My lack of interest in modern rock music of late....

I started playing guitar when I was 10. Back then, my hero was Allen Jackson, and the first song that I learned to play that was on the radio was "Don't Rock The Jukebox". That was 1991, which was a pivotal year for music both nationally and for me personally. I was listening to Boys To Men, MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice, and country. I wanted to be a country star! LOL!

Then something exciting happened. I was watching MTV, which I wasn't allowed to do (I had to sneak to watch it). The video for Nirvana's "In Bloom" came on.

I'd like to say it was an instant realization of how horrible what I was listening to was, and that I'd in one instant found a new musical direction in life. I can't honestly say that. I liked it from the start though, but I still listened to the pop and country. The Nirvana song did stick with me though, and aided in my conversion. The next one that I saw that really stuck with me and pushed me over the edge was Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters".

This one was a near instant hit with me. The beauty, the melody, the slow crescendo into all out fury…..

I started consuming more Metallica and Nirvana, and ditching the pop music and country music I'd listened to up to that point. Before long, it was grunge and metal all day with nearly nothing else even getting consideration.

The first album I ever bought was Billy Ray Cyrus's "Some Gave All". Then my rock / metal conversion happened and I stumbled upon a cassette copy of "The Black Album". This was the final nail in my country music coffin. Before long, I was collecting Metallica and Nirvana records. I remember driving with my family from Portsmouth Ohio to Philedelphia PA. I spent the trip lying in the back seat of the minivan with headphones on going through the entire Metallica catalog in chronological order to see if I could listen to it all before we arrived in Philly.

It was an exciting time for music. Some of the grunge rock giants were currently releasing music, like Soundgarden and Smashing Pumpkins. Nirvana was doing unplugged on MTV, and I soon would play guitar along to the entire unplugged album start to finish several times each week. I had completely abandoned my country and pop roots.

Around 1999, I started to convert back in minor doses to the pop side. 1999 was another pivotal year for music. We had Rob Thomas and Santana, Rob Zombie released Dragula, and Lauren Hill was singing about "That Thing".

In hindsight, this proved to me that I never really left some of my pop music tastes behind, but I wasn't willing to admit to any of my friends that I liked this song. All of my friends were metal heads, and if I liked pop it meant that I was not a real metal head. So I hid it. Over the next 12 years, I'd continue to suppress pop songs I liked, but I'd listen to them alone. When I'd get discovered, I'd get ridiculed by my friends or my girlfriend.

But back to the turn of the century, I was still a rabid rock music fan and I was still consuming current acts like crazy. Powerman 5000, Korn, Limp Bizkit (till I realized they sucked), were just a few of the acts that I listened to religiously. My love for Metallica was still undying, and my love for Nirvana was still on a religious level even though I no longer consumed them religiously. They were like the first love that will forever hold God-like stature.

But then something started to happen. I kept listening to modern rock radio, and although I liked bands like Breaking Benjamin and Audioslave, I wasn't driven to buy any albums from any of them. This could have been in part because of the ease of accessing music online, so there was no need to buy an album. This was more likely though because I was no longer as completely dedicated to it. The new stuff was good, and I'd still rock out like crazy in the car to some good songs that came on. But I was growing up, and the music was losing it's hold on me. It just wasn't that interesting anymore. Eventually, I lost interest in going to concerts.

As the first decade of the new millennium drew to a close, I had my own mp3 player. This was loaded with my favorite rock tracks, but I increasingly found myself listening to a few hip hop and pop tracks that I had found. These included

Missy Elliot

Mis-teeq

Estelle Ft. Kanye

I found the Estelle song because it was the hold music for a company I was calling one day. I was on hold for 10 minutes, and that song came on there. After that, I googled it and downloaded it. Probably the most interesting music discovery method I've ever encountered.

But still, my knowledge of music was still limited to rock and metal for the most part. Fear of ridicule kept me from really delving in.

