The first email of this type I got was from an “artistic management” company. 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 a weird offer : paying a high monthly fee + a commission to get a pdf press kit and have a call center phoning presenters to try to get me concerts. In brief, “pay 300$ or 500$ a month for minimum one year, and maybe you’ll get something“.

Just for fun, I checked their roaster : something like 30 pianists with a nice empty schedule for the next years, and obviously 25 of them had been listed less than one year ago. Conclusion : obvious rip-off. (Well, Norman Lebrecht posted a warning on his blog about these “agencies”).

For me, that’s not the way management works. I take a risk putting my career and interests in the hands of a stranger, the manager takes the risk of believing in and trusting an artist. Reimbursing the manager’s expenses can be considered as normal (press-kit design, web-mastering …) but paying a high monthly fee for nearly nothing is unbelievable. The couple manager/artist works as if they were associates : they both invest time and money for a common goal, it’s a win-win deal (at least, it should theoretically be one). They must trust each other and I’m pretty sure commission-based work is the only way to keep the motivation alive for both parties. And don’t expect to do nothing because you got an agent. It’s your role to help him.

I spoke earlier about record labels because the same kind of rip-offs take place in the recording business. The deal is generally something like this : Record, bring them a master, and add a 8000$ to be listed in their catalog and produce 500 copies. They claim they’ll advertise a little, do the P.R., distribute your recording and take a 20% on the sales. Usually the only things appearing in contracts are the fees you have to pay, and obligation for them to send promotional materials to some random journalists. When you know how the promotion business is working, you also know this kind of “obligation” doesn’t mean anything and have no impact.

Of course, if you need copies for yourself (the copies you already paid!) you have to buy them from the label (at a discounted rate, but anyway you already paid the goods…). What a good deal… for the label! They have nothing to invest, and they earn money even before the recording has been published, why should they bother to promote your recording? And I don’t want to speak about their releases, usually as bad as the deal is.

The musician’s life is complicated enough and we don’t need these vultures flying around our heads. My question is : do they really think musicians are that dumb and rich?

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Sometimes finding the right concerto for an event can be challenging, and Jaemi made me think a lot this time (in fact Jaemi makes me think a lot in general, see here!). I initially planned to play Ravel’s G major but some copyright issues and rental fee seemed to make our lives a little more complicated : it meant extra fundraising and extra work. I was not really aware of these problems, and in my opinion that’s not problems you want to struggle with for your first season. So I decided to look for an other solution.

I played a little Saint-Saens’ 5th concerto, a little Brahms’ 2nd concerto and checked instrumentation. Wonderful piano concerti, but the instrumentation required a lot of players and I wasn’t feeling like playing them anytime soon. And then I had an idea. Why not Rachmaninoff d minor ? Instrumentation OK. Copyright OK. What about me? Ok or not?

Rachmaninoff concerto in d minor op. 30

In fact I was really surprised : I had not played this for years, and but the concerto was still feeling fresh in my mind and a lot of joyful memories emerged. I practiced this concerto as a student a decade ago, and I could remember how proud I was in those times : I was the one playing Rach 3. Yes, this concerto has a particular connotation for pianists as it is supposed to be the most difficult piano concerto in the standard repertoire. I found out later when practicing his second concerto that Prokofieff wrote terrible things too, even more challenging than Rachmaninoff.

At first there was the challenge, of course, like other pianists I guess. But When I started practicing it, I discovered the real beauty of this work, how wonderful was this music. From the performer point of view, I really enjoy playing it and I feel like the orchestra is enjoying it : it is not only a brilliant work for the piano but also for the whole orchestra. Anyway, this concerto was thus my offer to Jaemi and the HHO, and I would be thrilled to play this with them!

If you want to help and support the Houston Heights Orchestra, connect with them through their website or their Facebook page.

