard. So you’ve got stuff that you’ve produced that people haven’t even heard, and I think that’s important for people to know.
JB: Well, we’ve all produced records that nobody’s heard, unfortunately [laughter]. But, you know, on a grass roots level, you gotta try and get it out there any way you can, you know, with the Myspace, the internet, through the band’s website, whatever, the artist’s website. You know, when you get signed to a major label your record might not come out for as long as a year.
SR: Sometimes it never comes out.
JB: Sometimes it never comes out, sometimes they release one single and if they pay their radio promo person and it doesn’t get air play, you know, three months after the record’s out, the artist can’t get through to anyone from the record label on the phone, you know. So it can be over that quick, you know. But, uh, I think the best thing these days is to, one is to make something that’s really, you know, good quality with the artist and the production, and two is to get as much momentum going with it as you can, before you go to a major label. You know, as much exposure, as many people coming to the artist’s shows or whatever.
Jerry Olson: Hi, thanks for coming out. My name is Jerry Olson I run a discount CD replication company called Music Boot Camp.com. I’m curious what you guys think of the big tidal wave that Trent Reznor made with his last album, the, I think it’s called ‘Ghosts.’ And, he made about a million dollars in his first week. I know he’s had, you know, obviously enormous prior exposure, but there’s a lot of controversy about, you know, people daring the majors to try this kind of a business model and there’s a lot of fear on the side of the majors, of course, to sort of stop monitoring the income of the CD and go with this sort of global approach, you know, saturating the market and then pay, you know, pay what you feel comfortable with. But there’s a big demand for that kind of thing. And lastly, I think a lot of people feel that’s a fair deal because they get to listen to the product and evaluate how much it’s worth and then actually purchase it. I know it’s a really controversial business model, but I wondered what, with your experience with the major labels, how do you feel about that particular success? Do you think that there is any future in that sort of approach?
SR: Well one of my clients actually made that record, Atticus Ross. And that record, it’s available through Trent’s website, but it’s going to be available physically in the UK and in America, so he’s put it out in a number of different formats. But I think he was just fed up with being with Interscope, and he just wanted to do it himself, and he just lucked out because, you know, the record has done really well.
RF: I don’t think that there will ever be a time where we’re at a ‘pay what you want for a record’ and that’ll be a successful business model.
SR: But I think it’s five bucks a record. I don’t think it’s pay…
Jerry Olson: It varied. There was a plateau of like 128 bit where you get your basic quality, iTunes basic quality, for free if you want. And then ten dollars if you want to pre-order the CD, and then they had twenty five hundred units that were like hundreds of dollars. And they sold out of those in the first week.
SR: Well I don’t think he anticipated the interest in this because he, I think the website crashed the first night on that Sunday night that it came out.
RF: I think there’s a lot of discussion in technology companies that are working on dynamic pricing models, which I think are possibly more relevant, where it’s just a demand, a dynamic demand system where in real time, you know, as twenty five people are typing in that they’re looking at this particular record, the prices are gonna go up and down. I guess similar to airline tickets and that type of thing. I see that as being a possibility.
SR: I think the biggest problem we had on that record was working out the mechanical because I got a share of the mechanicals from my client, and I think there’s thirty one tracks on that album. So it was very difficult working out the mechanicals.
JD: The thing I like about that model, I mean there’s a couple things I like about it, but the one thing I really do like is it forces the level of the product to be better. Because if you can hear it before you’re gonna buy it, that means that you can’t just put crap on a record and expect people to buy it. So it’s forcing us as creators to create a better product. That’s what I like about it.
RJB: I’m gonna have to take the last question now and then we’re gonna wrap up.
Jamal: How you doing, my name is Jamal [?], I’m an artist and producer. I heard you talking about clearing samples, and usually when I’m making a song about samples I produce for myself, so my philosophy is pretty much: I’m charging that to the game because they’re probably gonna take everything from sampling but that’s because I don’t understand the process of clearing the samples so I was wondering if you could elaborate more on that, the steps that need to be taken to clear a sample for myself.
RF: I mean, typically what will happen is they will put in either just the publishing or its interpolation and they don’t use the actual master, or they’ll actually use the master in the track itself. Now, obviously if, there are clearance houses that this is all they do and they will go and they will clear the publishing and there will be an advance that is required, there will be a, presumably, a royalty that is required, and that number’s gonna change depending on what type of deal. If it’s a big deal and you are doing this for a major label, obviously the deal’s gonna be different, but yeah, in the even that you do utilize other people’s music, you should license that from them, and it’s just, you know, a standard sample license that you’d have to go to the publisher for.
Jamal: Would that be something that you should think about doing before you take the sample?
JD: If I can say, ‘cause I’ve had it both ways I’ve had my stuff sampled, if you’re really clever enough to do it now, before the record is anything, most of the time they’ll probably give you, they’ll let you probably have it. If you’ve got something going on, the price just went up. I mean, it’s all relative to what it is and so forth. So, like you know, I figure a guy like yourself, I don’t know the level of your artist but if you get a sample clear what I’m doing, I’d ask ‘well let me hear what you’ve got,’ and if you could send me the original too, save me the time of having to go dig it up, but, you know, you give me those two parts and I’ll sit and I’ll listen and I’ll decide how relevant is this to your song, you know. Could your song actually have been done without this? You know, and that kind of thing. And then once again it’s really like ‘who is this? Oh, you were doing Jay-Z? It’s gonna cost you, dude.’ You know?
RF: And he’s right, you know, if you do it now before you really have anything on the radar, it’s gonna be less, however if you’re dealing with a major, they’re probably gonna charge some sort of minimum because there’s just administrative costs in doing a deal, but, you know, sometimes you can get contingency type licenses that it’ll be free for demos and if it gets commercially released it kicks in with what kind of royalty or what kind of payment that you have to do.
RJB: Well, I’d like to thank everybody for coming and I think we’re out of time. Particularly, I’d like to thank Sandy Roberton, Joe Blaney, Jimmy Douglass, and Robert Finan for traveling all the way to DC and sharing a lifetime of knowledge thank you so much [applause]. I’d also like to thank the producer/engineer wing of the Recording Academy and Smithsonian Folkways recordings for sponsoring the event and thank you again to everyone for coming and for all the good questions and I hope this has been a helpful discussion.
