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Hey.
We're here with Eric Beall, who's the vice
president of A&R at Shapiro Bernstein, and he also
is a course author for Berklee Online.
Eric, how's it going?
It's good.
How about you?
I'm doing well.
Why don't we start with what songwriters need
to know with building relationships in the industry,
because these students are about to graduate.
They're about to walk out of the final course and enter the world.
So where do they start building from here?
I always say that they should start with their current network, which
probably means their Berklee network at this point.
And I think that's really important because I
think way too many people have this idea about networking,
that it's something where you go and you hang out at a party
and suddenly you meet the president of the record company
and the record company president invites you to a party
and there you meet other vice presidents,
and pretty soon you've got a record deal because you met them at a--
it's just not like that.
That's just not-- it's not to say it never happens.
Of course it happens.
You know, there are famous stories about Mariah Carey and other people
who that did happen to.
But for the most part, that's not networking.
It's not a Great Man business.
It's not like one day you'll meet this great person and he'll come in
and he'll open every door and then everything will go smoothly after that.
The reality is, most of your network are not people who are above you somehow,
they're people who are beside you.
They're your colleagues, they're other students.
As you start to network with those people
and they start to make progress in their career,
then they start to bring you along, you start to bring them along,
and that's how networking really works.
Most of the doors that were opened for me as a songwriter
were never opened by people who were gatekeepers in the industry.
They were opened by other songwriters who got a small break
and brought me in along with them, and then I
was able to do the same thing for other people.
And that's really a much more realistic view of what networking is.
So I always say, start--
too many songwriters ignore their friends.
They ignore all the people around them who they think
are in the same position they are and they concentrate only
on trying to meet someone important.
The people around you are as important, if not more important, than the people
you are aspiring to meet.
Having said that, I do think that--
I always recommend that students, especially
at a certain stage in their career, at the very beginning,
really avail themselves of all the opportunities within the industry.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for people
who say, oh, I'd love to get ahead as a songwriter, but I don't know anyone.
There is no industry in the world that has more networking-oriented events
than the music industry.
I figured out one time that you could literally be out of the office--
and I've almost tried this.
You could literally be out of the office all year long
going to some kind of music industry event,
going from South by Southwest to Winter Music Conference, to [INAUDIBLE],
and you could just bounce every week from an awards show
to a conference to another awards show to another conference,
and never go in the office.
And all of those things, the primary point of them
is networking, is education, is learning from other people.
So if you want to meet people, there's no industry
in the world that has more events between the PROs, ASCAP, BMI,
SESAC, all of the things they do, The Recording Academy, organizations
like Women in Music, the Latin Songwriters Hall of Fame,
the National Music Publishers Association, the Association
of Independent Music Publishers.
There are just hundreds and hundreds of groups out there and events
that you can be part of if you want to be part of.
Will you know who you're going to meet at those events?
No, probably not.
A lot of the people you meet maybe you don't even want to know.
But you will make a couple of contacts at each one,
and that's how you build a network.
So I really think that networking might be
one of the easiest parts of the music business,
if you're willing to avail yourself of it, if you're willing to get on a plane
or you're willing to grab a bus or whatever
and go to where these things are happening.
You will meet people and you will start to build a network.
I think some people have this idea of networking as involving business cards
and follow-ups and, like, very-- putting on this stiff presentation.
What does networking mean to you?
And when you are networking within your circle, what does that look like?
Yeah.
That sort of networking is very awkward, especially in a music industry
setting which tends to be a more casual business.
And sometimes people go out and they try to take that approach,
and they find that people in the industry
are very sort of standoffish and a little uncomfortable
when they take that approach.
The music industry networking looks a lot more like hanging out.
And a lot of it is favors, and that's how I kind of try to approach it.
I try to approach it by, like, OK, what can I do to help this person?
What could they do to help me?
Let me extend myself a little bit.
Let me try to help them with something that they need.
And that usually opens a door and opens up a relationship somehow.
Collaborations are always a good networking opportunity.
Obviously if you meet a producer, they need
someone who writes melody and lyric, you write melody and lyric, that's
an obvious networking opportunity.
It's not networking in the sense of, like, here's my business card,
let's figure out a way to do business.
It's just kind of saying, hey, you do this, I do this.
Let's put it together and see what we get.
So it is a much more organic kind of thing.
It can't really look like social climbing.
Social climbing is something that nobody really
appreciates-- everybody's seen the young songwriter who's
out there hustling, trying to meet the important produce or whatever.
And it's not an attractive thing, and nobody really wants to be around it.
I think it's much more a case of staying in touch with people,
trying to help them out, keeping people abreast of what you're
doing in a way that isn't imposing but just making sure
that every 12 weeks or something someone kind of knows, hey, this good thing
is happening for so-and-so.
And you don't have to make a big deal about it,
but you can just keep people in the loop that way.
You know, the songwriters who I know that are best at it--
this one writer who I always cite who's an old friend of mine, Jeff Franzel,
who is great at it--
just calling, saying, hey, just got back from London,
wrote with this person and that person.