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• Internet is time consuming : The pianist’s schedule was already pretty tight and with internet we have no free time left at all. Social networks, Blog, website, forums… We have to join the conversation and its immediacy : interactions on internet are now on a real-time basis and people expect you to react faster than ever. If you’re not careful about the time you spend on internet, it can quickly become your one and only activity of the day.
• It increases our workload : As other media are not dead (yet?), we have to plan a web strategy in addition to other “traditional” media strategies. We all know how media strategies are difficult to set up and how painful this planning process is : since internet has been a mainstream media, I have much more work concerning the media planning.
• Good marketing is always pricey : Internet may be smoke and mirrors. Free marketing? It doesn’t exist. As other media, Internet has a price and increased our communication budget : running a website, advertising, creating multimedia content… Being on the web is not enough, you have to reach your audience and I don’t think you can reach someone by just saying “Hello, I’m here!”. Internet is a really good medium, but a real effective web strategy with a good ROI is far from free.
• Internet broadened offering : The classical music market is a tiny market and gets tinier every year. Internet made it easier to contact presenters and present our work, but on an already saturated market, Internet in fact broadened offering and that’s really not helping musicians : It’s more and more difficult to find concerts and our fees are going down. In brief, a logical outcome of the market over-saturation.
• Copyright issues : Yes, there are copyright issues. Who has never seen one of his articles stolen? Who can deny the impact of digital piracy on music sales? Internet made it easier for us on certain points, but the relative easiness of piracy on the web really hurts the business.

To sum up, Internet is here and you must adapt your work style to survive. In any case I would go back to the old times without Internet. It has brought fantastic opportunities to all of us in recent years and made so many things possible that were never possible before, but there are some negative points of course. The key is to recognize the drawbacks and try to minimize the negative effects. Ultimately, I would say the positives of the internet far outweigh the negatives.

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• Contacting presenters and media: Remember these paper booklets and CD demo we had to put together and send by physical mail? It’s now over. We don’t and can’t work like this anymore, it would be too expensive and not fast enough. We use electronic press kit and electronic promo kit sent by email. Thanks to internet, it’s now easy to find and contact presenters as well as media.
• New, cheap and effective ways to promote your business : The web created new tools to promote yourself : social medias, blogs… are very low-cost and can be great to target a particular market, if you know how to use these tools.
• Reaching an international market: We are in a global society and musicians are now working at an international level. Or at least they can do it. Back in the old times, it was really difficult to spread your influence beyond borders and gain new markets. Even if it’s not that easy, mainly because of national/cultural specificities, musicians can promote themselves out of their country without spending thousands dollars.
• Save time and react faster : We don’t have to spend time at the post office anymore and don’t have to wait for an answer for ages. Decision making has been optimized and we are now able to react in real time. Mobile devices and Internet have made us much more responsive without loosing your time sitting in front of a computer. I can pratice my piano and stay connected. I can cook and work at the same time.
• Connect with people : Internet made it possible to connect easely with other musicians (great not to feel lonely) and, much more important, connect with our “fans”. That’s what I do on a daily basis with my facebook page and twitter account.

Sure, Internet made our lives easier in a way. It also completely changed the business and not necessarily for the better, but this will be developped in my next post!

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1. Staying fit and healthy is part of our business priorities. I underestimated their importance in our profession but playing sports, doing yoga, relaxation, receiving massages are far from useless. They are essential moments in the pianist’s life. We (over?)use our bodies, so we must take care of this body and remember we could not play an instrument without it. Of course, I mentioned exercise here, but staying in shape affects many other areas of our lives: food, lifestyle, sleep …

2. Musical Excellence, of course, but not only. Communication, marketing, business negotiations, law… there are a lot of subjects a musician should know about, and he must master certain concepts outside the music to be able to take the right decisions for his career. We can delegate part of this work, but we are always asked for the final decision, and making a decision requires a clear understanding of the situation. How can you do that if you really don’t know what your collaborators are talking about?

3. Time management: our daily fight. We have many, many things to do and little free time. Poor time management leads inevitably to overdue tasks, stress and disasters. Planning, respecting a schedule, estimating the time you need to complete a task are real challenges: we must learn how to stay organized to avoid drowning in work. Free time is precious to us, and is in fact a passive working time : cultivating your imagination, reading, watching movies, all this affects your playing, and therefore your work. This part of “free time” is essential to “feed us” as an artist.

