Making Money From Music

You can't.

Not easily anyway. Like I said before, you have to try and stand out from the crowd and that isn't easy what with all the other people also trying to stand out from the crowd. Technology has managed to simultaneously liberate us and shaft us up the bumpipe. The sounds and flexibility I have at my aching nicotine-stained fingertips outstrips the multi-million pound studios I got my first jobs in many years ago… I can warp, mangle, twist and generally farticate around with noises until I have a vacant smile on my face and a bit of dribble on my chin. I can do things to audio tracks that producers in the 80's and 90's could barely imagine - even in the midst of their most fevered and drug induced dreams. It's, quite simply, wonderful.

I learnt my "trade" when "MIDI" was a type of "Hi-Fi" you bought from "Dixons". Sequencers were in black and white. Having a sound start just before the bar took fourteen hours of coding by a man with no friends and the personal hygiene of a damp badger. I stuck at it in the mistaken belief that it would get me women, money, women, fast cars and women. Unfortunately for several years I had a bright red Fiat van with a painting on the side of a rabbit leaping out of a top hat and loins so desperately un-plundered that I could regularly hear my spermatozoa crying itself to sleep.

However, I was still smitten with the technology.

Soon after my stint at "proper" recording studios, I left to set up my own. This brought me to a drink and drug fuelled existence in Coventry at a recording studio frequented by the type of musician who thinks plugging a chorus box in is taking a huge creative risk. During the downtime I gazed at my navel and wrote twenty minute epics with names like, "Shores of Dawn" that had a four minute windchime solo in the middle. I tried to sell some of this stuff to those record companies that provide music for massage parlours but they complained that I had occasionally made my music "interesting" and/or used some of the black notes so I gave up on that. Around this time my audience was three friends and a guy who rolled spliffs that made your eyes curl. Eventually a girl also started hanging around. She had breasts that defied explanation let alone gravity. Unfortunately she did her utmost to let everybody know this fact and I decided that a long term relationship with somebody whose idea of an intellectual conversations opens with, "look at my bruise" was probably a non-starter. I'm getting sidetracked...

Anyway, just down the corridor from my studio was a small collection of spotty people writing ear splittingly interesting music that, I discovered, was soon to be known as "The Drum And The Bass". They also had a guy who made eye bending spliffs so I started hanging around with them. I was the only person who understood how to make an S950 make noises so I quickly became a knob-twiddler for them. They had their own label and were putting out some tunes that rightly became considered classics on the Leamington underground scene... The man guy out of this group had used one of the big studios I had previously worked for so we decided, in a classic bit of self reverential bum-slapping, that it was meant to be and we should write music and take over the world. He was earning small amounts of cash from performing live and selling records - not much, but enough to buy himself a second hand 205GTI - and this seemed like the very top of the game to me at the time.

So we wrote some tunes and sent them to people like Paul Oakenfold. He said, "meh". So we wrote some more tunes and sent them to people like Fabio and Grooverider. They said, "yeah, y'know". So we wrote and recorded and released and travelled to London to stand at the back of clubs looking moody and street (probably ending up looking constipated and cul-de-sac). This led to the record deal mentioned in a previous blog. Wow! So this was it! The big time!

No. No it wasn't. It was the small to lower-medium time and despite critical success, a few radio plays and some releases that sold reasonably well (I still get people mentioning to me how much they liked it - which is nice) we managed to earn just enough to buy some nice toys and some Behringer piece of shit and the odd bag of chips. We did both have second hand 205GTI's by this point. They didn't last long.

After all this, what did I end up with? A Yamaha O1, a JV-1080 (which I still use), a collection of 12 bit samples from Bladerunner and large holes in my long term memory.

This wasn't what I had imagined. Where was the big house stuffed with gold women and diamond dogs? No-bloody-where, that's where. It was occurring to me that making money from this wasn't going to be as easy as I thought. Is it just that the stuff I write is shite? I don't think so - but then I would say that. I know some people who tend to give me honest opinions and they like some of the stuff I've done. They don't like all of it but my argument is that if you are trying to be experimental or original then sometimes you will fail. This is a mantra I repeat to myself in order to stop myself from falling into a deep depression. Or a drunken stupor...

But it does seem like some people can make money doing this kind of thing. I have started to investigate just how they do this. I will report back with my findings. I bet you that it involves something approaching hard work.

Bollocks.