Cut The Middle Man

Fred Wilson pointed to a blog post by Mark Suster, who is also a VC.  The post is a warning not to ceed too much control to the middle, whether it be a lawyer, PR person or your banker.  You are the one who should be pitching the deal/story.  You should be negotiating or setting the terms of the deal you want. 

How true is this for the musician?  No one should know the music better than the musician themselves.  I've heard many a musician claim that they are misunderstood.  More times than not it was because they had someone else lay the groundwork for them.

I'm not saying that musicians shouldn't hire people to do PR, manage them, etc.  In most cases it's more than necessary to have these people on your team. It's important that everyone is one on the same mission with the same message. The musician is the one who needs to make sure that is the case.  Don't lay back and let the chips fall where they may.  Don't think that just because you pay these people they're doing your work.  As Mark points out, they have many other clients and sometimes their long term goals are not the same as yours.  Make sure that they are.  Pay attention.  Take the time to looks at contracts. 

Perfect example of this came out last week when Arnold Schwarzenegger asked the courts to not grant his ex-wife Maria Shriver spousal support.  He also asked that attorney fees and legal costs be jointly paid. Now according to TMZ:  sources said that although he signed the divorce docs he never read them, partly because he was dealing with a family medical crisis -- Christopher's boogie boarding accident ... and partly because he relied on his lawyer.  He is going to refile amended papers today. 

Perfect example of why you don't rely on the middle.  This of course could be an excuse by the ex-Governor to cover up his audacious first filing after he once again, got slammed in the media.

Make sure you are the one driving your ship.

John Mayer On The Pitfalls of Social Networking

The Berklee College of Music welcomed John Mayer (he attended Berklee for a short time), who gave the students a lot to ponder.  The Berkleeblog goes into great detail about his visit with the students. 

John Mayer was the king of Twitter for a time.  He had millions of followers, my husband being one of them.  It was most interesting when he was talking about working in the studio and on his music.  Other times he got into trouble, but not as much as he did for his Playboy interview.

He stopped using Twitter and explained why.

The tweets are getting shorter, but the songs are still 4 minutes long. You’re coming up with 140-character zingers, and the song is still 4 minutes long…I realized about a year ago that I couldn’t have a complete thought anymore. And I was a tweetaholic. I had four million twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. And I stopped using twitter as an outlet and I started using twitter as the instrument to riff on, and it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn’t write a song.

Interesting analysis which makes sense.  He cut out all distractions while making his recent record. When the recording day was over, he went home and there he could do whatever he wanted, but not during the work day.

Solid advice not only for musicians:

• Good music (substitute your area of work) is its own promotion.
• Manage the temptation of publishing yourself.
• Anybody who tells you to have a fall back plan are people who had a fallback plan, didn’t follow their dreams, and don’t want you to either.
• Anybody who’s made it will tell you, you can make it. Anyone who hasn’t made it will tell you, you can’t.

Read the whole article.  It's an interesting take from someone who's been there and done it all.