I'd love to come play you the stuff.
And by the way, congratulations on this thing that you're doing.
That's another thing.
Like, if you're going to go network with someone,
make sure you know what they do.
If you're going to go to a conference, try
to look at who's going to be there, who you think you want to meet, and then
learn a little bit about those people.
And if you show that you know something about them,
that's a huge icebreaker for people.
That makes a big difference if you can call and say, hey,
congratulations on winning a Grammy last week, I was really happy for you.
That's a genuine thing.
And then people feel like this is a friendship, not just something
where you're trying to get them to do something all the time.
I always say that, at conferences I'm amazed--
people never know how to network at conferences, because they are awkward.
I mean, there's hundreds of people and everybody's asking questions.
You're at the ASCAP Expo or whatever and there's
1,000 songwriters and five publishers and everyone's besieging them,
and it's like, OK, how do I turn this into a networking thing?
The fact is, every panel has a question and answer at the end.
Every single one I have ever done has one of those.
If anyone-- and this has almost never happened to me--
but if anyone ever asked a question by saying, "listen,
I noticed on this last hit record that you
had you did x, what led to that decision,"
and actually indicated that they knew what I do, who I work with,
what strategies we might have used, all of a sudden I'm
going to talk to that person.
I'm going to remember that person.
Out of the 1,000 people I met that weekend,
that person's going to stick in my head because they actually seemed
to know something about what I do.
Networking has to be done with some interest in the other person.
It can't be just about, hi, I'm so and so.
Could you listen to my songs?
There's nothing in that for me.
You know?
It has to be something that has something in it for both parties.
What steps do you want to be focused on taking so
that, as more and more opportunities present themselves,
you're ready for them?
I think it's a combination of things.
I think there are--
certainly the one thing that I would say just as a general rule,
is songwriters, especially now--
maybe more-so than ever--
have to be incredibly adaptable.
The strategy you build this year may not be the strategy that works next year.
The strategies are changing that fast.
I mean, I remember when, at one point when I was at Sony maybe 10 years ago,
the edict came down from Columbia Records,
we're not signing anybody unless they have a TV show.
If they're not from one of the talent shows
or they're not on some kind of series, we're not signing them.
It was that closed and everything was TV-driven.
Then they didn't have hits with that, so then it became a situation of, well, we
only sign people who have YouTube following.
So then all of a sudden all of these YouTubers got deals.
And then that didn't quite work out, and so then the thing
became the blogs and everyone--
you had to be on Hype Machine, you had to have a presence on Hype Machine
and be featured in a lot of blogs, and then you could get a record deal.
And then that's now faded, and now it seems to be all Spotify-driven.
But these things change all the time, and they change often
within the course of two years, maybe even a year
where what record companies, what music publishing
companies were looking for in terms of numbers or in terms of data
is different.
So you have to be very adaptable today as a songwriter.
You can't just say, well, this is my strategy.
This is what I'm going to do and I'm going to stick with it for five years.
You have to--
I think the best advice I can give in that regard
is to look at other people who are having success who are similar,
who do something similar to what you do and really study, really, really study,
OK, how did this break through?
Did they start off doing YouTube covers and that led into something else
and then it built from there?
Were they on blogs?
What did they-- how, in my genre--
how do those people who do what I do, what
is the current strategy that seems to be working in my part of the business
in terms of getting ahead?
Beyond that, the other bit of advice I guess
I would give is an initial strategy move,
would be to start creating product in some way.
Somehow you have to have something that's your calling card,
whether it's-- if you're not an artist, then start developing an artist
who's singing your songs.
If you are an artist, then obviously start
putting some stuff out on your own, making some records,
getting them out through self-distribution
or however you want to do it, through SoundCloud.
If you're a DJ, start putting tracks up on S--
but get something out there.
The biggest flaw in the Great Man Theory, of course,
is that if you don't have anything to play the great man once you meet him,
then it's about a two-second conversation.
It's not going to last very long.
So you have to have product.
You can't meet someone that you think could do something for you
and say, yeah, I've got a lot of songs.
They're really good.
I'm going to start demoing in a couple months,
and I'll send you the demos when I'm done.
You've got to have something at that moment to say, yes, here
it is on my phone.
You should hear this.
I once heard a marketing guru saying that you should give away
whatever your best stuff is.
Just give that away for free and people will come after you
and then you can give them all the rest of the stuff.
So does that logic apply for songwriting when
your songs are the thing that people are going to be coming after?
Do you want to get your best stuff out there?
Do you want to hold it back on a private link?
What do you want to do?
That is a tough question because--
I think it's--
I mean, my background is, other than being a songwriter, is as a publisher.
So I think it's a little bit silly, obviously, the company I work for here
you see behind me, we have songs that are recorded by hundreds of thousands
of artists, the same song.
You know?
And I don't really understand the aversion.
If something's been out by someone else, why it would be a problem to record it.
