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Unusual success stories in music
When I was 20 years old in 2000 one of my friends gave me a stack of Jandek albums. I think that the stack was about 20 albums. That same friend has given me roughly 30 more Jandek albums since then.
Back in 2000 I had no idea who Jandek was, partly because YouTube didn’t exist, and there wasn’t a lot of information about him online then. The albums were amazingly light on details.
I’ll give Jandek some credit and admit that his albums are intriguing to me. On the other hand, a little Jandek tends to go a long way for me, so his songs are only right for certain disturbed moods.
I don’t think that he made much money from his first 40 albums, but somewhere along the way he became legendary and wealthy, thanks to the massive development of the internet across the world.
My friend claims that Jandek has made more than $5,000,000 from album sales without ever getting on social media, except for what gets posted by other people. Jandek hasn’t gone out looking for publicity.
Jandek isn’t his real name, but he doesn’t even refer to himself as Jandek. All he admits to is that he’s a representative of Corwood Industries. Some of his fans just call him The Rep.
As he gradually became a cult-level star he started doing a few live shows per year. I’ve heard that he never acknowledges the existence of the audience during a show. He just walks off when he’s done.
I believe that every Jandek live show becomes a live album. My friend says that there are thousands of strange people around the world who buy every album that Jandek releases through Corwood Industries.
That's over 100 albums by now. Even with the volume discount the math makes sense. When you have that many albums it only takes a few thousand obsessed fans to make each million bucks.
You shouldn’t automatically rule out music as a profitable career choice. You can probably write songs and perform the songs at least as well as Jandek does. Talent isn't really the issue.
There are other people and strategies that I’d like to cover, but for now I just want to focus some attention on the Jandek strategy. If you’re weird and prolific you might hit it big someday.
https://corwoodindustries.com/shop/
Comments
Here’s another unusual example, but it’s a completely different type of example than Jandek. I’m not really surprised that this girl hit it big. It’s mainly just that her background is freakishly unusual.
I sometimes go to acoustic festivals in somewhat out-of-the-way places around the U.S. My favorite times at the festivals are after-hours get-togethers where people talk and play late into the night.
People started mentioning a girl named Sierra Hull. She must have been about ten when I started hearing about her. She was supposedly a prodigy, but I hadn’t seen her so she was just a mystery to me.
The video I’m posting here is probably the first thing that I saw of her work. It’s about as down-home as it gets, so the setting doesn’t make it seem like the players are destined for success.
The playing is jaw-dropping, particularly at her age in the video, and particularly since guitar wasn’t even her main instrument. Please don’t let the first part steer you away without watching the whole song.
It’s really pleasing to me to know that the young girl in the video has gone on to make millions of dollars from her musical talent. It’s not really surprising, but it’s far from a given, in a fickle industry.
In her case, she’s gotten rich simply through talent and enthusiasm. It seems like she takes any chance that she gets to plays with anyone. She’s already legendary, but only in certain circles.
As an example, I heard that Sturgill Simpson was going to stream an online show with a backing-band of hand-picked musicians. I wondered if Sierra would be in that band, and she was.
Neither of these examples are actually the main point of what I want to cover. It’s going to take me a while to figure out how to write what I want to explain. This is just sort of a warm-up so far.
Back in my stoner days I sometimes hung out with guys who thought they were bad-asses. They were way too hard and cool to even consider the possibility of being into Rundgren.
I had a stereo that could be heard from blocks away. Sometimes we even tested that feature by seeing how far away we could travel across town before losing the traces. It was about a half-mile, so on a raucous night we probably annoyed a lot of people.
Sometimes, just for fun, I would play Heavy Metal Kids and Little Red Lights to my friends who thought that they hated Todd Rundgren. At the volume I played it the songs pinned them back in their seats, and they definitely had a new respect for Rundgren afterwards.
That’s just reminiscing though. The post here is one of Todd’s pretty songs, and the reason I’m posting it now is that the cover band is an example of a modern success story in music.
They’re a good band, but in the past that wouldn’t have amounted to anything. It’s only thanks to the current era that a cover-band of complete unknowns can get millions of total views for their output.
Very interesting, thanks for posting this! Reminds me of Matt Farley:
https://medium.com/better-marketing/how-matt-farley-built-a-65k-per-year-music-empire-from-his-basement-99b1192e762a
I'm not necessarily a fan of quantity over quality, but I have respect for him for using the system to his advantage.
Wow!!!
There are obviously examples of people who get obnoxiously self-promotional online. I don’t even like it when good-natured and mostly-modest people harangue at me to subscribe and click the bell. I know how to subscribe if I feel like it. I never want to be notified of anything.
On the other hand, I get sort of tired of the attitude that music can’t be profitable. Most musicians now are like kids shooting hoops in the driveway. There’s nothing wrong with having zero career ambition to be in the music industry. It just bugs me that so many people assume that they can never have success.
One main problem is that even the best advice is extremely unlikely to work well. I’m not in the business of giving advice, and I don’t think that anyone should ever follow my advice about anything, so that’s not really my intent here. I just love to think and strategize. I hope that people develop their own plans.
There are lots of advice-gurus on YouTube who will tell you exactly what you have to do to be successful with your music. I'm not going to say that the gurus are full of shit. I'm just saying that some of them have hundreds of thousands of followers, and I pity the people in the music industry who wind up being harassed by the followers of the advice-gurus.
Another thing that I'm saying is that out of the hundreds of thousands of people who watch the videos I'd guess that only 1% of the people will get anywhere close to success even by following the advice perfectly.
With that mind, I'm just going to explain an uncrowded opportunity that just about any musician can do. The money can be as good as you want it to be, unless you're way greedier than me. You can't use the option immediately, but you're probably not ready for it yet. It took me a few years of practice.
