I’m about to break one of the cardinal sins of blogging: I’m going to tell you why I haven’t updated recently.
I know I’m notorious for my gaps in posting, but that was usually due to time management issues, or writer’s block, or laziness. This time it was for a different reason.
I’m annoyed.
CEO of DuckDown Records, Dru Ha
As CEO and co-founder of DuckDown Records, Dru Ha is one of the most influential entrepreneurs in hip-hop. He’s helped influence a flood of independent record labels that continue to develop their own empires and hold weight against the majors.
I caught up with Dru recently and had a great conversation with him in which he discussed today’s music business, getting Bootcamp on Twitter, and President Barack Obama.
This is the second half of a 2-part interview with Zach Katz. To read Part 1, please click here.
Do you focus more on placing J.R Rotem’s music with artists or are you more focused on placing music with film, television and video games?
We do both, but I primarily focus on placing his music with artists.
We have an incredible publisher that helps us, Sony/ATV. That’s one of the reasons to do a publishing deal – to add more people to your team. They have a full film, television & video game department, who I provide music to on a regular basis, and their job is to go out there and to secure placements.
So I don’t do it all alone; I have people on the team who can also help.
But that income is definitely valuable, and the name of the game – especially in this shrinking market – is to capitalize and bring in as many revenue sources as possible.
One issue many upcoming producers have is knowing when to do free production for an artist and when to start charging. Also, once they do charge, how much to charge. How do you recommend they approach that issue?
Ariel Publicity has just launched their Cyber PR Urban blog, as a service to aspiring artists & musicians in the urban music genre.
Cyber PR Urban’s Christina Duren, was kind enough to reach out to me for an interview for the launch.
Below is the transcript of the interview, in which we discussed social media, and how artists today can use social networks to their benefit:
Here’s an interesting video I found of Jimmy Iovine discussing his views on today’s music industry and his vision on the direction it’s taking. (Note: The video is about a year old)
He offers advice for new artists as well as talking about possible distribution models, what makes a great producer and the future of Interscope and the traditional record label.
[flv:http://www.artistshousemusic.com/video/recordlabels/jimmyiovine.flv 425 319]
“What Are You Doing?”
That one, simple question is the basis of one of the hottest social networking tools around, Twitter.
For those of you unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s basically micro-blogging mixed with instant messaging. Essentially, it’s more or less the same as Facebook and MySpace‘s status field, but it’s meant to be updated more frequently and you can reply to other users as well.
It’s pretty easy to update and follow other people’s “tweets”, as the limit to each message is only 140 characters.
You can stay logged in from the home page, or install a Twitter client (I’m using TweetDeck right now). You can also update via text message or by adding Twitter as a buddy on your favourite instant messaging client.
Check out this video to see how others use Twitter for both business and personal:
Shout out to Aura and CJay who are featured in the video!
If you don’t have a Twitter account, you can sign up for one here. It takes less than 1 minute and you’d be surprised how useful this tool can be.
Artists, DJs, producers, managers, bloggers, journalists, general fans… anybody really can benefit from it. It’s easy to use and takes only a few seconds to update your audience on any news or event you want to share.
It’s also great for general fans who want to stay updated with instant news and have a platform to communicate with others you might not have any other means of contacting.
Make sure to add me and browse around my Twitter friends; you’ll find a lot of interesting people there.
So now that I stepped my game up and actually own a computer that doesn’t freeze every time I play media files, I’ve decided to stay fresh with my social networks and have added my YouTube and Last.fm accounts to my Network Badges on the right side of this page.
Make sure to add me on both these networks at the links on the left of the page or by clicking these links:
– Last.fm
– YouTube
While you’re at it; feel free to add me on a few other social networks:
– MySpace
If you’re an aspiring professional; I highly suggest you get your social networking on by learning about and joining all the above networks as well as others.
Word of Mouse is a powerful force!
Imagine you’re back in grade school, and your teacher asks you to draw a picture of a cat. What would you draw?
You’d probably draw a round head, two triangle ears, a small rounded nose with whiskers, an ovalish body, four legs with little paws and a long tail.
That’s a cat.
But what if your teacher asked you to draw a picture of a rapper? Not a particular rapper, but just… “a rapper”.
What would you draw?
Hilarious video!
On that note, you can add me on different social networks through the links on the right sidebar. Much like the video, MySpace is probably the one I check the least, but feel free to holler at me on Facebook, or LinkedIn and add me on Twitter.
Check out more videos from Super News on Current TV.