Shannon Emamali: Yeah, I just want to give another thanks for everyone for coming out and for Richard for moderating and I really encourage all of you guys to continue to visit our website: www.grammy.com/washingtondc, it has all of the listings of events like this. Our next big major event is our Grammy salute to gospel music, it’s gonna be, it’s back here again this year for all of you guys who attended last year, you know what a treat it is to have this event back here in Washington DC. It’s gonna be on June 18th, at the Lincoln Theatre, and stay tuned to our website ‘cause we’ll be announcing our honorees and tribute performers relatively soon. So thank you guys again for coming out.
Jimmy Douglas: Like if you’re not going to go to a full-blown contract, you’re just talking about a form, you’re talking about a form, so to speak, right?
Richard Burgess: Well, I mean just a binding agreement, basically. It could be a one-pager, but you know, you were saying these ones you get off the internet are not really worth the paper they’re written on, I guess. Does that mean they wouldn’t stand up if they’re contested or you can’t enforce them in whatever way?
Robert Finan: Well, I’m sure they could be enforced but a lot of times people are taking documents that they have no idea, you know, what a mechanical royalty and a controlled composition is, and they’re plugging in blanks and they don’t really know necessarily what they’re doing.
Jimmy Douglas: But, like, a Letter of Intention without getting that deep. In other words, that would kind of sort of say ‘Look, we agree that we’re doing this and we’re going to do a better thing about it once something happens.’ Does that do anything?
Robert Finan: Yeah, I mean, a lot of times you find that people have selective memory. And so a letter of intent would be good for those situations. But then there’s obviously with agreements, I mentioned there’s about five areas that are problematic. One of them is sampling, which you’re [Jimmy] probably involved in a lot, and you really have to hash out, if there’s a sample in something, how the producer has to contribute to either the money that it takes to clear the sample or any of the publishing issues that are involved in the sample, or even if you have a sample clearance from on the record side, the master side, whether he absorbs all that. So in that, you know, all of that stuff is very important to be detailed in any kind of document. But, I mean, I have seen quite a few producers do very short form producer agreements, but it’s also important to have all the indemnity provisions as well because quite often, especially, you know, I’m seeing it more and more where people are putting tracks out on spec and they’re sending them out to different people and the next thing you know they’re popping up with different voices on it and it’s uh, it can be difficult. I actually was, uh, when I was at Sony I handled all the clearances for all the samples for Sony repertoire. So if anyone wanted to use a clip from an Epic artist or something they would, um, have to come through our group and I had within one month two different record companies sending me in for sample clearance the exact same song with a different artist on it.
Richard Burgess: Right.
Robert Finan: And, uh, that would have gone back to the producer.
Richard Burgess: Sandy, you had something to say.
Sandy Roberton: Well, I’m finding in this climate that I’m doing a lot of deals where the producer will spec tracks. So normally what I do there is I just exchange emails with the band’s manager because, at that stage, it can go one of three ways, I think. You spec some tracks and you work out a deal with the band that, if they get a deal, they’ll pay you so much a track, or if they get a deal and the label doesn’t want to use you as the producer you can get a kill fee, just a variety of different things. And that way, the band or the label can’t use the tracks, you’ve got the drive, you’ve got the masters, so they’ve got to work out a deal if they want to use it. If they don’t want to use it, they’ve got an agreement with the band to pay a kill fee.
Richard Burgess: Right. And do you think, do they honor that because of the email exchange or…?
Sandy Roberton: To be honest, I’ve had no…the most problem I have is getting paid by labels. I don’t have any problem with bands, if you struck a deal. It’s when you’ve sold records, and you’re trying to get the royalties, that’s the biggest problem.
Richard Burgess: Yeah. I think a lot of…
Sandy Roberton: [interrupting] It’s like it was, you read about in the fifties and people saying, you know, you ask for royalties and they shoot you or something. You know? [laughter] It’s really, that’s the difficult thing: chasing down, if you’ve had a big record, chasing down and then every time I’ve done an audit, what you normally do is you can’t afford or normally they don’t give the rights to the producer to audit, they’ll let you piggy back with the artist. So when I audited, uh, Hootie and the Blowfish, I audited Atlantic with them. They found a million dollars in mistakes.
Richard Burgess: Yeah. “Mistakes” right? Yeah, yeah.
Sandy Roberton: It was something to do with club sales. Same thing with, um.
Richard Burgess: Have you ever noticed how it’s funny that the mistakes are always in their favor? They’re never, they never pay the band a million dollars too much, do they?
Robert Finan: And that’s also the reason why, like Sandy was talking about, the Letter of Direction, which is effectively a letter from the band instructing the record company to pay the producer, and it’s, the more simple that can be the better. And that’s why when we were talking earlier a points deal, where if it’s three points, four points, or whatever, the record company is set up to do that, and it works. Sometimes. It works most of the time. When you start deviating from that is when it gets really bad. So when we were talking about earlier doing profit splits and coming up with some sort of artificial royalty terms that you negotiate with the producer because the artist doesn’t want to pay him a percentage of his profit, it gets very messy because the record company doesn’t know how to handle that and inevitably it will get botched and you will have payment issues. So if you were doing a percentage, that’s why I’m an advocate of, you know, doing those percentage deals, you will likely get paid more often and better because you’re effectively getting %25 of what they would otherwise pay the artist.
Sandy Roberton: See, America is the only country where the label doesn’t hire the producer.
Richard Burgess: Right.
Sandy Roberton: They worked out very early on, ‘let’s distance ourselves from any problems. Let the act hire the producer and then they can tell us to pay them and if we don’t want to, we won’t.’ Every other country in the world, you sign a contract with the label, they pay you. It’s only in America where they’ve done it, they sort of stand back a little bit and you have to do the deal with the band and then get the band to direct the label to pay you. They’ve distanced themselves. I don’t know whose idea that was in the beginning but it’s very smart.
Richard Burgess: I’ll give you three guesses.
Robert Finan: There are a bunch of smart, smart people up there in the music business.
Richard Burgess: One of the things I’m interested in is Sandy, Joe, and Jimmy, is you guys have had extremely sustained careers, I mean for a very long time through a lot of different changes and I’m curious to what you attribute that, I mean apart from just talent, which is obviously there, but at the same time you’ve had to adapt to a lot of different environments. I mean, I know Jimmy, you’ve adapted to tons of different kinds of music, I mean it’s been quite incredible. Do you have any insights into how you’ve managed to sustain a career, because I think over the next ten or thirty years it’s going to be at least as changeable as it has been over the past thirty, probably a lot more.
