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November, 2006
 
Why I Only Work with Talented Musicians
Reminder: Music Comes First In Music Business by Anne Leighton The major music industry should take a tip from our major mass media news shows, because the most successful ones are offering "the real thing"—actual journalists. I'm defining major mass media as TV outlets that are accessible to nearly every American. Cable channels like HBO, MSNBC, Oxygen and ESPN are subscription and not known like evening news shows presented on CBS, NBC and ABC. (Fox News has about 845,000 viewers a day, CNN about 466,000. ABC, CBS and NBC have over 7,500,000 viewers.) Most American homes have televisions; they all can theoretically view the evening news with Katie Couric, Brian Williams or Charles Gibson. CBS was the number one network on August 31, 2006, with Bob Schieffer anchoring. He has a strong history as a reporter who covered the news where the action was. When Katie Couric hosted the Today show for nearly 14 years, she interviewed VIPs in the comfortable NBC studios. The Today show received high ratings, but she lost her credibility as a newsperson in 2003 when she hosted Jay Leno’s show for a week, because she presented herself as a jokester. Couric’s move to anchor the CBS News was so well hyped that the first week she was No. 1 in the ratings. As the show progressed into its second and third weeks, more Americans chose to watch other news. By early October, NBC's Brian Williams won with 8.2 million viewers. Second place was ABC’s Charles Gibson at 7.6 million, and close behind in third place was Couric at 7.5 million. Everyone respects Williams’ hardworking standards; he is a legitimate reporter and covers stories from the scene of the news drama. He was stationed in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina. He's been back and forth to Iraq. When Couric says she's not going to risk her life to report from danger zones, she shows she’s not interested in offering her first-person observations. She lacks a reporter’s curiosity and passion. That armchair presentation is bad for anyone who professes to be a journalist. It’s disrespectful to the reporter’s craft. I'll wager CBS phased out Bob Schieffer because of his age, not his ability as a reporter and anchorman, even though when big media offers authentic talent, the masses consume them heartily. The same is the case with any art. Very few poets cross into the mainstream the way that Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg did. They were able to live off of their writing because they wrote their poems from their hearts and crafted them from their heads. Some rappers do well because they are also reporting from the frontlines and crafting their words in an accepted format. I’m studying with former two-time U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, one of the few white poets who lives solely off his poetry. He’s even got an agent who books him for speeches and workshops. One of Billy’s secrets is that we should write with clarity, which allows our audience to see what depth our poems offer. I believe that poets who don’t take the time to edit and rewrite their long-winded poems are not concerned with their readers; thus they’ll have a limited audience and little legacy. Just as there are constants on what is BIG media—NBC, CBS and ABC—there are also consistencies on what is defined as talent and what isn't. Talent is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. Talent is a seasoning that develops with practice, musicianship, smart songwriting and dedication to performing live shows. Independent (including solid Gold) artists who can fill 1000-seat concert halls will fill five times that if they are offered proper promotion and a budget on new recordings by the majors. The solution for these big-budget major labels is to put the MUSIC in music business where it belongs: first. Get into the MUSIC business again. Give a caring commitment to talented musicians who are more concerned with their craft than their image. It’s just common sense that hard work done in a smart way will reap rewards. Fans will buy music by artists who care about their music, the same way that Americans know to watch newscasters who really do know news. |