In this introductory video, Wendy Day explains why understanding the music business is essential for artists and outlines the myriad components that make up a successful music career. She emphasizes that talent alone isn’t enough; musicians must learn marketing, fan‑building, promotion, digital presence, SEO, publicity, publishing, royalties, copyright, performance‑rights organizations, SoundExchange, distribution formats, metadata, ISRC codes, radio tracking, sales tracking, contract law, team building, finance, video/content creation, and personal life‑skill management. Day stresses the importance of surrounding oneself with knowledgeable professionals, studying successful independent models (e.g., Chance the Rapper, Think It’s a Game), and maintaining a proactive, goal‑oriented mindset. She also points viewers to her archived video series, blog (wrapjewels.com), and podcast (rapanomics.com) and shares her publishing schedule. The video serves as a roadmap, whetting the audience’s appetite to dive deeper into each topic through her subsequent, more detailed videos.
Chapters
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in today. This is Wendy Day and I've made some notes. This video I'm making because it was actually a direct request from one of you guys asking me to make a video about the importance of really learning the business side of music. And the thing about the music industry is that it's a very closed industry, meaning if you're not in the inner circle of the industry, it's a little bit challenging to find out how to succeed in the music business. It's not like you can just get a book on how to market or promote your music and succeed because all music is different, right? So it's really more than just making music and performing music to succeed in the music business. And, um, once you make the music, you have to get it to your fans, right? You have to figure out who those fans are, how you're gonna get it to them, when you're gonna get it to them, and then which music you're gonna get to them. And what I did when I first started making these videos, I made a list of all of the different components that I wanted to talk about and just the general topics. There's like 60 of them. There's like 60 different things that I wanted to talk about, and some of those topics can be broken down into like 5 or 6 videos. So this is not an easy industry, but it's an industry where you really have to understand how it works so that you don't end up giving away your music and letting someone else profit from that music, or so that you don't waste your efforts, meaning you make music, the music's great, It may have, with the proper marketing and promotion, even been, you know, super viral hit records. But because you didn't know what to do with it or how to market it, it really just kind of stayed on your hard drive or stayed in your social media and never went anywhere. So that's kind of the goal of this YouTube channel, is to help you guys get to success, right? Um, so some of the things that you're going to have to, um, study and pay attention to, or find somebody to add to your team who specializes in these areas, right? And that would be marketing and building a fan base, promotions, um, like how to promote your music, um, building websites and your social media accounts, understanding SEO. SEO is, um, how you rank high when somebody runs a Google search on you, right? Keywords are really important to understand in SEO. And again, if you don't understand these things, you can find people to add to your team. Just make sure that you find people that are legitimately good at this and have a track record of success in doing this. Don't just find somebody who says they know about SEO and let them have at it. Make sure it's somebody that has done this professionally before. Um, publicity— you've got to understand publicity or have somebody that's a publicist. Publishing— you have to understand how the money comes back in. What are royalty payments? How does the money come back in once you put your music out there? How do you profit from your art form? How do you monetize your music? Um, copyrights and trademarks, publishing rights, or organization— excuse me, performance rights organizations, the PROs. That's ASCAP, BMI, SESAC. You want to understand SoundExchange, um, you want to understand pressing of music. How are you going to get the music to your fans? Are you going to use CDs or are you going to use MP3s? And if you're using MP3s, do you understand how to attach metadata to your music? Um, What are IRS— what are ISRC codes? IRS codes. And how do you attach them to your music? You need to understand if you're getting radio play, you need to have BDS and MediaBase. You need to have access or understanding of how that works. If you're selling physical copies, you're going to want to know what SoundScan is and how does that work. How do sales get tracked? Um, in fact, what is distribution? You know, how do you get it? What tools do you need to market and promote? Do you need posters, flyers, stickers, t-shirts? What, you know, what do you need to be able to advertise yourself? Where do you advertise? Production— what beats do you choose? How do you find beats? How do you find producers? What kind of deals do you have to do with the producers in order to be able to legally use their music? Um, what contracts do you need to have? Do you understand contracts? If a record label brings you a contract to sign to them, do you know where to go to get that contract, um, looked over by an attorney for you? Or do you have somebody to negotiate on your behalf? Do you