4. Saying no. This was one of my biggest weaknesses. We must understand that as professionals we have rules: we have busy schedules, we must make choices about what fits or not our season and our long-term plans, what interests us or not, what suits us or not. It is our job, we can not do everything, nor accept anything. Quality over quantity. And being professional means you sometimes have to say no. And we must learn to do that because it’s not as easy as it looks.

The pianist’s career path is long, difficult and requires many skills that nobody teaches us during our student life. It is a major weakness in our educational system and if we were really prepared for this life, many of us would avoid many of the art business pitfalls.

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Your first step towards a recording is a good definition of the project. Clearly, why do you want to record? For promotion? To be a worldwide famous star? Every artist has different expectations about recording and the solution must be tailored to his needs. In my case, I want to record because I love working in studios, because I have a program that is close to my heart and deserves to be heard by a wider audience than the concert one. Of course, I also need a CD as promotional support, I do not deny it.

My current experiments with independent labels and those of my colleagues are not very successful. The music market is going through a crisis. None of them provides conditions satisfying my own desires and needs, and the ratio time and investment vs. benefits is quite inconclusive. I still have to produce the CD on my own with a lot less freedom than via self-production while promotion and distribution remain uncertain. Apart from wasting sponsors’ money, which is not in my interest, I do not really understand the advantage of such a system, especially since the days of many independent labels are numbered: if the label collapses, you must take everything from scratch once again.

Majors: not an option for me right now. While distribution and promotion are almost perfect, it is a double edged sword and can hurt you very badly. I’m not big enough to negotiate a fabulous contract with a major label : I’ll be “washed-up” quickly. It is indeed very interesting to record for DG, Sony and others when you have access to their premium service. Not when you are one of the thousands average artists who recorded for them. In short, you don’t call them, they’ll call you, if they fell in love with you or if there is business to be done, in brief if you represent a profitable investment.

If running his own label was a really crazy idea for an independent artist a few decades ago, today many are doing well running their own company. The advantages are numerous: you can keep control over your career, control product quality and have an opportunity to truly express your unfettered musical vision. But it’s no bed of roses. It’s a titanic task, and promotion and distribution are difficult to handle when you start from scratch. But the development of new distribution channels and growth of music downloads are pushing us in that direction and help us to realize such projects. So why not?

Recording is not (except in very rare instances) a source of income anymore, the industry has substantially changed, technologies have changed, but we, classical musicians, are still thinking as we used to years ago. It is time for us to move on, to get a different perspective on the recording industry and finally create a business model serving the artists’ and music lovers’ interests.

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1. Know your “customer”. Since you can not contact everyone, you have to make a choice. Gather information about your potential prospects and evaluate whether or not you could fit their plans. Contacting an opera festival to book a violin-piano duo is a non-sense. With a good targeting, you will avoid plenty of rejection and loss of time and money.

2. Contact the right person at the right time. All the festivals or seasons have their own schedule. For each potential organizer you need to know who handles the booking of artists and when are the good times to contact him/her. Sending a promotional kit to the wrong contact or after the deadlines often lead to the same result: At best your kit will be forgotten in a drawer somewhere, at worst it will be immediately discarded.

3. Have something to sell. Put yourself in the presenter’s shoes: Why should they book me and not someone else? What are the benefits for him/her? What am I offering? Would my proposal be really interesting for a presenter?

4. Prepare your pitch call. Write down what you have to say in order to not babble on the phone and stay understandable. Moreover, you will not forget anything. Practice with a friend to be comfortable with your pitch calls. This seems unnecessary, you do know your product well, but believe me, you can easily be disturbed and lose the thread.

5. Be persistent without becoming boring. You’ll rarely reach the person you want at you first call. You can leave messages, but most presenters get far too many cold calls and are far too busy to return them. 3 calls are enough: if after 3 attempts to interest them you still get nothing, move on. Keep the presenter on your mailing list and invite him/her to performances in his/her area and send information about the major events of your career. I call this the passive prospection.

Booking concerts is an exhausting process. We musicians have not been trained for it and we must learn to introduce and sell ourselves. This is far from easy, and for some of us became a full time job. But some have achieved great carrers while being self-managed, so why not you?