Around the time that Sarah left me, I started working with Jovy in my studio. This was the beginning of my musical evolution. I was working with a good hip hop artist consistently, so I started doing some listening homework so that I didn't get it wrong. I started falling in love with the videosongs of pomplamoose as a way of distracting myself from the things that were falling apart left and right around me. I had stopped playing music for the most part for myself about 5 years prior, and decided to pick back up the guitar and be creative again.

I found myself lacking the threat of intimidation for liking a certain song. I found myself free to be honest with myself about what I liked and didn't like. I looked at modern rock and saw Five Finger Death Punch and Bobaflex being played way too often on the local rock station. The old songs I grew up on were still getting spin, but they were 20 years old and no longer held my interest. There was nothing new that was captivating and interesting anymore in modern heavy rock radio. I started listening to alternative hipster rock via iheartradio on KTCL 93.3 in Denver. I started listening for the first time in my life to hip hop and learning about the genre. I found favor in new hip hop….

…..and old hip hop…..

I still find myself listening to tried and true rock music, but it's no longer on the radio. I'm more likely now to discover new stuff via youtube and spottily than I am to go searching for it on The Blitz. The stuff on commercial rock radio just doesn't interest me anymore, and all sounds like a copy of itself. It's like the bird species that vomits on itself to make it unappealing to predators. I don't want any part of it.

But through the internet and the underground I've discovered some of my recent favorite rock and metal pieces.

Dream Theater

Arch Enemy

Eluveitie

So it's not as though I've abandoned rock music and metal music. Rather, the kind of rock and metal that's being pushed by modern rock radio is uninteresting garbage. Hinder? Really?

Thanks to Pandora, I've discovered that quite possibly my absolute favorite genre of music is soft electronic style music with a groove, piano elements, and female vocals. I've really been consuming Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, and Portishead like crazy thanks to Pandora solidifying my love for that sound.

Perhaps the biggest difference, aside from a lack of respect for most of what's on modern rock radio, is that now I'm free enough with myself to explore my musical tastes without fear of ridicule. Laura may laugh at something I like, but she's not gonna judge me for it. I know she hates Lady Gaga, but I like some of her stuff. I know she hates Madonna, but I grew up listening to some of Madonna's stuff in the early 90's. While those acts are far from regular listening material for me, I know she won't judge me for listening to them. So perhaps it's being given the ability to freely explore my musical horizons, coupled with the fact that modern rock radio holds no appeal to me. I no longer even listen to it. When I do, it gets turned off within 3 minutes. I'd much rather listen to a podcast, NPR, or my iPod.

….or maybe I'm just getting old……lol.

The Music Business.

The music business.

Being 30 years old and having a savings account that couldn't pay my current gas bill, I've been doing a lot of thinking about my future and how I'll dig myself out of the hole I'm in. This is obvious if you've read through my 5 year plan and any of my other business related blogs. So I wanted to use this post as a way of breaking down why I'm doing certain things that I'm doing.

I currently run Skyline Sound Studios. My studio rate is only $25-hour, kept low because I don't have a very large marketshare in the recording market for Central Ohio at this time. When that marketshare increases, my rate will increase, allowing me to shed my day job even sooner and make Skyline my full time day job.

But let's look at the numbers.

$25/hour + 40hours/week + 52weeks/year = $52,000.00/year.

This is a calculation of what is coming in only, and doesn't account for the costs of doing business. I'd be making almost twice what I make at my current day job if I can make Skyline full time at it's current hourly rate, which will be nice, but it won't be enough to get me what I want in life.

Good financial planning dictates diversification. This means that you shouldn't put all of your eggs in one basket, because if the basket gets knocked off of a shelf, you're out of eggs and have to start from scratch. So I'm looking into other ways of generating an income, and have determined that the music business is where I should continue to focus. This time, it'll be on using the studio as an asset to produce products that will be sold. In other words, I'm starting record labels out of the studio.