But there are people-- there are definitely managers and A&R people who,
if they see something has been released, even if it's been released by someone
who they've never heard of in a different language,
they still don't want to touch it.
And that is a tough one then with putting your own stuff out
if you think this song is your smash hit.
But in general, I would say I would go along with your marketing guru.
I would say, get your best stuff out there.
Because I don't actually believe-- especially for young songwriters--
I don't believe that--
whatever you think is your best thing this year,
will not be the best thing you do in your career.
So while you may think, oh my gosh, I'm burning this song
that I think is just the most incredible song,
it may in fact be just good enough to open a couple of doors and that's all.
But by next year you'll be aware of that and you'll
see that it wasn't really that big a deal to give that song away.
My gut would be to go ahead and put stuff out there, get it out
there, and somewhere where people can see it and hear it.
It doesn't have to be for sale necessarily,
but somewhere where people can hear it.
And, you know, it is also possible, it happens a lot
that someone sees it online, hears it on SoundCloud,
and decides they're going to do their own version of it
and it becomes a hit with their version.
That's not at all unlikely, and I think it's better to take that chance
and get it out there and let people see what you do.
If people don't see what you do, it's almost impossible for them
to really engage in trying to help you build your career.
And I've also found--
I will say I've found, especially working
on the record side of the business, hit songs are a strange animal.
Like, if you really wrote something that is an absolute smash,
they just have a way of finding another life.
It's very-- it's surprisingly hard to kill a genuine hit song.
They just keep resurfacing.
And people will cover it, maybe it just keeps
building, of your own version keeps building
and suddenly it's got a huge Spotify following
and it's bouncing on all the playlists.
With hit songs you're unlikely to just waste them, just to put them out there
and they never get noticed and that--
if they don't get noticed, they probably weren't--
they might have been potential hits if they
were the third single on a huge artist, but they weren't breakthrough hits.
Those ones don't get lost very often.
They somehow-- they always seem to find another life, even when it
looks like they're dead.
Can you tell me a little bit about what it's
like for you when you open up your inbox and there's new songs in there,
amongst all the other kinds of emails that you've got to deal with,
amongst your writers arguing about 13.3 to 13.5?
Then you've also got-- let's start with how many new songs do
you get in your inbox in a week?
Maybe 50 to 80.
You know?
And it is a lot.
I think that the biggest thing I noticed,
having been a songwriter myself for many years,
going into the business of getting big on the other side of the desk
and getting the songs, is the difficulty in cutting through.
When you're a songwriter on your own, you're writing,
your song seems like the most important thing in the world to you
and you hear all the nuances of it and you
hear the beautiful poetry and the verse and you hear the cool chord change
in the bridge and all these little details,
and it seems really important to you.
And you never notice that, if you're the guy who's getting 50 of those a day,
none of that stuff really registers.
It's a question of what cuts through.
What will cut through?
What jumps out of these 50 songs?
What has a silly, funny, sad, you know, emotional-something-quality
about it that cuts through everything else that
makes you remember that one out of 50?
And it's not the most beautiful chord change
and it's not the most beautiful lyric line.
It's "Broccoli" or something like that.
You know?
It's songs like that.
It's "Bad and Boujee," or it just--
phrases that jump out at you.
You can tell almost looking at the title, like, yeah.
This one gets my curiosity going.
This one is interesting.
This one jumps out at me.
It's that element of surprise.
And I think, especially as a songwriter, sometimes especially
for good songwriters, bad songwriters sometimes
have a more intuitive awareness of it because they don't have much craft.
People who have a lot of craft to what they do and really understand
the craft of it sometimes takes so much pride in the craft
that they forget that the concept is like 95% of the thing.
And that-- you know, a good concept and a silly, dumb, catchy hook line
will beat a beautifully-crafted song every time out.
Like, it's really-- you need those things that cut through.
And that's what every record company wants.
That's what every publisher wants.
It's what every artist needs.
It's the one thing that hasn't kind of changed in the music industry.
In fact, I think it's gotten more-so this way because, you know--
I mean, now everybody and their mother can put stuff up
on Spotify or SoundCloud.
So it just means that there's more stuff out there
and it's that much harder to try to cut through all that stuff.
And it's going to take something kind of edgy, kind
of surprising in order to do that.
And if the song's not surprising or edgy, it becomes very hard.
Unless it's somehow associated with a superstar or something
like that that brings a certain star power to it.
But it becomes very hard.
And that doesn't always mean that things have
to be edgy in terms of being shocking or something like that.
It's possible-- I mean, in her own way Adele, when she came out,
was very edgy because everybody was doing big electronic productions
and she comes out with an acoustic piano.
By contrast, that's surprising and that's edgy.
It doesn't have to be big in order to be edgy or provocative or something.
It has to be different than what everybody else is expecting.
Eric, thanks so much for your time and such
wonderful and valuable, insightful advice.
It's a pleasure.
Look forward to being in touch with you and look forward
to hearing from the students when they're out in the songwriting world.
Excellent.
Take it easy, Eric.
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