Basics for a successful music album, Part 2.

About 20 years ago, when I used to be hired by corporate record companies, like Sony Music, Universal, Fonovisa and Wea Latina, to produce albums for their artists, I realized that their talent did not need to know much about the music business to sell their music. They were assigned a executive producer thinking about the total cost of the project, a music producer taking care of the audio part of it, an art director for the photography and images, and a marketing director taking care of radio, magazines and TV appearances. Nowadays, it is not a corporate market anymore, it is a independent artist market, and all those roles fall into the artist themselves.

Luckily, today we have so many tools in our hands that we did not have then. First, we can experiment on writing songs and hearing demos with a quality that only people with expensive studios back then were able to accomplish. Second, we have an incredible freedom to deliver the honest messages that we want to present, without the filtering of a corporate company telling us what to record, since they though it would sell more records. And third, we can use all the marketing tools in the internet: Social media, iTunes and digital music stores, Video distribution of our performances (YouTube, Vimeo, etc). Even the sales of our music is presented internationally, without much effort.

Now, what we need to focus as independent artists, is to deliver true quality in the products we create. As I said before, the quality of the song itself has to be the best (talking about melody and lyrics), then the production and the style has to be tuned to our audience, and the image of the artist (pictures, videos, reviews) has to match with the music and the message we present. 

Back then when an artist was signed by a corporate label, the contract offered close to $1 per record sold, after the expenses were covered. Unfortunately, many times that not, the sales never covered the original expenses (production, manufacturing, marketing and promotional tour), so the artist ended their contract owing money to the company, instead of making money.

The independent artist now has to have smaller expectations for the sales of his or her albums, but the reality is that they can actually make more money than before. Now the artists have to invest in the production and marketing of their albums, but at the end THEY OWN IT, meaning that instead of making $1 per CD, they can make $8 to $10 after their costs. So if in the past you needed to sell 30,000 Cds to make $30,000, now you only need to sell 3,000 to get the same amount!

I think that the independent artist today is in a better position than before, and the public is exposed to a better variety of music and possibilities.

We will get into the live performances in future blogs. See you soon!

Basics for a successful music album, Part1.

I briefly met Quincy Jones (Multi Grammy Arranger/Producer) in Boston, 1983, days before my graduation from Berklee College of Music. He had a meeting with a group of graduating producers, and in a very relaxed environment, he told us many important facts about the Music Business. The one that stuck the most is this: To have a successful Music Album, you need 3 things: A great song, a great song and a great song. He explained that through history, after a great album, usually the next one is either a better one or a flop, even though the artist is the same, and usually the producers are the same. What is the only thing that changed? THE SONGS.

After this eye opening statement, I started focusing on finding the right songs for the artists that I would eventually produce myself. I also started polishing my songwriting, and collaborating with different songwriters and the artists themselves. When the artists I was working with did not have the right songs, we would either write them, or find them from a pool of songwriters that I was involved with.

If you are either an aspiring recording artist or an experienced one, and you are working on a new album, I would recommend you to review your songs and check if they are connected to the audience that eventually will see you perform live. I find this small detail overlooked the majority of the time, and really makes a big difference in the audience response.

In my opinion, the artist should check the songs to be recorded in front of an audience first, to get a real reaction of the people that eventually will buy the music. Sometimes a slight chance of pace in the music makes a big difference.

Also the instrumentation used in the production of the music should be realistic. Make sure that you can easily reproduce the album experience live. If you use a symphonic orchestra in your album, you won’t be able to play those songs live, unless you either hire the orchestra, or you use a “ Performance Track” along with live musicians. I will explain the types of performance tracks in the next blogs.