This Is Wendy Day

Hey, I'm Wendy Day. I have been in the music industry since 1992. See, I have the gray hair to prove it. Yay! I've been working with rap artists for a very long time. It's the music that I like the most, which is really kind of surprising being that I'm a middle-aged white woman, right? But Anywho, um, I've built a lot of millionaires in the urban music business. And in fact, you know what, I should probably put that on my business card: building millionaires in music since 1992. That's just silly, isn't it? Anywho, um, I started by— I came to rap as a fan of the music in 1980. It's— rap was really just starting to begin on the streets mostly of New York. I lived in Philadelphia at the time. And, um, in 1992, I decided that I wanted to become part of the actual music industry, and I started a not-for-profit organization called Rap Coalition. And Rap Coalition did a bunch of things, um, and it still exists today. Yay! Um, Rap Coalition pulls artists out of bad deals Um, we help educate and support artists so that they know what's fair and acceptable. Um, and we offer a source of information for artists that want to learn more about the music industry. After about 4 years of, um, helping artists get out of bad deals, I realized that it would be helpful to get them into good deals. So I started negotiating some deals with major labels for some artists that had leverage, meaning artists that could get really great deals. My goal was never to just get artists signed to labels. My goal was to get really fair deals for artists where they would earn the lion's share of the money. Um, many of my deals, the artists owned their masters and still do. I've had the luxury of and the good fortune of building some incredible superstars, which is fun. But I gotta tell you, I really like the early stages. I really like building artists from the ground up, like when they are at a point where nobody knows who they are and it's very unprofitable to work with them. So it's really kind of a bad business model, right? I really enjoy building artists and converting their, their, their potential fans into rabid fans. I really enjoy that ground-up grind. There's so much authenticity with artists when they are new in the music business, and I love having the opportunity to educate artists about what's fair and acceptable and helping them profit from their own art form. Which is one of my missions in, in, in, in life and in the music business. And, um, I find that once they become stars, it's not as much fun because you really can't help them chart the direction of their career. It, it becomes more of, um, answering the phone and choosing which opportunities are the best, because the opportunities then start coming to the artist. It's a little bit more challenging to go after opportunities and seek opportunities. And when they're new, there's a lot more of that. There's more rejection too. There's a lot of people that tell you, no, I can't help you, nobody knows who your artist is. Um, but there's, there's so much more beauty in helping somebody grow from nothing to something. And I think that's the part of my job that I love the most. No, actually, the part of my job that I love the most is educating artists and people that want to work in the music business about how the music business works. This is one of those industries where if you're not in the inner circle on the inside, it's very hard to get information. And the people on the inside kind of protect their circle, and they protect outsiders from coming in because they don't want anybody messing with their money. And that's just the way the music industry is. And, and I'm kind of the opposite of that. I'm sort of the, the odd egg that wants to share information with everybody. I just believe that there's enough money in this world for everybody, and we don't need to really compete with each other. We can build our own careers and all fit together in this wonderful thing we call the music business. Um, so yeah, educating artists is probably, um, the part for me that's the most gratifying of what it is that I do. And through that, you know, I've written books, I've got a blog, um, I have a YouTube channel, This is Wendy Day. I've got a podcast. So there are many different ways that I educate artists. I speak on panels all the time. I'm about to start a series of webinars so that artists can learn from, you know, their cell phones or the luxury of their own home sitting in their pajamas, which by the way I am sitting here in my pajamas. But that's what I do, and I love what I do, and I'm really glad you're here checking me out. And if you go to WendyDay.com, that is kind of the central clearinghouse of everything that I do. You can, you can link to all of my websites from there. You can take a look at what I do and have fun. Knock yourself out. Pull up a chair, drink a beer. Bye.