Jimmy Douglas: If I’m here over the next thirty years, somebody can just shoot me. [laughter] But no, to me the biggest change that I really saw was the changing over from analog to digital, that whole thing; that whole transition. And when I say ‘digital’ I don’t just meant digital digital, I mean the ability to, well, computerized tools in the music work place. That was the biggest thing; that was the challenge to me. And I guess for me, the only thing that really kind of drives me is the, is always wanting the ability to try to be ahead of the next, you know. When they were changing over analog, there was a machine called Synclavier. It was a digital new, like one of the first: there was the Fairlight and there was the Synclavier. The Synclavier cost like $250,000, and I happened to be at Atlantic and they happened to own one, and it was sitting in the closet doing nothing. Literally, they could afford it and it was doing nothing. And I saw a couple of demos of it and I went berserk because it could do all these amazing things that nothing else on this planet could do at the time. And I spent about…I worked for them and I asked them not to hire me on anything and I said ‘You know what, let me just learn this machine.’ And I started doing digital mastering for them at night so they wouldn’t put me on any other gigs because I wanted to learn this machine, and I learned this machine, I taught myself, I felt very proud of myself. And I was, you know, on the forefront, I was in the leading forefront; I did a couple of albums with a group called The System and it was really, you know, it was very rewarding. And you know, they started, these kids started coming around that said they could do the same thing with this cheap little thing called ProTools, or whatever [laughter]. And I paid no heed because, you know, this is $250,000 what can this little machine do? But, you know, as time went on, that little machine got better and better, and this was too much and it was just, it just got kind of outdated, and I found myself with all the little kids.
Richard Burgess: Right.
Jimmy Douglas: You know, and just trying to keep up with all the changing technology has been a very very interesting challenge to me. Like even now, I listen to a lot of the records and there’s a lot of like, you know, all the effects and all that crazy stuff which has nothing to do with music but it’s there and it’s available and, you know, that’s what they want. They want to hear effects, they don’t want to hear just people play music anymore they want to hear all kinds of crazy, ‘what can this machine do? Let me see what it can do!’ you know? And it’s really, it’s a challenge but that’s what you gotta do if you wanna stay in the game.
Richard Burgess: Yeah, so you’ve been excited by the changes, really. The technological changes, that’s kept you excited.
Jimmy Douglas: Yeah, I’m excited [ironically].
Richard Burgess: [laughter] And Joe, you come from a tech background, so, I guess that…
Joe Blaney: Yeah, well, one thing is you have to keep aware of the technological changes another thing is you always have to be listening, you know, when we’re in the studio sometimes working 12 or 14 hours a day, you still have to find time to listen to the new records and find the things that you like, and listen to any good music that you’ve always liked and just stay in touch with music, is one thing. Another thing is if you just always do a good job and you give people a hundred percent, somehow it comes back, you know, when a few years later a guy who was a bass player in one group you worked with is in another group and, you know, when word of mouth and reputation. You know, I’ve been lucky because early on in my career in the ‘80’s I worked with people from Japan and people from South America and it just branched out into more people from those places. And you know, I guess luck is also a factor, but I think just always doing good work and staying in touch with what’s going on.
Richard Burgess: Could you elaborate on the international work a little bit? Because it’s unusual that you do so much international work.
Joe Blaney: Yeah, well it wasn’t by design or anything. You know, I started working with a guy from Argentina who came knocking on the door of Electric Lady Studios in like 1984 and wanted someone to mix his record and he turned out to be a very legendary artist down there, his name is Charlie García. I made a few records with him and then in the ‘90’s the MTv Latino started making unplugged records and I did his and then they liked the way it sounds so they hooked me up with a couple other bands and then all those bands when I met them they wanted me to do their next studio records and it’s just, one thing led to another, and I’ve done about nine projects for Warner Music in Spain. And, you know, some of them were successful so they called me back for other ones.
Richard Burgess: That’s great. And Sandy, you’ve, firstly, you’ve been in the business for a very very long time.
Sandy Roberton: Well I’m certainly the oldest person here. I mean, I was an act; I was signed to Fontana Deca EMI as an artist in the ‘60’s in the UK and then, I just realized that I wasn’t going to make it so I decided to go and get a job in the business and I very luckily got a job working for Chess Records. And I ran their publishing company and got their records distributed in the UK, and it was great. And then I left there to start my own label with one of the producers at Decker and we formed Blue Horizon Records which was a very successful blues label. The first act we signed was Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer, and then Seymour Stein and Richard Gott came over from New York and they bought into our label. And then I got the bug: I just wanted to produce records and I left and I did fifty five albums back to back. And only seven of those records was I actually hired to produce. All the others, I found the bands, I signed them to my production company, I made the record, and then went and shopped it. And it was only like the last two records where I never got a deal. But every time I just walked into…with finished albums and got deals. And I know it’s risky to do that but now it’s less expensive to make records. You couldn’t have…I mean in those days, you couldn’t afford to buy a multi-track machine and sound-proof a room and all that. So I would be taking a risk, but nowadays you can make records for very little money. But my passion has always been about making records. And that’s, I just OD’d on doing it so that’s why I switched over and represented producers because I still love that whole passion about making records
Jimmy Douglas: Making records or music?
Sandy Roberton: Music.
Jimmy Douglas: Music, ok. Because we keep saying ‘making records’
Sandy Roberton: Well, you know.
Jimmy Douglas: No, no, I, no it’s very important…
Sandy Roberton: It dates me by saying records because…there are no records anymore.
Jimmy Douglas: No you mean making music, though.
Sandy Roberton: Music, yeah.
Jimmy Douglas: Yeah, ok.
Richard Burgess: But it’s the recording, it’s the actual recording, the capturing of an event or a series of events or whatever and preserving it forever that…
Sandy Roberton: I used to know every player on every session I would, you know, I would memorize their stuff.
Richard Burgess: Yeah, well you said something to me earlier about not wanting your producers to be working all the time.
Sandy Roberton: No, I think that is, I think what producers should do, and it’s tough because obviously you’ve got to make a living, but the secret I think is picking and choosing, obviously if you’re starting off you’ve got to try and get your name going, but once you’ve got established a little bit you should try and pick the projects you do. And I know it’s tough because everyone’s got to make a living, but it’s so much better to work with great projects and great acts than just be doing it just to make the rent or the mortgage or whatever you want.
Richard Burgess: How do you keep your producers alive and I mean, do some of them have to do day jobs or other gigs in between?