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My first act was to open up space for a deep introspection. Trying to discover what direction I really want to take, what is really interesting me in the pianist’s job. In addition to the tip of the iceberg, namely concerts, I discovered that transmission of knowledge is an area which is attracting me very much. So I developed a series of workshops around the piano and music of our time, in parallel with traditional master-classes, and refocused on educational programs as a core activity.

These last six months, I also discovered lots of things. Newly self-managed artist, I must say that this experience, even if extremely rewarding, is not a picnic. It is a totally new aspect of the job for me and I did a lot of rookie mistakes which have made me feel a little ashamed. Booking concerts, contacting presenters, selling myself, all this is far from easy, even with a wide experience in the music business. When not swimming (sinking?) in, the management may seem pretty simple. When confronted to it, we get lost easily, and you get discouraged very quickly.

I also found time to adjust my repertoire, at last! Some scores out and some new pieces as Debussy’s studies or Incises of Boulez (whose birthday was yesterday!). New concertos, like Bartok third, enrich my repertoire with orchestra. Sometimes, spring cleaning is good! Spring Cleaning for my technique also, since I practiced a lot and radically changed my technique (I wanted it for a while !). The result is very interesting and I hope you’ll see this in a few months!

These last six months are very positive. I was finally able to think on and confront myself to the music world as it is in reality. I do not regret at all this “suspension” of (public) activity . Occasionally you need to take a bit of distance and change the way of doing things, and that’s what I wanted to do during this break.

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From Gramophone to The Sun, there’s only a short step… The free artist, making his own choices disappeared beneath marketing. To reach a new audience and sell more than ever is one of our leaders’ main ideas. In our world of image, the most important is not the contents anymore but the container. In their race, the labels do not bet anymore on musician’s quality of interpretation but on his appearance, and his actor’s skills.

Anna Netrebko in a famous quizz show is, according to Deutsche Grammophon, a success: the head of international marketing points out that 70.000 discs were sold in the two months following the broadcasting. But is this really a place for Anna Netrebko?

They now sell us Grimaud’s lovely face, the lips of Renee Fleming, the plunging neckline of Angela Gheorghiu, and so on… Arièle Butaux, producer for France Musique, stated: “at equal talent, a pretty girl with blue eyes will prevail over an ugly oily-haired girl.“ And went on: “And what is certain is that in the 21st century, Clara Haskil would not pursue a career!”. This proves that with higher talent, a chubby person does not have any career opportunity.

In our perfect world, the box-office diktat gained the upper hand on musical thought. It’s now essential to sell discs. The time when the record label bet on an artist and let him progress fifteen or twenty years is behind us. People need stars. A young singer enters the marketplace, O.k., but he must sing all the repertoire immediately. Producers make him believe that he can do it, and finally he looses his voice.

Today, there is no time to wait. Everything is going faster and faster, but towards where? We need time to build and grow a repertoire, but nobody wants to wait anymore. “It becomes difficult to think about the meaning of a music when reigns the race for contracts and planes. But perhaps we cannot mix anymore the current life style with the internal rhythm of the serious music.” said Rostropovitch. But who wants to know the meaning of a music? Who wants to understand music? Surely not a large majority of professionals, who only see in it one simple product which can bring them glory as well as money.

The keyword now is : marketing. You have to sell. Tickets for example: so you’re frequently asked to play a program with only classical hits, and pay attention to communication: Your career depends on it. A new spirit was born, art is becoming a huge company adapted to the customer. I hope that all is not lost and art is not a company. Should it be otherwise, then art would be dead.

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Indeed, once the conservatory is over, we are confronted to stewardship problems. Most of the time, not enough supported, we must manage everything by ourselves: solicit concerts organizers, manage press relations, deal contracts…

However, at school, we never heard about this at all. I know our studies are already very heavy but a little training to music management wouldn’t have been too much and would have enabled many of us to save some precious time.

I’m thus asking the question: Why did no one have the brilliant idea to integrate management modules or an overview of the different jobs we’ll deal with through our career and which will help us in our course. I think it has become essential in our education.

When will there be extra courses in conservatories?

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