How To Profit From A Rising Trend In The Music Industry

Chris Graham (0:29)

Oh, total nerd out today. I hung some bookshelves in my office in homestudialessons.com central, and I'm really excited about it. I've never really had nice bookshelves before.

Brian Hood (0:39)

Everyone is literally yawning right now, Chris.

Chris Graham (0:41)

So dumb, yeah. Sorry, guys. All right, Brian, how are you doing?

Brian Hood (0:45)

I'm fine, it's cool.

Chris Graham (0:47)

Are you getting super jacked for your bachelor party, where you, myself, and many people I don't know, but who are apparently super good friends with you, all go out to Yosemite.

Brian Hood (0:58)

We just booked flights for this. This is fun. And I just found out what we're actually doing. Apparently, we're going to Yosemite State Park in America.

Chris Graham (1:03)

National Park. This ain't no state park bachelor party.

Brian Hood (1:07)

Oh, you're right. Sorry, that's national park in the middle of winter. So we gotta get snow chains on our tires. We're gonna hike 12 miles in the snow. It's gonna be a grueling self-discovery of a bachelor party. And I've got all my friends with me, so it's gonna be awesome, including Chris Graham, the one and only. Actually, winter NAMM is only the second time we've really ever been around each other in person.

Chris Graham (1:26)

This is true.

Brian Hood (1:26)

Which is weird. So two NAMM's are the two times we've been around each other, and then the third time will be my bachelor party. Fourth being my wedding. It's weird, as well as we know each other, we've not really spent much time together.

Chris Graham (1:36)

This is true.

Brian Hood (1:37)

It's weird. I feel like we're way closer than we actually are, at least physically.

Chris Graham (1:40)

Well, yeah, I'm nervous about that because I'm not a very touchy person, but I feel like I'm gonna have to hug you real big when I see you three times this winter.

Brian Hood (1:47)

This is a podcast about business, not about my bachelor party, not about my wedding, not about your bookshelves.

This is about how to run a successful business, and one of the biggest things about running a successful business is seeing changes in the industry before they've really taken hold, so that you can take advantage of them before everyone else does. And that's the big thing about trends, is there's a bell curve that comes with trends. When something starts to take hold, there is a gradual increase, and then it peaks out, and then that's the point of saturation, and then effectively it starts to decrease. And if you jump in too late, you are going to get the last little remaining bits of the benefit of that trend. And so we're going to hopefully bring up something that we've kind of noticed this year as being more and more of a trend that hopefully our listeners can start taking advantage of before it becomes over saturated. Chris, do you want to kind of talk about what we have started to notice, or do you want to preface this before we actually talk about what that thing is?

Chris Graham (2:44)

Yeah, well, let me kind of put my prophecy hat on as we predict tectonic shifts in the music industry. I'm going to make a prediction here. We're going to talk about this. And I think what Brian and I have to say is right on the money. We are already beginning to see a shift, and this impacts our industry. If you are a mixing engineer, a mastering engineer, a studio owner, a producer, a session musician, fill in the blank, if you are in the music industry, this shift will dramatically affect you.

We're working on getting some people to come on the show to interview that are ground zero in this shift. So stay tuned for more episodes about this in the future. But here's the shift that Brian and I see. Over the past 100 years, our industry revolved around, and Brian, you brought this up earlier, what we would call a waterfall sequence of events.

So a band would come in, they would work on a record for a long time, and then that record would release, and then they'd switch from recording production product making mode to promoting mode. They'd hit the road and they'd promote that record and try to sell it. As everybody listening probably knows if you're over the age of seven, something dramatic happened about two decades ago where suddenly you couldn't make one good song and have 10 other mediocre songs and sell that for $20 anymore. All of a sudden, if you had a good song, the good song would sell, but nobody was willing to pay you $20 for your album. So this has dramatically changed things. There was sort of a golden age. There was home studio world, plus people still bought CDs in the early 2000s where people could make a lot of money as a touring band, especially solo musicians. They were killing it.