Sandy Roberton: Well I mean I’ve got one guy who’s in his fifties and he’s struggled but now it’s really come through for him because he insisted, and we worked together on this, he insisted that he did not want to work on cheesy projects. And, uh, he just did the Nick Cave record which has done really well, it’s the highest charting record that he’s ever had; he’s in Texas now producing the Yeah yeah yeah’s. He’s, uh, Supergrass: he’s just done their record. So he’s really picking and choosing the projects he does, and the Yeah yeah yeah’s came to him or wanted to work with him because of the record he had made with a Nick Cave side project: Grinderman. So I think it all snowballs.
Richard Burgess: Well that actually was my next question: do you think it continuing to work, is it about relationships? Is it about reputation? Is it a combination? How does that work, is it about relationships with A&R people, with bands, or how does that, where does most of the work come from, well, from your point of view and from the producer’s point of view?
Sandy Roberton: Through me, oh, it’s changed. I have to go the extra mile now to get my producers work. I mean there was girl recently in Philadelphia who made her own record, and somehow she got it onto XM radio just herself, and it was played on The Loft and I was driving to work and I heard her, her name’s Melody Gardot, and I listened and I thought ‘she’s amazing.’ And I sort of basically got to the office and I started phoning around and Googling her. I found that she had made her own record and had it on her own little website. So I contacted her and said ‘Listen I’ve got this guy Larry Klein that would be a fantastic producer for you.’ She says ‘Well I don’t have a label.’ So I went and met her and she had a manager who was twenty one and he, you know, he didn’t even know the address for Sony, so he would never have got a deal. So I said ‘Look, if Larry can produce the next record, I’ll get you a record deal.’ And so she said ‘Great, cool.’ She didn’t have a lawyer and she just had this young manager, so I went out there and I shopped it and I got her a deal with Universal in London and Verve are putting out that record now and Larry’s in the studio this week started doing a record. So that’s what I have to do now in the old days you would be basically getting phone calls with people trying to hire your producers but I have to go out and do that extra thing. And there’s a girl who got signed, purely by making her own record, putting it on her website, and getting some guy on The Loft on XM to play it.
Richard Burgess: This is kind of going back to the days of John Hammond where the producers went out there and A&R’d and found acts and got them signed and so on and so forth.
Sandy Roberton: Absolutely. It’s what I said in the very beginning, I think producers should be finding the acts and working out a deal with the band and either putting it out through iTunes, EMusic, Amazon, whatever digital…they want, and maybe working it a little bit themselves, and then maybe going. Because shopping deals now is just impossible with majors. They just want a story, they don’t want a baby act that’s sold nothing.
Richard Burgess: Yeah, I mean they want it to be on the radio and have sold fifty thousand copies and, it’s crazy.
Sandy Roberton: I’ve got a guy now, who, I made a record with this guy, from Australia, and we made the record and it was sort of like, Jet meets Stacks. Had horns, it was a really cool record. And, nothing happened, so basically we just shelved the record and said let’s wait, let’s try and get you on the road. He drove down to San Diego himself and went on American Idol, and he’s in the last ten now, so I’m sitting on a finished record with this guy who’s in the last ten on American Idol. So he did all that himself, he just bit the bullet, auditioned, got on there, got right through, and he’s in the last ten. And he’s the only one on that show right now who’s got a finished record sitting on the shelf.
Richard Burgess: Yeah, if he wins, you’ll have to give it to BMG, right?
Sandy Roberton: I don’t know, for me I hope he doesn’t win because then we can put that record out, instead of Jay making a crappy record. [laughter]
Richard Burgess: He said he was going to be the Simon Cowell of the panel. So, Jimmy, how about you, I mean what do you, where do you think most of your work comes from? Relationships? Reputation? Combination?
Jimmy Douglas: It comes from a combination of any and everything, and when I was listening to Joe, actually, I remembered one thing: one of the key places my work used to come from back, was, you know, when you work the big studios a lot of acts come around. They see you in the seat, they see you making the big record, they want you. That’s what that represents basically, but the era of the big studio has kind of come and gone. And a lot of us are making records in a vacuum, or at home in your own studio by yourself, and nobody’s coming around anymore. So, you know, the hardest thing for me, especially, I’m in Miami now a lot, and I work at a place called the Hit Factory where, like, you know, all the hip-hop people are, when I’m there it’s great, they all come through they see me, we do a slap hands, ‘I’m gonna work for you, I’ll do your mixes.’ But when I’m not there, trying to keep in touch with the rest of the world to let them know that I even exist, even though I’m making great records and my record do come out, you know, I’m in the hit parade hopefully, but still, on a daily basis, like Sandy was saying, somebody’s in somebody’s office talking about somebody else’s name and it’s not mine. And even though they know and love and respect what I do it’s just like I’m not there, I’m not in their mind at that moment, and this vacuum thing is really part of what is, uh, it’s a good thing and it’s a bad thing.
Robert Finan: You also see producers more and more getting hired to very high level positions in record companies.
Richard Burgess: Right.
Robert Finan: So obviously the people that run in those circles tend to get some business out of that. Jay-Z and Germaine Dupree and those type of…
Richard Burgess: LA
Robert Finan: Yeah.
Richard Burgess: But this is a cyclical thing, though, you know in my lifetime they go through phases where producers run labels and then it goes back to accountants and lawyers and then it flips over to producers again. I mean, unfortunately there aren’t enough labels out there to employ more than about six producers at this point are there? Here’s a question for you that I hope is meaningful to everybody here and that is: if you’re just starting out from scratch today, eighteen years old or twenty two years old, whatever, how do you get started in producing? What do you do? I’ll throw this open to anybody who wants to…
Jimmy Douglas: Well, how do you get started in producing. You know, that question, I’ve been asked many times actually and matter of fact some kid came and asked me this it was some ProTools exhibition, and he came to me and he said ‘I’ve learned how to work all the stuff, I can do this and that and the other,’ he says, ‘but, how do I learn how to produce?’ And I thought, ‘how do you learn how to produce?! No, either you produce or you don’t.’ It’s not something you learn, either you have it or you don’t have it. I don’t think I’m wrong there. From what I’ve understood, from watching producers and being one, you either get it or you don’t get it. So when you say ‘how do you start out being a producer?’ well, I would say ‘well, if that’s what you are, you believe that you have the ability and the talent to be that.’ There’s so many, to me, I’m watching people get, I guess, seen that wouldn’t have been seen in the past because of the internet, basically. There really is, I mean as silly as it sounds, there is the youtube thing. People are putting stuff up there and people are seeing stuff that, you would’ve never known these people in the past. There’s no way they would have gotten past anybody’s gate, and now they’re, you’re getting a lot of that, between um, I guess just regular people in the street are being able to, there are channels that you can get out there. You don’t have to depend on the big boy to bring you through and let the world see you.