understand who your team players are? Your manager, your publicist, your accountant, your booking agent, your internet person. Do you understand finance and budgets? You need to know whether you want to sign to a label or stay independent, and if you're going to sign to a label, what different types of deals are there? Um, videos— you need to understand how to make a video, what videos work, what web content works, why do you need content. There's so much more to understand about this music industry than just making music and putting it out there, right? And that's why I have built these, um, these video series, so that you can have a basic understanding and to sort of entice you to go and investigate more, do more research, find out, you know, if I'm talking about, um, I don't know, management or content, I'm hoping that the different conversations we have will entice you to go and do more thorough research. Who are the best managers? Who are the shitty managers? What makes somebody a good manager? How do they train? What are the best skills? Are there organizations for them to join as managers? Can you go to that organization and find a manager? When should you find a manager? When should you hire a manager? That's my goal, is in whetting your appetite so that you will go on to do more research and understand exactly how the music industry works. And this is one of those very basic videos. Um, I probably should have done this one first so that you would understand all of the different aspects that go into, um, building a career. And then the last thing I'm going to say is You know, there are different life skills that you need in order to succeed. You know, attitude is such an important thing. If you think you can succeed, or if you think that you cannot possibly succeed, you are right. Like, whatever you think is what is going to make you move forward or, or make you not move forward. You need to learn time management. You need to learn to set goals. You need to be a little bit organized. How do you handle procrastination? Are you somebody that even though you're doing all the right things, it's just very hard for you to get off your butt and go do it? This is an industry where you can work 20-hour days for 365 days a year and still not have enough time to do everything that you need to do. And study, you know, study some of the people that are out there doing this successfully. Study Chance the Rapper, you know, who's got a great independent career. If you're trying to be an independent artist, study Think It's a Game. You know, they're the label behind Rich Homie Quan and YFN Lucci and Trinidad James. I've been studying them up close for the past 2 years. You know, I'm a mentor to Fly, who owns Think It's a Game. And he teaches me stuff about the music industry every day based on what he's going through out there right now, you know, with Lucci, for example. So, um, it's important to surround yourself with people that are like-minded and that are successful. You are only going to be as successful as the people in your inner circle. Um, so you want to hang out with people that are more intelligent than you and more successful than you, so that when you have questions, you've got a resource. I mean, you guys have me, so You know, you email me questions constantly, so I, I get that. You know, once a week we go live and you ask me questions, but I'm not enough. You've got to have more resources than just me, and they've got to be legitimate resources. You know, how do you find people that are really successful at what they do who are willing to share that knowledge with you? Those are the people that you need to find out here, and there aren't a lot of us out here, but you need to find us those of us who are out here that are willing to share info so that as you move forward— and every day you should be moving forward, right? You shouldn't just be sitting back and studying. You can study, but you also need action and you need to move forward. So every day that you move forward, you're going to find new things that pop up that you need help with. So you need to have a system in place of people that you can turn to and ask. Meanwhile, please keep watching these videos. I've archived them at wrapjewels.com, so if you want to watch them in order, or if you just want to see them in a little bit cleaner fashion than on YouTube— YouTube doesn't quite archive them as neatly and nicely as I would like. Also at WrapJewels, if there is a topic that I've written an article about on my blog, I post it right there so you don't have to jumping back and forth between the This Is Wendy Day YouTube page and industryreport.com, which is my blog. I kind of have them all kind of linked together there to make it a little easier for you. And then for those of you who have requested that I turn this into a podcast or that I do a podcast, I've done that. It's at rapanomics.com, so that if you want to listen to these instead of watch them,, you now have the ability to do so. So guys, that's it for today. Um, I hope this was helpful. Um, again, it was an overview. I probably should have done this, um, within the first week of putting out these videos, but I kind of just jumped right into it and, um, started teaching you guys so that you would have different topics. I'm going to keep doing that. I do these 3 times a week: Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 11 AM. If you subscribe to this YouTube page, you will be notified when these post. And then of course we go live on Wednesday night at 7:00 Eastern Standard Time. Okay guys, thanks for tuning in. See you soon. Bye.
