Entering the Entertainment World

Today I wanted to discuss a simple factor to your success as a music producer or artist: entering the world of entertainment. If you plan on becoming successful as a music producer I think it’s important to understand what you’re fighting for and the only way to do that is by actually entering the game. For instance just the other night I went out to a local club for one of my best friend’s birthday. There were plenty of people in the club but probably at least a third of them were there with the group I came with, seeing as we rolled in with a huge group.

I’ll be completely honest here, the night started at a bar across the street from the designated club which was the final stopping location. Even at the bar the world of entertainment starts to unravel itself around you. We began by sitting at a large booth with at least ten people in our group already even when the night was young. Music was playing at the bar and there were TV’s on as well playing the music videos visually.

The music, televisions and friends: this is the world of entertainment. So looking at where the money gets spent is important if you plan on making it far in this industry. At the bar in the beginning one of the most noticeable places money was spent up front was most definitely food and drinks. In fact roughly half of the money spent throughout the night was on alcohol alone, not including money spent on things like gas, food and drugs for the night. This is important information, it means if you’re going to be doing shows, performing or otherwise trying to make money in entertainment, roughly half of the income you have to potentially make isn’t from your music at all but actually from alcohol.

So assuming you’ve got your own venue and you can sell alcohol, already your chances of profiting go through the roof when compared to the same show without alcohol, or a show selling alcohol and food that you don’t get to see any of the profits from.

Then you’ve got tickets to enter, but usually that’s only about $5 for a club on a weekend. Which, of course, is the price of a single drink at these venues. So even the tickets don’t make up as much money as the alcohol does.

Now when you perform at a venue as an artist, usually you get a percentage of the ticket sales (And it’s much less than 50% most of the time), and you don’t get a dime off of the food and drinks sold, which is really where the venue profits anyway.

Having said that, for every song that they play at a club, there is a dance beat to it. So by making dance music and licensing it off to artists you can get spins in clubs which ends up making you money. But the artists who use your beats for these types of songs are not the centerpiece either: the centerpiece for the person coming to a club is the party. That’s why while the artist really doesn’t matter at a club (you can play pretty much anybody you hate on, including N Sync, and with enough alcohol and good friends you’ll probably dance all the same), the beat does. If the beat were slow nobody would know what to do.

So you end up having DJ remixes of popular songs for the most part. A lot of times the club won’t even play the original versions of these songs, but chopped versions that are faster paced and with different beats in the background.

I think that going to the clubs once in a while is important if you expect to make it in the entertainment industry because it’s important to understand what entertainment really is. You’re getting money from bringing fun to people’s lives, whether that be in the form of drunken dancing or in the form of great suspenseful music for an action movie. No matter where your music goes in entertainment, it’s all meant to serve one purpose: to eliminate boredom and make people feel intrigued.

Real money isn’t made off of album sales, it’s really more towards the things you can sell that make you money. Whether it be t-shirts, alcohol, licensing for movies or selling your beats to rappers, you have to follow the money. If the songs you’re making aren’t acceptable for clubs, movies, TV shows or commercials, then you need to rethink what kind of music you’re making and whether or not you’re really ready to enter the world of entertainment.

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