Richard Burgess: Do you use the social networking outlets like MySpace and Facebook?
Jimmy Douglas: I actually have two or three writers that I’ve found on MySpace, I mean I really do go through, you know, a lot of people hit me up and I just, I listen, audition what they do, and some of it’s decent, you know and like and I’ll listen to the writers, I’ll check them out, see what they got, I’ll send them some tracks, they’ll send me some stuff back. You know, we can do that across the thing. I’ve even had a couple people fly into my studio and we’ve written some stuff. Um, it’s there.
Richard Burgess: Yeah. Joe, what do you think about how you get started.
Joe Blaney: Well, I think to do this to begin with, you have to be passionate about music and you have to have some kind of skill, and I don’t it’s necessarily a technical thing or something, but just a good, good taste and a good ear. You know, and a good objective view point when you’re working with an artist to help them. You know, to me a producer’s job is really to bring out the best in an artist and hopefully that coincides with making a successful product. But, I think when you’re starting out you just got to find somebody who will let you work with them, and you have to believe in their talent and do the best you can, and if you can make something really good, you know like Jimmy said there are these channels on the internet and things, something that’s good will get noticed, you know, so.
Richard Burgess: Well there’s a second part to this question then. If, say you’re a pretty successful local or regional producer, how do you make the jump to hyperspace, as it were, or how do you jump up to the level of having hits? Any thoughts on that?
Sandy Roberton: I think you, I really do think you need to get somebody to work for you. Because, when I was a producer I never had any manager until the very end. And I got a lawyer in New York called Marty Meshat who’s dead now and he said ‘Listen, I’m never going to find you work, but once you’ve found something I’ll do a good deal for you.’ And he would charge me fifteen percent for doing my contract. But, he would ask for money that I would be embarrassed to ask for, and he got it. He would never read the contracts, he always said, ‘Listen, forget about the contract. If the record’s a hit, I’ll go in and renegotiate.’ And that was his [laughing] his standard approach! But I think that labels are always looking for somebody new, I mean, they really are. I mean, people come out of the blue. Where did Mark Ronson come from? He came out of the blue!
Richard Burgess: Yeah.
Sandy Roberton: Tim Palmer, who I represent, he sent me, he was a tape-up at Utopia Studios, and he used to sneak back in at night after they had locked the studio and take bands in there and cut B sides and things, free. And he sent me, he worked with a band called…dreadful band called Kajagoogoo, you probably don’t even remember them. He did a B side with them and he sent it to me and it was just amazing, the sound was fantastic. And I took him on when he was a tape-up, because he just sounded fantastic. And not long after that, I got a call from Phil Carson who was working at Atlantic records and he said Robert Plant wants somebody new to work with him. He doesn’t want any name. And I thought, ‘I’ll put Tim up for this.’ So I put Tim up. Tim had never miked a drum kit before he had always worked on drum machines, and he got the gig! Robert said ‘I like you, come and…’ So he, I think Richie Hayward was the drummer, it was the first time he had miked a drum kit, he phoned me up and said ‘what do I do?’ Well, you can either put two overheads and [laughs] one on the kick. Or you can just double mike everything! And if you listen to the drum sound on that, it’s great. That’s Shaken and Stirred, that, Robert Plant.
Richard Burgess: Yeah, no, I remember.
Sandy Roberton: So I think it’s…you know, if you’re going to try and break into, as you said ‘go into hyperspace’, you’ve got to probably get someone to help you get there whether it’s a lawyer or a manager or someone like that. But, it you’ve got a great tape, and you get it to the right people, you’ll get, people are going to listen.
Richard Burgess: So you recommend mailing…[part lost]
Sandy Roberton: …boxes in the corner and they’re so depressing. Because people’s whole hopes are sitting in there and some intern’s going to come in there and listen to it and maybe, and, that’s not the way to do it. You have to get somebody to work with you to get it, to get people to play it.
Richard Burgess: Yeah, but I mean, market yourself to managers and lawyers?
Sandy Roberton: Yeah, I think so, yeah.
Richard Burgess: So reach out to managers who manage…
Sandy Roberton: Yeah, or lawyers. Some lawyers don’t like to shop, but some do.
Richard Burgess: Jimmy?
Jimmy Douglas: I wanted to say one thing, this is called ‘MySpace savvy.’ Just for those of you that really do it, cut the intros off, please? And I mean that in all sincerity ‘cause when I go on it to hear stuff I need to, it’s like if you multiply the amount of people in this room and if every one of you had four songs up there, and I have to sit through fifteen seconds of an intro on four songs, that’s a minute times however many people there are here. I would like to hear what you have to offer, but I’d like to get to the point. Um, I’m not trying to be arrogant about it, but sometimes I really do, I get excited by what I see and I’m like, ‘let me see what this sounds like.’ And then I hear ‘ku ku kgoon…kgoon.’ And I’m like, ‘ok…so…it’s gonna sound like what?’ And it’s just one of the things that I just, it’s just a piece of advice I give people because it helps people that might spend the time to listen to you. ‘Cause if I do two of those, and I realize it’s a lot of intros, then I won’t listen to the third and fourth song.
Robert Finan: And, to follow up on that, I mean, it needs to be your best stuff too. I hear so much ‘Well, it’s a work in progress.’ Or, ‘It’s not my best.’ Well it has to be your best stuff. I mean, that is out to the world and there have been, you know some people that have got some success, and, you know, you don’t want him [Jimmy] hearing just your mediocre stuff, it needs to be the best.
Richard Burgess: Yeah, I mean you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. I want to throw it open to questions now. I’m not sure if we have any questions, but if we do, does anybody have any questions? Would you possibly, Tom, do you want to stand on the mike, ‘cause we’re trying to record everything and capture everything, questions as well.
Tom: Hi, my name’s Tom, I’m an artist manager. I’ve had good success with major labels, but with the whole trend towards self releasing, from my clients I see both sides of that. And, I’m curious to hear what any of you have to say about that; Sandy in particular in the case of Melody Gardot, who I’ve been hearing a lot about lately, what made it a better decision for her to go with a major label than to stick with her independent record, which was already being played on XM, caught your attention, why was it not better for her to self release?
