Wesley Verhoeve

I am spending a week in the city of Memphis, TN, where I’m attending the International Folk Alliance Conference. We don’t really do too much “folky folk” at Family Records, but we really respect the song writer tradition and it’s not hard to see our artists have been inspired by the second wave of folk singers from the 1960′s. The highlight so far was meeting Mr. Jac Holzman, one of my top music business heroes, founder of Elektra and author of the amazing book at the bottom of my  ”Recommended Reading” list. For this week’s post I wanted to share some lessons from a panel discussion in which Mr. Holzman, celebrating 60 years in the business, dropped some knowledge. Mr. Holzman not only is one of the greatest music men and creatives of all time, he is also one of the very few senior executives in the music business that always thinks and moves forward as both a technologist and a futurist. I’ll include some by Jim Olsen of Signature Sounds as well.

Comments by Jac Holzman:

• On Motivation: One of the thing that kills staff at an indie label the most is having to work a record that the head of the label doesn’t believe in. Just don’t release it.
• On Clarity and Communication: It’s very rare, but some artists can do it on their own. However, generally artists needs some help and guidance. A mutual understanding on what the capabilities and responsibilities of the label are, and an understanding on what the artist needs to do to keep the engine running needs to be defined early on and made clear.
• On Touring: Some artists don’t want it badly enough to go out and do the roadwork. And yet that is so essential, and it’s where an artist hones their craft, learns to be a better writer, listen to their audience, and sell their music.
• On Patience: Build your base. Without a slowly and strongly built foundation, you will fall down much too hard after a the initial moment of a big break or hype. There are no short cuts.
• On Noise: There is more noise today with anything to do with music. Hundreds of thousands of things are coming out these days. That is an incredible level of noise, and you suddenly have to create a lot of noise yourself to get recognized and heard. And people don’t buy music that they haven’t yet before heard.
• On Indie Labels: The job of an indie label especially, is to do something that is very difficult to do: take an artist from nowhere to somewhere. That is the first step, and if you can’t take that first step, you’re gone.
• On Customers and Piracy: In a world where most everything is flat now, the users are smarter than the people running the company and you can’t control what they do so you might as well make use of it. These days our customer is smarter than most peep running the labels.
• On Napster: Take a look at where the labels were prior to Napster. Singles were coming out as CDs with the original track and some alternate versions. By shutting down Napster we lost the opportunity to sell singles in real quantity and keep track of it. The original technology of Napster was a central server, which means you could keep track of everything. We had the opportunity to do so, but since it was about control and not about the future, the approach thing was to set fire to it and put it out of business. So what happened? The next generation of Napster was peer-to-peer and we lost the ability to track things.
• On Going Public: I don’t think a music company is a proper public vehicle. You need a tremendous amount of flexibility, which you don’t have as a public company.
• On Pricing: The people that ran the record companies did a lot to degrade the music. The cd was an incredible cash cow and they were making a ton of money, but the records got poorer. People these days don’t resist buying a kindle book for $9.99, but they won’t spend $0.99 on a song.
• On The Music Biz: You cant call the music industry an industry, because its a really just series of individuals that cannot collaborate on anything and will fight over everything.
• On Relationships: The distance between artist and listener is going to be condensed dramatically.
• On The Future: We’re gonna go through a lot more pain, but I think we’re gonna come out with something where more people will be able to access more music more quickly than ever before.

Comments by Jim Olsen:

• On Access To Music: I keep discovering fantastic new music. One of the things I find incredible about the online music age is that I’m working with very young artists with a full working knowledge of folk music that I had to work a lifetime for to obtain. Nowadays it is all out there and you can track all the links between albums and records and learn.
• On What Matters: We look for artists that have fun doing what they do. If it’s all ambition to be big and famous, then it never works out for anyone.
• On Touring: At this point what matters most is road work: touring. For the artist to sell the CDs on the road, from stage, because they’re sure not selling anywhere else these days.

Mr. Holzman and I