Market Share

This morning I was reading about market share; the story started out talking about how Wal Mart had taken nearly a quarter of the market in the U.S. in one of the aspects of its business which was an expansion of its core business, retailing.  Immediately, I began to think about the Music Industry.  People say that the Industry is more open than it ever was before because of the Internet and the various ways to distribute music digitally.  Actually, I’m one of those people who believe that you can make your way in the music business without having to really work inside the industry corporations.  I believe it only to the extent of some severe limitations.  You can play the note, and maybe you can make a living from it, but the industry is going to be playing the chord, and somewhere you are going to intersect. 

Sometimes people who don’t want to get involved with the Corporate politics of the music industry bounce their way directly out to the non corporate industry path.  The trail they take isn’t taken because of money issues or opportunity issues or personality disagreements, it is taken because they just don’t like corporations and the idea of the system skimming from the artist.  That is a valid point of view, as far as it goes.  It is like a note in a larger sound.

Corporations in music do more than just publish music and skim profits.  There really is a whole industry of support structures and opportunity creation that exists within the various Corporate structures of the media and entertainment Corporations.  Many of the Corporate people don’t know much about music at all.  They know accounting and insurance and publicity, not music.  The development departments are structured to ensure that they develop artists who can produce product that sells consistently.  That is “one note” – make money is the goal.

The real problem in the way the music industry development professionals present themselves these days is twofold.  First, the development is aimed at the youth market – because it is assumed that once you’ve passed high school, you’ll never want to learn music well enough to publish.  Second, and this is the bigger issue, EVERYTHING the corporations support seems to turn out to be “pay to play”.  Pay to play is a huckster method of getting money up front for a service that might or might not be completed.

I know from personal experience that the music industry is almost exclusively a “closed shop” operation.  There are a few “open mic” nights and “send us your tape” indies, but when it comes down to developing the interest in the foundations of music – teaching the fundamentals that run through all the levels of professional music from Classical to genre – the one road in, if you can make it further on up the road, is a pay to play road.  This is not shocking when you think about the way that education has been treated in America.  Education has been made increasingly expensive even in the public sphere, despite the widespread claim that “knowledge is power” and “education is the road to knowledge”. 

When I was very young, I had two sources of music education that stuck.  While I could also count the two classes a week in Elementary school, and they really should count, I actually group that class with the “public” education I received from my home city’s Symphony Orchestra.  That part of my education was brief – if I slept hard, I’d probably forget that I received it; somehow, I remember.  I remember the place where the education was given, and I remember that I was dropped from the classes because I was too young to know that I was supposed to keep up by making classical music my only real goal in life.  It would have meant practicing two or three hours a day when I was not yet 10 years old.  The instruction was designed to tell me what it took, what was in it, and then to leave it to me to figure out how to implement it.

The other source was a girl from up the block who used to “babysit” while my parents went to some social event.  She taught me everything there was to know about learning chords and scales, and she tried to teach me “House of the Rising Sun” which was a hit rock song at the time.  She was probably in high school at the time, and I was still in Elementary school.  Whatever she told me on Saturday night, I’d generally forgotten it by Sunday morning.  Still, there was a piece of what she told me that remained dormant inside my mind, in my memory. 

It wasn’t until I really made the commitment to music as my whole heart venture many years later that I started to look for schooling on music theory and music practice.  When I found a local music school in Denver – Swallow Hill Music Association – that took music learning by adults seriously, and made it somewhat affordable to me at the time, it was a totally new experience for me: Learning as an adult.  I had spent years working “around” musicians in Los Angeles, asking them questions and generally being an almost pest in my curiosity about what they were doing, and “what is the music business”, but I had never found a place like the Musician’s Institute – even though some of these people were part of the Musician’s Institute Programming, according to what I later heard.  I guess they just wanted to get away ….

From the beginning of my “music relationships” in Los Angeles, I had started focusing on the areas of development that might fit my skills.  I didn’t play an instrument well enough at the time to even consider the “talent” side of the equation; I was thinking about production, and how to tie what I was learning and studying at the time, which stretched from Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhism, which I basically remember, to teaching and learning theory, which is mostly a bundled blur.  It took me fifteen years to make the whole connection – from philosophy to “kyo” [sound or “teachings of the Buddha”].  When I finally did make the connection between what I was seeking while buzzing around those professional musicians in the 1980’s and the “whole heart commitment” to music as a career, I realized that I needed to play an instrument well to demonstrate what it was that I was talking about, if I was talking in a “teaching mode” as a Producer or an artist.  For the next decade, I tried to practice as much as possible – two, three, four hours a day.  I went through the peaks and valleys, forgetting just about everything, then remembering what had driven me forward in my learning.  Perhaps I wasn’t organized – I was not in a school – or perhaps I just needed to pound the information into my brain.  It was the opening of the “caged method” that came and went – the closer I stayed to understanding by practice in the C-A-G-E-D system of chords and scales, the more my playing reflected what I wanted it to project.  That chord and scale system is “Classical music”.

As I’ve searched for a way to make a career in the music business, I’ve increasingly found that there are few inroads to employment that don’t involve pay to play.  Even the companies that offer “introductory programs” start making demands about qualifications for employment that involve having spent money, an education, or certification before being considered.  Companies that should be developing from within aren’t – a lesson I learned this past year which opened my eyes to how closed the shop is.  Everywhere I look, you must pay!  Want to network to write or pitch songs?  Pay to join an Association – and maybe that could happen ….

Problem with all the pay to play angles?  When you’re not making money, and you’re doing jobs to get to the next level of learning on your own, eventually, you’re so far marginalized in terms of employment [“the note”] that you can’t reach the chord [“the Corporations” & the industry].  Development is a growth  industry in the music business, if you can get the job.

Perhaps when the shop is closed is the time to start looking for market share …, despite the laughter [and silence] on Music Row.