Recommended Reading

Singing For A Living
by Marta Woodhull; Originally published in 1991 by Writer's Digest Books.
Reprint coming this year!!!

If your life's dream is a professional singing career, this book will help you beat the odds and achieve your goal of making money with your talent. Whether you're interested in singing for a living locally or in going for the top and pursuing a recording contract, you'll be armed with the information you need to create your niche, establish your vocal individuality, plan your career strategy, present your best image, and market yourself effectively.

Networking in the Music Business
Making the Contacts you need to Succeed in the Music Business
by Dan Kimpel
MIX BOOKS ©2000 Intertec Publishing Corp.
Distributed by Hal Leonard Corporation

Like every other business, the music business is based on personal relationships: who you know, what you know, who knows you. Networking in the Music Business is a blueprint for developing the people skills necessary to achieve success in this billion dollar global industry. With a detailed guide to creating a career game plan and by learning from artists, writers, and executives who have already established themselves as major players, both the professional and the aspirant in this highly competitive business have a substantial edge.

The author, Dan Kimpel, a 20+ year veteran of the music industry whose recent credits include producing concerts and events with Quincy Jones, Babyface, Diane Warren, Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman, has been in a key position to observe, first-hand, how personal skills positively impact professional achievements. These invaluable insights are vividly documented in a high energy, highly readable fashion. This is a book bursting with invaluable information from an industry insider.

Music Money & Success
By Jeffrey Brabec & Todd Brabec, Schirmer Books. © 1994.

If you want to save tens of thousands in legal bills, buckets of tears in broken hearts, get the skinny on how to oversee your career, and know what the heck is really going on when everybody starts scrabbling over your juicy pie, read Passman. A thorough but invigorating read, my first pull-off-the-shelf legal reference manual, I have Passman marked cover to cover in Yellow dayglow. Jeff and Todd Brabec's book will soon suffer the same happy fate. A lot goes down lightning fast every day in this business of music. Here in LA we reference both sources so often we don't even use their titles anymore. With us it's just "What does Passman say?" Or, "Did you check The Brabec yet?" I've read Passman three times. It is concise and well organized, but not narrow in view. It helps me with day to day decision making- the kind of decisions I need to make even before consulting a lawyer - decisions for which there is more than one acceptable answer.

And somewhere in all of that wrangling there is you and what is fair for each situation, and how much you know going into the deal. Here comes "Passman" and "The Brabec."

It's never too early to self educate, because the messiest stuff usually happens in the early days of a singing career. Stuff people don't usually find out about until a bad situation happens to them, and it takes money and lost time to iron out. Stuff like this: If you are new to recording vocal demos or writing and recording your songs with outside musicians and people play for you for free: who owns the tape (not the song, but the actual master tape) of your performance when you have someone engineer or producer friend record you for free or "on spec?" And what do you owe them if something happens?

Singers who gradually become songwriters get confused on this point. For example, when hiring someone "to put music to your songs" you must understand what portion of their contribution might entitle them to shared ownership of the final song. If your "song" is only words, the answer is obvious. But this is a critically important distinction for the emerging vocalist who sings melodies and words without writing a harmonic or rhythmic structure. I'm not telling you the answer. Do the research for yourself. You will have to sort out a lot of surprises for yourself, like what do you do when a spur of the moment creative rehearsal turns into an actual "writing session? " You never wrote a song before but some rude expression you always hassle the guitar player with becomes part of the lyric: what percentage of the song do you actually own, even if you came up with only five words? What happens when you change around a melody on a song the drummer wrote for you to sing, and it becomes your band's best song? Is it an Ad Lib? Or are you a writer? How does the copyright law of the USA protect you on these points even when the other guy is saying you don't own much or anything at all? This is the stuff that seasons your bigger fights ahead, (when it really gets wild) like a management contract, a production deal, a publishing offer, an indie or a major record deal. Will you know a good offer when it's on the table? Do you understand how much (or how little) you probably will earn from a first record deal? What if you have to go solo with out any of the players you came in with? And the big question: if you get signed, are the suits really as smart as you think they are? How much power do you retain? Do you know how much money you owe the suits before you see a dime?

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