By King James

First and foremost let me apologize to the readers, because I missed a week or two here lately. Not slacking on my grind, but I’m in the process of moving and I had a few court dates. Not making excuses just letting ya’ll know I’m real like ya’ll, and during the pursuit of this music I to must work….yes….that dreaded nine to five. Good news though I’m writing this so it means I’m free! Ok got that out the way so let’s move on.
 

By King James

Ok, so you’ve got your team together and everything seems to be on the up and up. You’re in the studio and the speakers are beating like domestic violence, the MC’s are flowing like broke ass toilets. But hark….what’s that sound no one seems to notice? Ching-ching! It’s the sound of a cash register! Like most bad break ups, business or personal (which both make up this music game), money is an issue that is often ignored until it’s too late.

I could careless how you feel about making money off of the art form. Some people really have hang ups of “x” amount of dollars making you a sell out, and others feel if you don’t have that “x” amount that you’re not legit. The fact remains we all have bills to pay, and if this is how you plan to pay them, then you should make sure that the money issue is discussed honestly, openly, and often. Who occupies what role within the team? What are the industry standards for what that person does? Speaking from an unsigned point of view those industry standards can be altered depending on the agreement between everybody involved. The name of the game is fairness. Equal money invested into a project should be equal money returned. I’m not one for making money the main issue, but it is a major one.
 

By King James

I know what you’re thinking. Maybe I should have covered this first before I got into the other topics of how to interact with the people you’re working with and hook structure and blah blah blah. The reason I chose to talk about this now is because the other topics covered a broad scope of putting things down in the studio. You can use those dealing with different people you’re working with at any point and time. This time around it’s about picking YOUR team.  Not the guy who had to stay late at the studio to record you at the last minute. This is for the people you will have around you on a consistent basis. 

By King James

 I’m going to pick up where I left off in my last entry. The radio is important to us as musicians. Of course there’s a lot of bulls**t on airwaves  these days, but that again falls back on us as artists, and producers. Without the music there wouldn't be any radio programming,  plain and simple. It doesn’t work the other way around. However, the radio does get the music out farther and quicker than a lot of us can travel. The radio in a sense was our first internet. It brought, and still brings you closer to artists who you might not know of because of the geographical barriers.