The 11th edition of Passman’s trusty guide, All You Need to Know About the Music Business, comes out Oct. 24.
was starting his career five decades ago, he talked his first client out of signing a 15-year contract that would have paid her manager half her earnings. Today, that same artist could get the same career-saving advice from Passman’s revered guide,A partner at Los Angeles-based Gang, Tyre, Ramer, Brown & Passman, Inc.
Now it’s about how you connect with your fans. I have a section that I’ve expanded this time about how to go about doing that. Whether you want to do it yourself completely, or whether you want to go to a label, you’ve got to start a buzz on your own and you’ve got to make things happen. The companies get the same data, they’re all chasing the same artists and you’re getting bidding wars. And artists are able to get deals that in history they could have never gotten for their first record deal.
It also depends on the smartness of your manager and the innate talent of the artists to follow it up. But the ones that are real artists, and the ones that are well managed, can launch a good career off of it. The ones that are one-shot wonders don’t do so well. They can’t follow it up. I don’t know what the statistics are on the ones that get these massive deals, but I’m going to guess there’s a pretty good rate of failure beyond the first record.
What about artists who are already established? Do they have more power? Is there a ceiling to how powerful a Taylor Swift or somebody can be in her negotiations? They do but they’re becoming much less relevant. Certainly, the returns reserve if the item is physical goods still applies. Although vinyl is surging, it’s still less than 10% of the business. So, it applies to that. And the same thing with the control composition clause. It doesn’t really apply to digital. It only applies to physical product in any relatively recent deals. And so, it’s become less relevant and easier for the artists to get better terms on it.
In your book, you give artists some advice: “All the superstars I’ve known have a clear vision of who they are and what their music is.” But there are also countless stories of artists, perhaps with clear visions, running into record labels’ A&R teams and sometimes that vision changes. What separates the superstar artists that you’ve known from the artists that didn’t reach that status?
Your book details quite well how the music business can get really complicated and have a lot of pitfalls. What are some mistakes you see artists and their attorneys still making that they shouldn’t?
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