Sandy Roberton: Well, it’s down to funding. I mean, Universal in London have flown her to London two or three times, she’s already been on TV there, they’ve got whole press behind her, she couldn’t afford to do that. She just had her own website with a record up there, and she sent it to somebody at The Loft and got it played, and I happened to be just listening at that time.
Tom: Doesn’t that speak to the whole issue of ‘well, gee, you make more money per disc when you put it out yourself, so why don’t you put it out yourself?’ I think so many artists are being told that and they don’t understand, but then they’ll have to fund the marketing of their own recording themselves, and they don’t realize the whole business behind it. All they’re thinking is ‘gee, I’m gonna make more per disc’ and they’re not thinking about the business that goes into releasing a record.
Sandy Roberton: Right.
Richard Burgess: Any other questions?
Ward Kirkendal: Hi, my name is Ward Kirkendal and I’m a student at Omega Studio Schools of Applied Recording Arts and Sciences, and a good question for me is, I’m trying to figure out how to get into the business after I’m done with school and everything. How many of you all take on interns and entry-level positions? How common is that in the business today?
Joe Blaney: Well, I own a recording studio so occasionally we get somebody to come in and in the beginning it’s things like answering phones or assisting certain sessions or the engineer’s pretty confident to do it himself and he just sort of, you know, watch and learn, and it can be boring a lot of times but you’re, you know, there are places you can do it. It generally doesn’t pay well until you work your way up to being an assistant engineer or something like that, you know.
Ward: Maybe just one more, if any of you guys can remember, how did you make your first dollar? Since we’re talking about money.
Jimmy Douglas: My first dollar in the records or my first dollar?
Ward: Yeah, as far as producers or engineers.
Joe Blaney: Well I was fortunate I worked in the studio in New York, Electric Lady Studios and I was their technician and I fixed the equipment, I worked the night shift and things. And I got friendly with a lot of the bands that worked there and one of them was The Clash and they came through town on a tour and they had a song that they didn’t finish, and they said ‘hey if we bring the tapes over here after our gig, can we finish this with you?’ And I said sure, you know, but I had never touched a fader or done anything like that, you know, I had the knowledge of that all because I was a fan of music and I had to keep the studio working and everything. But so I just fell into it and I was very lucky, but, you know, some guys are assistant engineers for a long time and they never get a break, and then some guys are there for two weeks and somebody doesn’t show up sick and they get to touch the faders and then they have a career, you know, so it’s, there’s a lottery element to it, you know.
Ward: Thank you very much.
Richard Burgess: Any other questions?
Stan Green: Hi, my name is Stan Green. I’m a songwriter/engineer. My question is directed towards Jimmy Douglas: you being a producer, engineer, and songwriter, how many times while you were tracking a song or mixing a song have you been involved in the songwriting/producing aspect and not received any credit for it? And how often does that happen and is that expected while you’re an engineer?
Jimmy Douglas: Um, it happens a lot. It happens a lot, I mean, it happened a lot back in the day because I didn’t realize my contribution as a producer… many times, like a lot of the funk groups I used to do, I’d help them kind of write, but there’d be so many people writing that I would think ‘well you’re the producer, this is your contribution to make the song better by contributing a word or two here.’ And you know, there are so many people I would be like ‘yeah, don’t…’ you know I felt kinda… And then sometimes I’d hear people talk about the song and they’d mention the line that I put in, they go ‘I love this line,’ and I’m like ‘shit that was my line.’ But, you know, that’s the way that it goes sometimes. More recently, I mean on one of the things that I do, a lot of the people I work with now, the reason they love me is because I am producer and I’m a really good vocal coach, and I do all that stuff from back in the day, and I am also a contributor. And there’s one artist I’m not gonna mention because the camera’s rolling, but there was one song that we kinda wrote together but he’s a little more clever than that; the way he wrote it was, he kinda asked me questions about the way to say things, and then he’d re-word it. So we would talk about the song, we were actually writing the song, and he would talk about the thing and say ‘well how would you feel if this…’ and I’d say ‘well, you know, he’s gonna feel this way, and the character’s gonna…’ and we’d talk about, like, writing the song and he’d go ‘you mean, kinda like, dadada…’ and I’d be like ‘ok but that’s not you’re words,’ but we kinda just, you know. So yeah, it happens, you know. But the record was very successful so at the end of the day, sometimes you give, sometimes you take, sometimes, you know. If you’ve got talent, you’ll get what you’re supposed to get.
Sandy Roberton: That’s a good question because it comes up all the time, because it must be like talking about a prenup, you know? [laughter] How do you get around to it? It’s so difficult because if you talk about song splits with a band before you start working with them,
Jimmy Douglas: Oh god.
Sandy Roberton: it’s just, it’s a vibe killer right away.
Jimmy Douglas: Kills it. Totally.
Sandy Roberton: But, after the fact, it’s always very difficult to go back. So that’s a good question because that comes up still now, every month there’s a producer who’s saying ‘listen I wrote some of that song.’ It’s so difficult. It’s a really difficult thing because there’s no real hard set way to deal with that. Maybe just go out for a drink before hand, wait for the right moment.
Richard Burgess: It’s particularly difficult because I think sometimes the artist thinks the producer is trying to get a piece of the publishing.
Joe Blaney: It’s a grey area, though, because if you’re working on a record, you’re the producer and ultimately you’re in charge, and if the artist, you know, like has a song and one of the verses or something has some corny lyric or something and you say ‘well, why don’t you change it?’ ‘Well I can’t think of anything,’ and then you think of something and you give it to him or something then… but, no, but a lot of times you have to let it go, but if it’s a thing like ‘oh, this song needs a bridge,’ and then they can’t come up with it and you write it and they like it, then obviously you’re a co-writer. So it’s kind of a grey area, you know, but you also have to step in and help because you have to make a good record.
Stan Green: Thank you.
Richard Burgess: Did you have a question?
Unnamed: I’m probably working on my third independent project in the past fifteen years. Question I have to the Academy is about how do we, or what is the Academy doing to stop the illegal downloads?
Richard Burgess: I can’t speak on behalf of the Academy, actually, I don’t know if anybody else here does, but I, uh, I think, you know, it’s really an educational process more than anything because the Academy’s not an organization that can really stop illegal downloads but I think that, certainly for my part, you know, I try to put out as much information to people to say ‘you know what, you’re hurting the very thing that you love. If you download music for free, you’re hurting the business in general, you’re hurting artists who make their living, if artists can’t make their living from music, then you’re not gonna wind up with as much good music out there.’ And maybe that’s not true, you know, I mean there’s also the argument that people that download a lot of stuff also buy a lot of stuff, so, I don’t know. Do you guys have an opinion about that? About illegal downloads?