One option worth considering is doing shows at schools. You don’t have to be booked by a school. You can be your own booker and promoter and everything else. It’s way easier than most people realize.
My life changed one afternoon roughly ten years ago when I pulled into Hana, HI. I saw a sign in front of a school that announced an upcoming show by Kris Kristofferson.
I had no interest in seeing the show, which isn’t a knock on Kris. My interest in the sign was simply in wondering why in the world a big star would be a show at a dinky little small-town public school.
I wondered if his career had hit the skids, like the aging rockers who do shows at county-fairs. I did a quick google search and saw that his net-worth was more than $150,000,000.00, so he was doing OK.
It turned out that he has an estate near Hana, so the show in the school gym was probably just a good way to be part of the community. It still got me thinking about the option of doing shows at schools.
My next thoughts led me back to my college experiences. I had already played a lot of live shows before I started college, but by the time I graduated I had played in front of hundreds of thousands of people.
One semester I took a course that only lasted for one weekend. It covered the history of songwriting, which isn’t easily explained in just a weekend, so the course focused on ancient songwriters.
The course was taught by a married couple who traveled around the U.S. giving the course. I don’t know how much my university paid the couple to give the course.
I do know that the couple put on a Saturday night show that wasn’t related to the course. That venue sat about 500 people, and they filled it. I think the tickets were $15 each.
That means that the couple’s Saturday night show took in about $7500. I don’t know if they booked the venue on their own, or if the university handled that part.
Even though I couldn’t be sure of the details, particularly years after the course and the show, I was reasonably sure that the couple made at least a few thousand dollars for a weekend of fun work.
The main point is that ten years ago I got to thinking about doing shows at schools. One good thing about schools is that there are lots of them around wherever there are people.
What I realized is that I didn’t have to jump through many hoops to work the plan. Lots of schools are willing to rent spaces to pretty much anyone who isn’t a complete lunatic.
The vetting process varies widely from school to school. The rental charges range from insanely expensive to shockingly cheap. I’ve booked school venues for $35 to $3000.
There are a lot of advantages to school venues. There is generally good parking that’s either free or cheap for the audience. Security is always good. The restrooms are clean.
The audience at a school is always affected by the setting, so people are way better behaved at a school show than they would be at a biker bar. I’ve played scary venues, but school shows never scared me.
One main reason why I’m posting this here is that the people are a brainy crowd, and it seems to me that your skill-sets are a good fit for doing shows at schools.
For one thing there is no box to think outside of. The box doesn’t exist at all. When you put together a show you get to be the Queen For A Day or the King Of The Night. You just have to be entertaining.
You could put on a great show at a school without even needing great shows, or any official song-like things at all. Most people here could wow a crowd just through skillful editing of what you know.
Most of you seem annoyed when an app doesn’t have three or five features that you want, but that doesn’t matter in a show. You can just stick to an endless supply of amazing things that do work.
The point is that the general public is generally unaware of music apps and VSTs and DAWS. I don’t think they want all the details anyway. They just want to be entertained.
The beauty of doing shows at schools is that you can be experimental and learn on the fly without much or any risk, and almost no expense. We started our experiments with renting the $35 space for shows.
It’s not really bragging to say that we learned how to easily get 50 people to pay $20. They got enough content that it would cost have them $1000 for the same content back in 2000 or even 2005.
Making almost $1000 for a two-hour show is good work if you can get it, and you can. I realize that you can’t do live shows right now, but you can definitely plan ahead and get yourself ready now.
We woodshedded for a few years before we were ready to start the plan. We not only recorded the music along the way, we filmed our practice shows to eliminate anything that looked dorky.
Now I am going to brag. Anyone who does the same over and over again hundreds of times will learn a lot just by keeping track and paying attention and gradually improving.
The best thing about school shows from a career perspective is that you can get to amazingly good numbers surprisingly smoothly. You can sell 700 tickets for $20 each at a school venue.
You can do way better than that, but the point is that the number of schools is pretty much unlimited for any specific musician who wants to work the plan. It’s not a crowded career option.
People like to install their own roadblocks, and that’s a subject that keeps therapists busy, but from what I’ve seen, the school option only has minor roadblocks that are pretty easy to jump or eliminate.
That’s all that I have to say for now. My next post, if I make one, will cover the experiments that I’m doing to sell songs from home, and even do live shows from home. The experiments have been lots of fun lately.
Some good stuff thanks for sharing.
I used to play mandolin in a bluegrass band, it’s not easy doing that stuff for a whole gig, or as we did one night on a french tour - an 8 hour stint. I’ve still got the scars to prove it!
But. Another time. We landed a gig at a bluegrass festival in Ironbridge. The thing with bluegrass festivals, is that people wander around the campsite, gathering in groups and jamming. So before the gig we had a wander around. A lot of campers/punters were well-heeled professional looking types - bankers, doctors etc., and most had very, very expensive guitars. And stetsons. Ha ha we thought. Thinking we’d show them how it was done, our raggle taggle group approached the first bunch playing...
Well. They were like the guys in the video, but better, and faster. And this was just their hobby. After we’d picked our jaws off the ground, and quietly put our instruments away, we observed a few more groups, all equally mind blowing. None of them professionals, all of them ridiculously good. Hundreds of amateur, hobbyists playing like the devil was blowing fairy dust up their bottoms.
Bluegrass players....it’s a bit of a thing.
I have learned good things in these posts.
@Janie I love your straightforward no bullshit way and look forward to anything else you have to share with us/teach us.
@MonzoPro There goes my bluegrass career....
Seriously, good stuff.
Very interesting collection of posts here Janie, thoughtful, inspiring and well-written, keep 'em coming.
That’s the second time today I’ve heard a reference to painting teeth... 🤔
Very interesting thread btw!