Guerilla Guide to the Music Business

by Dave Laing, Sarah Davis (Editor)

A companion to the successful "Guerilla Film Maker's Handbook", this book deals with every aspect of professional music making in today's popular music industry on both sides of the Atlantic. In creating music and developing a career, almost everyone starts out "independently", that is without the support of a large company. However, independent music making can be defined in a broad sense as a particular attitude towards creating and distribution of music held by professional people. The attitude involves a commitment to retaining control over your work as far as it is practically comaptible with getting it to the larget possible relevant audience. This does not necessarily mean that the independent musician does everything him or herself. One of the most important dimensions of the book will be the checklists of questions musicians need to ask themselves in order to decide whether they need outside help from a manager, lawyer, accountant, record company, music publisher, agent, press officer, plugger etc. The book is divided into six sections, each of which includes brief interviews with key experts. The first two deal with the main areas of musical activity - live performance and recording. Section three explains other aspects of musical activity while section four gets down to the nitty-gritty of the business aspects of making music. Section five summarizes the whole area through some well-chosen real life examples of independent musical activity. Finally, a toolkit section will provide examples of key documents (recording contracts, PRS membership agreements, etc) and other relevant data.

Genres: Nonfiction, Music

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001