Clyde Lawrence (Lawrence)

Clyde Lawrence (0:00)

I think a lot of artists end up not only not being the CEOs of their own company, they end up not even working at their own company, they end up being the product.

Nick Grossman (0:08)

Welcome back to The Slow Hunch. On this episode, I'm thrilled to welcome Clyde Lawrence to the show. He is, along with his sister Gracie, the co-founder of the band Lawrence. They've been around for over a decade and have built a really incredible catalog of music and content, and have built a really interesting business around being musicians that's really creative and diverse and independent spirited. We're going to talk not just about the creation of music, but the creation of business around music.

Clyde Lawrence (0:38)

I was hoping that AI would be helping me do my dishes so that I could make my art, not helping me make my art so I had more time to do my dishes. And I feel like there's a little bit of that with like how AI is like impacting the music industry. It's like, how about we let artists make their fucking music, and let's let AI like route your tour.

Nick Grossman (0:57)

We filmed this in my apartment in New York, and right after we finished, Clyde headed straight up to Broadway where he and his sister are starring in a Broadway show that they helped create, which is just another example of the kind of incredible stuff that they're up to. Hope you enjoy the conversation with Clyde. It was so much fun. Here we go. You and I have talked a little bit about not the theory of music, but the business of music. And that's also a complicated topic that it's hard to understand unless you're in it. And I think of you and Lawrence as a really interesting band because you have a genuine presence, you play live a lot, you've done some really interesting things on the business side. I think you're trying to come at the business with new eyes in a way that feels like it works for you, works for your fans, and that's not an easy thing to pull off or to even try to navigate versus just playing the game on the field. Anyway, so maybe first just introduce yourself and tell us who you are.

Clyde Lawrence (2:29)

I'm Clyde Lawrence. Me and my sister Gracie are the band leaders of a band called Lawrence, which is our last name. I'm currently super over indexed on Lawrence merch. I'm accidentally wearing Lawrence store pants and a Lawrence hat, all of which you can find on our website.

And the band is not only composed of me and Gracie, but also of six of our best friends that we have been playing music with, the eight of us together for over 10 years now. So I'm sure we're going to talk about a lot of interesting, you know, successes and challenges that we've had. But one of the coolest things is that this group of eight of us has remained intact for over, I think, 11 years now. We tour all over the world, we release music, and probably notably for this conversation, we are way more independent and DIY than I would argue pretty much any band of our level of development. Almost 99.999% of bands that are at the level that we're at have a way more robust infrastructure and have way more of the equity of everything they're doing farmed out to and owned by other major companies in the way that we do.

Nick Grossman (3:52)

That's an incredible statement, and so we'll go back and figure out how we got to hear from there. So upfront, what does it mean to be 99% more independent than anybody else at your stage? What kind of stuff is that?

Clyde Lawrence (4:05)

Yeah, so I mean, one really obvious example is most artists are on a record label. Record deals, I mean, I know that probably you and your listener base will be more able to digest me throwing numbers at them than like when I'm on a music podcast. Most record deals can be anywhere from the record label taking anywhere from like 30 to very frequently like 80 to 85% of the equity, not in the whole company of the band, but in the particular recording project that they're investing in. So we don't have something like that. We have a really awesome deal with this producer named John Bellion, who's an amazing guy that is a creative partner to us, and has become almost like a extended family member and advisor, and just an overall person who we've struck a deal with, where he does in a way that's a little different than just a producer would. We do, he does have some equity in the recording side, but vastly less than like a traditional label would.