Chapter 26

When I left Tennessee, I’d originally planned to go to New York City, to seek work in the entertainment business. Or maybe L.A. Most of the music business in Nashville was country, which, although I’d developed a respect for, I didn’t wish to work in.

My plan was to infiltrate a record label, establish connections, either through interning, or working at a label, and then form a group, have that group be signed to a deal, and hopefully become famous, be a star.

But by the time I finished college, while I still loved music, I’d stopped writing, playing. I don’t know why. I’d spread my music around online, had over a million page hits to my website, hundreds of thousands of downloads, and gotten major label interest, though my demo was rejected, regarded as “too experimental, edgy” for the label, but a senior record executive had told me he liked me, that he’d wanted to hear more, told me to do something more commercial, and had asked me to send another demo...

I’d planned to start another group, do something different, something more dance-pop. I’d gotten into Alice Deejay, trance, wanted to try more electronic music. But I wasn’t able to make anything pop enough or commercial enough ... Everything I produced wound up too weird or edgy for radio...

I enjoyed it, though. I liked what I was doing. And I liked the freedom of doing weird, fucked up and crazy music. I didn’t want to conform, make my music into solely a product, make music only for money. And I started to have new dreams.

My focus started to shift from producing music to other pursuits, namely, business and entrepreneurship.

For a short time, I’d become more interested in purely the business side of music, had thought of forming a music label, signing groups, singers, developing, producing talent. I did produce a group or two, a few demos, with a couple local rappers, and a Christian rock group, of all things, but nothing took off.

This was around the time, however, that downloading, file-sharing became a thing.

I was becoming disillusioned with the direction the music business was headed. It was always shady, but I’d envisioned working for or starting a label with fair splits of revenue for artists, doing things in a more ethical, musician friendly manner. Then, though, the business was diverging even farther from that, and I was especially grossed out by the emergence of “360 deals” where music labels were siphoning every stream of an artist’s income (shows, merch, etc.) to recoup lost income from file sharing.

(I’d also found I didn’t like the schmoozy aspect of the music business, the ass-kissing I’d seen, the plastic people, plastic smiles and forced laughs. So many of the record label executives I’d seen or met were scumbags, and I was having second and third thoughts of working with such slime... )

Having taken a few business and accounting classes for my major, I was becoming more interested in going into business, not the music business, but finance. The business of business. The business of money.

I’d become fascinated by stocks, financial markets and had become intrigued in working in financial services or accounting.

(In reflection, I really wish I had changed my major to accounting or a finance related field. Especially on a practical level, when I entered the “real world” and found out how useless my “music business” diploma was, especially in the age of record label consolidation, downloading and rampant piracy.)