You certainly noticed a proliferation of companies calling themselves artistic agencies or record labels. Lots of emails from these companies flattering me and offering me management or a recording contract went through my inbox. When I opened the first email, I was excited to get an offer and I went on reading it carefully, thinking a manager was interested in my projects. In fact what I read was one of the most unfair offer on the market.

One year ago, one of my readers asked me how I feel about competitions and if I could write something about this hot topic. I really had to think about it (one year!) and find the right time to publish this. But, wait, aren’t we in the middle of a series of posts dedicated to Janáček? Yes, absolutely, but you’ll soon understand the connection. As you can notice in my biography, I didn’t “win” any prize in any competition. Not that I never attended one, I did join one but I decided right after that I will never do it again. But don’t worry, I won’t bother you here with the traditional music-competitions-are-evil. Things are not that simple.

Over this week-end, I had time to rest a bit and think. About what? About me, of course, and what I experienced during the last six months. For those who followed the story, I was wondering how to publish my first CD and wrote this post, and after friends made me change my mind a bit, I looked for and found several record labels happy to release this project. Hurray I said to myself, people to help me! But the artist-label relationship is much more complex than this.

In my last post, I discussed about the top 5 improvements Internet brought to the musician’s life. But nothing is ever totally black or white and Internet has some negative effects too. Today, let’s review 5 of the top reasons why internet doesn’t help Classical musicians.

Every day I receive dozen of articles about how internet is great for classical musicians. It’s true and we can’t deny it: Internet changed a lot of things in our lives : you can purchase music from your home and listen to it instantly, you now have virtual friends, you can share your experience with people, the list could be very very long… But what did it change in my professional life? Does internet improve my professional life? Let’s first see the top 5 reasons why internet makes things easier for me.

In the previous post about my past year, I mostly wrote about changes in my piano technique and the pianist’s loneliness. In one year, my perspective of the pianist’s job has tremendously evolved and my working life has changed drastically. Let me talk about four aspects of my work I had to improve and which have helped me a lot to develop my professional activities.

Last year, I decided to take time away from the the music business. I needed to take a step back and breathe, reorganize my work, to work on me and set guidance for the upcoming years: I had to go from the relative liberty allowed by my studies to the total freedom I got in September 2009. This year seemed very short to me and was far from useless, I learned a lot, and I have been pursuing my research, but under my own and only supervision this time.

I’m sorry I haven’t written for such a long time! I had a lot going on and I will share with you today one of my current concerns. For several months, I have been thinking of a recording project I feel very strongly about. Except the program, the studio, and all the little hassles associated with the recording itself, the question of the label came up. Indie label, major or running my own label, all these solutions have their pros and cons. Let’s do a quick overview of these very different options to grasp the situation clearly.

It’s been a year already since I started writing this blog. After two months of well deserved rest, I am back on the web, I mean on my blog. It was a sincere pleasure to share my ideas and my wishes with you last year.

I was talking a few days ago with an eminent colleague pianist, expatriate as myself, who, while on holidays in her native country after several years of absence, was asked by friends what she was doing in life. She naturally answered: “I play the piano” . Not satisfied with this answer, they asked her what she was seriously doing in life. Tragic… isn’t it? But all musicians will tell you, it’s typical!