WHY I TEACH THE MUSIC BUSINESS
The modern music industry in the form we generally know it today—businesses selling a product created by bankable performers whose projects these companies fund— has roots that date back as far as 1850. It is weirdly fitting that the infamous circus ringmaster PT Barnum is the one who helped develop the music biz marketing playbook. Barnum funded, routed and promoted the first large-scale music concert tour in America, by soprano singer Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale.” Tickets for some of Lind’s concerts were in such demand that Barnum sold them by auction—a precursor to Ticketmaster dynamic pricing. But Barnum also installed an accompanying merch industry around Lind’s tour that played on her popularity with Victorian Era women—selling gloves, bonnets, riding hats, shawls, jewelry, along with the first commodified musical product: sheet music.
Thomas Edison is regularly and incorrectly assigned credit for the “record player” with his invention of the phonograph. Wrong. The foundation of the music business was laid via an 1887 invention by Emile Berliner, called the gramophone. Berliner is who started recording music onto discs to show how good the playback was—NOT Edison. But more importantly for this discussion, is how the pattern of swindling ideas is literally woven into the fabric and foundation of our industry from the start. Berliner, a German national who became a naturalized citizen, partnered with an American-born engineer named Eldridge R. Johnson, who improved the gramophone’s motor and helped commercialize it. But a legal dispute with a dishonest distributor named Frank Seaman, who was Berliner's own U.S. sales agent but used his patents to start a rival company and still was able to beat the inventor in court by manipulating—WAIT FOR IT—distribution rights. So Berliner was barred from selling his own products in the U.S.
Johnson split from Berliner and founded the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1901, continuing to build on Berliner’s original ideas. Victor Talking would be acquired by RCA, (Radio Corporation of America, a radio manufacturer backed by General Electric) to become the record label RCA Victor in 1929—a major force in the music business now known as RCA Records.
Sixty-one years later, I was hired by RCA Records to run their Dance Crossover Music department in New York City. And I will never forget the first time I walked into that building naively expecting a vibrant music community filled with creativity and flourish but experiencing an atmosphere aligned more closely with a bank. The company wrote checks to fund product and checked for profits and receipts, period. Make no mistake about it, it is much more business than it is music and was from DAY ONE. We’re nearly 125 years into this playbook now. If you do not understand the rules of business, even if you are the most brilliant, visionary person in the world—like Berliner himself—you will be outsmarted, outplayed and ultimately outlasted by treacherous cheats like Frank Seaman. Our industry is rife with these shady characters: people who prey on the pure creations of others to make a buck, or a million bucks.
And this crazy history is exactly why I teach the music business. Gatekeeping information is how the empires have been assembled—they count on you not knowing, especially if you are an artist. That is the business model. It’s time to deconstruct all of it. And I am not operating “theoretically” either. These days on social media, there are hundreds of those characters in the space now. All offering “information” and “advice” about an industry where they never held a job of any consequence. What have you done? I come from doing, not talking.
I’ve taken my 30 years of experience from working at the music business’ highest levels in broadcasting, major labels, music publishing, artist management, digital music and of course the ether elements that tie it all together—marketing & branding—and transmuted it into university curriculum. My role as professor is to help very smart people who have a passion for music, realize their potential to operate dynamically with integrity and credibility, in the business of music. Notice how I don’t use the expression “realize their dreams.” The game is not for dreamers, full stop. Dreamers usually get trampled on. You can be a dreamer of course and we all need to aspire but do it while sharpening skills, understanding laws and refining blueprints in order to compete against the cheats.
This website and this blog is an extension of my own blueprint to expand the reach far beyond campus in our global music business of today. To share actionable information and knowledge with the intention of improving a system built on thievery—the history is what it is. We can’t change the past, but we can sure create our reality in the future. The world needs artists, the vibrational magic they create, music is the lifeblood. But we also need people who will take care of the artists and do it earnestly without exploiting them. I am firmly committed to this purpose—when my students ask me why I’m on this campus in freezing upstate NY instead of back in Los Angeles, I tell them the truth: it is much more effective strategically for my goals to educate and empower 100 smart people like you at a time, then one or two clients at a time. Now this mission extends to the world. Welcome and I look forward to that conversation and collaboration with you.
Much Respect,
Michelle S. Fresh