By T. Perry Bowers
I was 21 years old. I was walking across the campus at Hamline University in Saint Paul, MN when I realized I was an artist. When I started college 3 years before, I wanted to be an international businessman. I thought I’d be in the import/export business. I was interested in language as I’d been abroad more than a few times (thanks to my parents). I’d studied Spanish, French and Russian intensively and spent 6 months in Saint Petersburg Russia.
But as I was coming from my painting class, on my way to band rehearsal, I knew all I really wanted to create was art. It was my moment of realization and from that point on I committed the next 8 years to music.
After college, I moved in with my musical partner Charlie. Our practice space was a dump. We lived cheaply and delivered kosher food for our day jobs. We had an eight track in our living room, a pound of marijuana and we thought we had the world by its balls. Everyday we wrote and recorded music in our home studio and twice per week we were in a recording studio in Minneapolis making an album. There was some learning going on, but the very powerful weed our drummer grew in his downtown apartment building ruined most of it. Not much really got done. We talked a lot and had many drunken jam sessions, but we neglected the business of being in a band. This was in the era when bands were still getting signed to labels with very large advances and one of our contemporary Minneapolis bands, 12 Rods, reportedly got a half-million-dollar advance when they were signed. So, we had the idea that if we just made a great demo, someone would hear it and give us money and fame. Well, it wasn’t our fate.
My band had been suffering from this illusion for a few years when we met an up and coming music producer. He got us on track musically. We started getting our tempo together and practiced scales, keys and modes. We learned the importance of discipline. Every night for about 3 years, Charlie and I met in our practice space and worked on our music. Now we meant business. We were disciplined in our musical approach. We quickly had a band of very serious musicians. We got a website and promoted ourselves. We played gigs in and out of town and made 4 CDs. We even toured out to Colorado and back one summer. I look back on that time with very fond memories, but when all is said and done, we didn’t accomplish much. It was a hobby and a very expensive one. There is nothing wrong with that – in fact, I think it’s wonderful.
When I think about my old band, I remember how much work went into trying to make it. Scheduling rehearsals, designing and printing posters, designing and publishing our website, booking gigs, booking a tour, getting press reviews, preparing and launching a radio campaign, talking to agents, talking to lawyers, etc took up most of our time. I’d say when it really came down to it; actually playing music was only about 30 percent of being in our band. Luckily, I had a penchant for business. I liked talking to people and I’d get a rush from landing a gig or getting a radio interview. The rest of my band though, not so much. If we all had the same business sense and the same zeal for promoting our money making potential, we might have made more of ourselves. What I did alone wasn’t enough.
So, where should we be spending our time as artists who want to create business from our art? I believe we need to spend a good amount of time to ensure we maximize the potential of our website. It’s not enough to have a Face book page. Having a professional website sets your band apart from the fly-by-night acts. It shows you have a business and a long-term vision. It gives fans a place to go to get the things they want from you, like videos, links to buy CDs, song downloads and information on gigs. Facebook is great, but you have to be on Facebook to view it and you need to be able to navigate well. We must make our art as accessible as possible. A good website with an easy to remember domain is essential.
Some of us are going solo. In a lot of ways, it’s easier than being in a band, but if you run your band like a business you can get more done. You need to have goals (whether they are stated or not). If your goal is to gig once a month and drink beer with your bandmates once per week in your practice space that’s fine. But if you want more than that, it can be helpful to have weekly business meetings. Make goal setting a part of these meetings: clearly state your goals and write them down – it makes them real. Sometimes it is scary to speak them out loud, especially if one of your goals is to be a famous rock star! (Is someone in your band going to laugh at you?)
You need to know whether you are on the same page as your band-mates. Maybe you don’t want anything more than the opportunity to play your instrument, but the rest of the band wants to tour the world. Or, you find out your drummer will never leave your city for a tour, but the rest of the band have out of town gigs as a goal. In this case it’s time to look for a new drummer. The first step is to put all your goals on the table and see where they intersect. Once you have some solid goals and you’re on the same page, you can move on to creating and implementing strategies to get what you want.
As a solo artist you work with yourself and everything is on you. With a band there is usually a leader. Most of the time he’s a reluctant leader. I’ve seen many bands implode because the leader refuses to lead. He gets resentful doing all the work or refuses to promote the band because he doesn’t want them getting more popular all on his own efforts. This is childishness. If you’re the leader, lead. But make it fair. If you’re booking all the shows, take a bigger percent of the profit. If you’re organizing the studio sessions and paying for them, you should get reimbursed before anyone else sees any money. The more you do, the more you get.
Sometimes though, you need to count your blessings. Do your drummer and bass player show up to practice and play gigs with you? Are they good musicians who add a lot to your sound? If so, maybe you need to pay them to keep them in your band. A longer vision is important. If your band isn’t all for one, one for all (and most of them aren’t) facing that fact is the best course of action. Maybe you can treat your band mates more like jobbers. You pay them a stipend at shows. If they expect to get paid every time they play, that’s fine, but then you get to keep all the T-Shirt and CD money. When the band makes more money, they still get their stipend and you make more. The more risk you take, the more reward there can be. It’s capitalism. Don’t get caught in the socialist band model. It doesn’t work. Remember the Soviet Union?
If you’re one of the few lucky ones with a partner or a whole band willing to do equal shares of the work, get at it and hard. Set goals and create a strategy to meet those goals. Check in on progress and dole out new tasks in your weekly meetings. If possible, have the meeting, keep it brief, and then actually do the work. Make phone calls, send emails, update your social media, record a quick update video. Do the things that need to be done.
The moral of this story is being an artist is 30% doing your art, 70% conducting your business. I talk about bands because it’s what I know but this can be applied to any art. In fact it’s pretty much the same as running any business. If you’re an independent plumber, about 30 percent of your work is actually plumbing. The rest is advertising, talking to potential leads, accounting, invoicing, collecting money, putting out fires, dealing with the government, etc. Most people, especially artists, don’t realize this when they start their business. They have a fantasy idea of what it will be like when they are a full time artist or entrepreneur. Maybe someday, you’ll have a secretary, a lawyer, an assistant, a booking agent and a manager, but when you’re starting out you must be willing to do it all yourself.
As artists, we need to grasp the concept of the artist/entrepreneur. We can’t insulate ourselves from our business. We have to be comfortable with the way we produce our art and conduct our business. We all know of politicians and clergymen who are hypocritical in their actions. But most successful artists are very honest – they are willing to be transparent about their personal weaknesses and failings. This honesty is what ingratiates artists with their fans – it’s how they make that connection. As an artist you don’t have to pretend you are perfect, you can be flawed and still act with integrity. With integrity comes responsibility – if we are calling out the government and institutions on their corruption, we need to be willing to honor those principles when we are designing our own businesses.
Our business needs to be in alignment with our art. If we create art inspired by the great inequities of the world we can’t then sell it to Bank of America. It doesn’t work.
You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time.
So, there are many things to contemplate when you design your business. It’s 70% of being an artist. But it is possible to be an artistic business person. You can have style and panache in the way you conduct commerce. You can bring compassion into your business and be ethical. You can make the work of being an artist, artistic.