Let's explain. I've already expressed my intentions to monetize off of Project DIVIDE and my solo career. This is something that's taking more time to start than I'd hoped, but I'm taking steps when I can. Meanwhile, I've also decided to partner with Nathan Froe to start F.R.O.E. Records, a hip hop label in Columbus Ohio. We've signed Jovy, our first artist. We're going to be hitting the studio soon to record Jovy's first release, which will be heavily marketed online and through other sources.

I'm also considering making deals with other independant artists to work toward promoting their products in exchange for a share of their revenues, essentually acting as a label without signing them to a label. I'd be working for an equal share of their profits.

So what does all this mean? Let's turn to Jack Conte and Natalie Dawn from Pomplamoose.

Yeah yeah yeah. I've mentioned this before, but basically, these two helped me realize that it's possible to make a living off of music independantly in this day and age. So if Jack and Natalie can sell over 100,000 downloads a year, and each of them have their own solo careers as well, then there's no reason I can't follow this model.

So now let's look at some numbers. Let's just assume that I can sell 10,000 downloads each from my solo project, Project DIVIDE, and from F.R.O.E. Records label artist Jovy, and we'll leave the speculated possibility of working with other artists out of it for now. So that's 30,000 downloads I've sold at $1 each, meaning that I'd have generated $30,000! Now, that's not $30,000 for just me, that's $10,000 for each of 3 different projects and I'd need to split those profits between the other parties. But let's just assume that from that, I am able to retain a profit of $10,000. If I add that to the $52,000-year potential revenue of Skyline Sound Studios, I'll be around $62,000 -year. This will be a decent living for an artist to be making, and if these investments continue to grow, then the sky is the limit!

So let's plug that into my 5 year plan.

By New Years Eve 2017, my goal is to have dual residency in Columbus Ohio and in The Greater Denver Area. My studio will have been built into an efficient, self sustaining business by then, and I'll have established income streams from F.R.O.E. Records and my other musical projects. I will have used my recording and musical careers to establish myself as a producer who now has national clients, and will travel the country and possibly the world to work on records. I may or may not start a studio in Colorado, as there are studios I've partnered with there that are already up and running that I can work from. If I don't start a commercial studio in Colorado, this may help me save the cost of starting a new facility and trying to gain a marketshare in that market, but we'll see. I would at least have a private production facility so that my musical career could continue without haulting, and that would allow me to continue working on Project DIVIDE and my solo career from either Ohio or Colorado. And now, on January 5th 2012, the clock is ticking. I have officially less than 5 years to implement these things. Fingers crossed. With luck, and hopefully with Laura by my side, I'll be looking back on this blog on December 31st, 2017, and be toasting my accomplishments to a glass of champaign from within the Rockies.

Happy new year!

Time to change the game

I've been trying all year to pull myself out of what I've often analogized as a personal tailspin. The bottom fell out in the first half sending me into a personal and financial tumble that nearly crashed over the summer. Since then I've been trying to pack on as many tasks as I can to get myself pulled out of the whole, but the burden of the work I now have can be crippling.

Something's gotta change......now.

I'm a full time student with a full time day job. I can't change that right now. But I've also been packing on a number of other projects hoping that one of them will be the game changer. The result is that I'm stressing myself out.

So it's time for a change. I've got to prioritize. I've got to approach all of this in a more intelligent way....one thing at a time. Sure, the workload still seems like a mountain. But instead of trying to blaze a trail to the top all at once and burning out quickly, this way I can climb it in incriments and be able to enjoy the view from the top, while stopping to smell the roses regularly.

The lowest priority for me right now is my own music, specifically my solo project. I'm stepping aside for a bit. I've got a Project DIVIDE EP to finish mixing, with a mountain of videos to edit for it. I've also got Enemy By Mourning's record to finish, which is getting close. But then, after the EBM record, I've got the flagship artist on my new record label F.R.O.E. Records.......a hip hop artist named Jovy. We've got to start recording Jovy's first release under the label and I'll need to focus heavily on the marketing campaigns once the record is done. So there's no real room for my solo music for a few months. But that said, I've got to make sure I buckle down to get things done as quickly as possible over the next few weeks while I'm on a break from school.

Time to get real here.