Robert Finan: I think it’s offering the consumer better alternatives. I think iTunes has done a tremendous job of that by giving them very simple way to download things. You know, the CD was actually a great period of time, the invention of the CD, because all the labels would reissue their catalog, there was a tremendous spike, and I think you can have that for the digital age as well if they do it right. Because everyone, even though you have the record down somewhere in your basement or the CD down in your basement, you know, we’re a society of instantaneous gratification and we will go and we will hit that button on iTunes and download the thing for ten dollars. And, uh, I’m seeing that more and more. So I think it’s important to give the consumer a very efficient way of getting the music.
Richard Burgess: Yeah, I will tell you this, I mean I see so many people out there with digital players and to me this indicates that there’s a massive proliferation in the use of music, and yet for whatever reason the industry’s declining each year in terms of revenue. So I think that it’s really everybody’s responsibility to kind of front up and say, you know ‘I enjoy this, I should pay for it.’ That’s how I feel about it, but on the other hand, I mean, if you could get gas free at the next gas station people would do that too. So it’s very hard as long as it’s free I think people are gonna take it. Any other questions?
Elyse Perry: Good evening, my name is Elyse Perry I’m a producer. You all spoke of a number of projects that are getting completed this year, how they’ve dipped, and I think that the industry looks at some of us producers that aren’t those twenty producers that are doing the six figure projects as on a different level. So we get a smaller amount of money. So my question to you all is: how do we potentially broker a deal with people who just have no money? Everybody wants to pay the studio, no one wants to pay the producer. They want us to go independent in with them and then they go out and they burn their CD’s and we have no way of auditing, you know, their independent releases. We do five songs, two songs, ten songs, they go out, they do a concert, they sell a hundred CD’s, everybody loves it, but we don’t ever get a cut. So we get our money up front as much as we can, and still don’t really get what we deserve. I mean, we want to broker a deal fairly, but it’s never fair enough. So my question to you is, and I was hoping I was gonna get something like this was, another production business model for low-balling. I mean, there’s so many things that people are doing out here, I call it ‘street brokering,’ where they rent beats. They rent beats it’s: they get out here and they do a beat for somebody and ‘you got this beat for six months and then it goes back out here for, if, Jay-Z wants his beat, you can’t have the beat anymore. If I do this beat for you for six months and you get picked up, then we renegotiate.’ You know, so there are all kinds of little street that we’re doing and some of them hold up and some of them don’t. I was just thinking maybe you all had an idea for some form of a production business model for the ground level until you become on Timberland’s level, or something.
Jimmy Douglas: That’s called, uh, that sounded like that was called licensing to me, what you just described. Whether it’s in the street or whether it’s in the big offices, it’s the same process basically. The real fact, and I look at this many times from my positions, the “big money”, the Timberland’s and all those people, there is a handful of people making most of the records that you hear on the radio. Yes, there’s a handful, that they’re all feeding the same Ferrell, Timberland, and dadadada, and they’re sending all the money. But at the same time there’s also a crop of people like yourself that are coming up, that can’t really be regulated yet because you’re not really on the radar. But if you want to be on the radar and you want to have everything set straight up, they’re not gonna do it with you, they’re gonna do it with them. The thing is, your investment and your risk, that is what you’re investing in: yourself. And you’re investing in your future. And the fact that work that you’re putting into it right now, which you may not be being paid for, you will be being paid for at some point. One of the things that I do, remember when I was talking about that Australian deal, one of the things that I kept saying to this person, I said ‘you know, you’re getting crazy over this little little stuff. Either we make money, and we both make money, or neither of us really make any money and this really isn’t worth this shit anyway.’ And that’s what I kept saying over and over again and they weren’t understanding; I was saying ‘look, if we end up selling this many records, we’re both gonna make money, so stop it.’ And, you know, it’s kind of the same thing, you know: so, they’re selling a hundred CD’s here and there, so what are you gonna make of that? Probably, what, I don’t know what you’re gonna make. Whatever that is, you may be entitled, but look at the bigger picture, you know, look at some of the, think about somebody getting some sort of documentation that you’re supposed to follow this trail that, suddenly should blow up and really make some serious money, now we really want to talk about it. Now we want to talk.
Robert Finan: One thing that I’ve also seen more recently is, before, uh, ten years ago or so, record companies wanted to, they would listen to a demo and then they would go in and get one of these guys to re-do that track. For some liability reasons, they wanted to be able to control the sound, they wanted to be able to do it. I’m seeing more and more that labels will be interested in putting out the track that they receive. They’ll be putting out those demos. I’m doing a deal right now where it’s kind of this, we were talking about this earlier, a flow-rider situation which was just this one track that was serviced through iTunes, and it just blew up. Same type of situation where a major is going to do a singles deal, put it out, and it’s the same track the got, same producer such as yourself who hopefully will, if this track blows up, will be able to produce the album or at least, will be on that single, will have that credit to their name. And then, you know, and that’s the baby steps. So, you know, that’s a good thing in kinda where we’re going now, recently.
Richard Burgess: Thank you. Next question.
Bo Samps: My name is Bo Samps and you guys are doing a great job. I would like to know from you guys; can you guys elaborate on how long it takes an artist to come out? Because a lot of people don’t really realize just ‘cause you sign a record deal doesn’t mean you’re coming out the next day, and I just wanted you guys to kind of elaborate on that, and then, I also would like to make a comment that, you know, from the way radio does things now, things have changed and that has really affected you, producers, the artists and everything. The way you expose music is the only way, you know, that you guys are gonna be heard. So you’ve got stuff that you’ve produced that people haven’t even heard, and I think that’s important for people to know.
Joe Blaney: Well, we’ve all produced records that nobody’s heard, unfortunately [laughter]. But, you know, on a grass roots level, you gotta try and get it out there any way you can, you know, with the Myspace, the internet, through the band’s website, whatever, the artist’s website. You know, when you get signed to a major label your record might not come out for as long as a year.
Sandy Roberton: Sometimes it never comes out.
