Vacancy Something sure to irritate and offend you, I’m afraid: an article written by someone named Joakim Book, Music Has No Economic Value. It’s all about how music has no economic value, because Spotify devalued […]
Category: business
Ordinary
“Oh! How ordinawy.” A little bit of an business/economics side track here: In the USA the word ordinary is rarely a compliment. It’s usually taken to mean unexceptional, uninteresting, not that good. It’s not a […]
Protecting your business
Maybe not. This is a situation I had recently, which is common for teachers working with music stores, teaching studios, or other services. Many of those businesses require teachers to sign contracts to keep them […]
Negotiating for prostitutes
Not to hire one, to be one— good not to have too many illusions about our economic place in society, as musicians. From the Quartz web site, an excellent piece on business negotiation as practiced […]
Your big paycheck is just around the corner.
In Salon today is a conversation with Marc Ribot about the future of copyright, the Internet, and the state of the music business in general. What started the conversation was some statements by producer Steve […]
Why you don’t need to get paid
This guy will tell youwhat you deserve. I see that the old downloader “culture”— always a sketchy-sounding crew, even in the early days when they were led by high tech vanguard types writing in Wired— […]
The club scene
Here’s a great piece on understanding the, well, near-dead state of live music in clubs (professionally, anyway), and what musicians can begin to do about the situation, by LA pianist Dave Goldberg. It opens: AS […]
…or, to just fail.
I would add: – Think of your work as being in competition with that of all artists, everywhere, at all levels of the business, past and present. – Imagine that your every creative move and […]
Making any money in jazz
Dollar bill. This is something I wrote last week, but decided against posting, as it can be kind of a downer. I have actually officially banned from my presence discussion of how much being a […]
Alan Greenspan won’t let me give make-ups
Via Steve Korn, here is an economics professor’s opinion on make-up music lessons: […] I’d like to explain to other parents why I feel – quite strongly, actually – that it is unreasonable of we […]
Joey Baron master class, part 1 : Paying Your Rent Is High Art
This is part one of a transcript of a master class Joey Baron gave at the New School in 1994. I originally found this in ’98 on the rec.music.bluenote news group, and was just able […]
NY Times: Freelance Musicians Hear Mournful Coda as the Jobs Dry Up
This is via the blog Jazztruth by pianist George Colligan- a NY Times story about the collapse of the freelance market for classical musicians in New York; much of it also applies to jazz musicians, […]