Joe Blaney: Sometimes it never comes out, sometimes they release one single and if they pay their radio promo person and it doesn’t get air play, you know, three months after the record’s out, the artist can’t get through to anyone from the record label on the phone, you know. So it can be over that quick, you know. But, uh, I think the best thing these days is to, one is to make something that’s really, you know, good quality with the artist and the production, and two is to get as much momentum going with it as you can, before you go to a major label. You know, as much exposure, as many people coming to the artist’s shows or whatever.
Jerry Olson: Hi, thanks for coming out. My name is Jerry Olson I run a discount CD replication company called Music Boot Camp.com. I’m curious what you guys think of the big tidal wave that Trent Reznor made with his last album, the, I think it’s called ‘Ghosts.’ And, he made about a million dollars in his first week. I know he’s had, you know, obviously enormous prior exposure, but there’s a lot of controversy about, you know, people daring the majors to try this kind of a business model and there’s a lot of fear on the side of the majors, of course, to sort of stop monitoring the income of the CD and go with this sort of global approach, you know, saturating the market and then pay, you know, pay what you feel comfortable with. But there’s a big demand for that kind of thing. And lastly, I think a lot of people feel that’s a fair deal because they get to listen to the product and evaluate how much it’s worth and then actually purchase it. I know it’s a really controversial business model, but I wondered what, with your experience with the major labels, how do you feel about that particular success? Do you think that there is any future in that sort of approach?
Sandy Roberton: Well one of my clients actually made that record, Atticus Ross. And that record, it’s available through Trent’s website, but it’s going to be available physically in the UK and in America, so he’s put it out in a number of different formats. But I think he was just fed up with being with Interscope, and he just wanted to do it himself, and he just lucked out because, you know, the record has done really well.
Robert Finan: I don’t think that there will ever be a time where we’re at a ‘pay what you want for a record’ and that’ll be a successful business model.
Sandy Roberton: But I think it’s five bucks a record. I don’t think it’s pay…
Jerry Olson: It varied. There was a plateau of like 128 bit where you get your basic quality, iTunes basic quality, for free if you want. And then ten dollars if you want to pre-order the CD, and then they had twenty five hundred units that were like hundreds of dollars. And they sold out of those in the first week.
Sandy Roberton: Well I don’t think he anticipated the interest in this because he, I think the website crashed the first night on that Sunday night that it came out.
Robert Finan: I think there’s a lot of discussion in technology companies that are working on dynamic pricing models, which I think are possibly more relevant, where it’s just a demand, a dynamic demand system where in real time, you know, as twenty five people are typing in that they’re looking at this particular record, the prices are gonna go up and down. I guess similar to airline tickets and that type of thing. I see that as being a possibility.
Sandy Roberton: I think the biggest problem we had on that record was working out the mechanical because I got a share of the mechanicals from my client, and I think there’s thirty one tracks on that album. So it was very difficult working out the mechanicals.
Jimmy Douglas: The thing I like about that model, I mean there’s a couple things I like about it, but the one thing I really do like is it forces the level of the product to be better. Because if you can hear it before you’re gonna buy it, that means that you can’t just put crap on a record and expect people to buy it. So it’s forcing us as creators to create a better product. That’s what I like about it.
Richard Burgess: I’m gonna have to take the last question now and then we’re gonna wrap up.
Jamal: How you doing, my name is Jamal [?], I’m an artist and producer. I heard you talking about clearing samples, and usually when I’m making a song about samples I produce for myself, so my philosophy is pretty much: I’m charging that to the game because they’re probably gonna take everything from sampling but that’s because I don’t understand the process of clearing the samples so I was wondering if you could elaborate more on that, the steps that need to be taken to clear a sample for myself.
Robert Finan: I mean, typically what will happen is they will put in either just the publishing or its interpolation and they don’t use the actual master, or they’ll actually use the master in the track itself. Now, obviously if, there are clearance houses that this is all they do and they will go and they will clear the publishing and there will be an advance that is required, there will be a, presumably, a royalty that is required, and that number’s gonna change depending on what type of deal. If it’s a big deal and you are doing this for a major label, obviously the deal’s gonna be different, but yeah, in the even that you do utilize other people’s music, you should license that from them, and it’s just, you know, a standard sample license that you’d have to go to the publisher for.
Jamal: Would that be something that you should think about doing before you take the sample?
Jimmy Douglas: If I can say, ‘cause I’ve had it both ways I’ve had my stuff sampled, if you’re really clever enough to do it now, before the record is anything, most of the time they’ll probably give you, they’ll let you probably have it. If you’ve got something going on, the price just went up. I mean, it’s all relative to what it is and so forth. So, like you know, I figure a guy like yourself, I don’t know the level of your artist but if you get a sample clear what I’m doing, I’d ask ‘well let me hear what you’ve got,’ and if you could send me the original too, save me the time of having to go dig it up, but, you know, you give me those two parts and I’ll sit and I’ll listen and I’ll decide how relevant is this to your song, you know. Could your song actually have been done without this? You know, and that kind of thing. And then once again it’s really like ‘who is this? Oh, you were doing Jay-Z? It’s gonna cost you, dude.’ You know?
Robert Finan: And he’s right, you know, if you do it now before you really have anything on the radar, it’s gonna be less, however if you’re dealing with a major, they’re probably gonna charge some sort of minimum because there’s just administrative costs in doing a deal, but, you know, sometimes you can get contingency type licenses that it’ll be free for demos and if it gets commercially released it kicks in with what kind of royalty or what kind of payment that you have to do.
Richard Burgess: Well, I’d like to thank everybody for coming and I think we’re out of time. Particularly, I’d like to thank Sandy Roberton, Joe Blaney, Jimmy Douglass, and Robert Finan for traveling all the way to DC and sharing a lifetime of knowledge thank you so much [applause]. I’d also like to thank the producer/engineer wing of the Recording Academy and Smithsonian Folkways recordings for sponsoring the event and thank you again to everyone for coming and for all the good questions and I hope this has been a helpful discussion.
Shannon Emamali: Yeah, I just want to give another thanks for everyone for coming out and for Richard for moderating and I really encourage all of you guys to continue to visit our website: www.grammy.com/washingtondc, it has all of the listings of events like this. Our next big major event is our Grammy salute to gospel music, it’s gonna be, it’s back here again this year for all of you guys who attended last year, you know what a treat it is to have this event back here in Washington DC. It’s gonna be on June 18th, at the Lincoln Theatre, and stay tuned to our website ‘cause we’ll be announcing our honorees and tribute performers relatively soon. So thank you guys again for coming out.