Thankfully Randy was able to set aside a few minutes to get interviewed and gave me a big hand with this project and I would like to thank him for his help on this and in getting my foot in the door of the music industry.
Randy has been working around the music industry since just before Creed (yes, laugh now, but back in the late 90's no one was bigger at the time than them, and they sold around a truck load and a half of records, which is significantly more than ten million more than me so I'm not judging and you probably shouldn't either...) who he worked with as day to day manager during their heyday on top of the industry if not the world. Over the course of the last ten years working in nearly every aspect of the music industry Randy has managed to learn a thing or two about how to manage products through the distribution chain and what is important to an artist in today's changing market that is the music business.
After the interview I took Randy's responses and edited them into this paper:
Recently Randy Dease took time out of his hectic schedule as an artist manager to sit down with myself and offer some insight into the artist management world of the music business. Randy graduated from UCF in December of 1999 and gave himself till March 1st to find a job he liked, after that he was just going to take any job that presented itself. After going around the Orlando area hunting for a job for a few weeks, he decided to start interning with Axis Magazine doing interviews in exchange for event tickets and CD’s. After interning for a little bit he was asked to give his resume to Jeff Hampton Management – a company from Tallahassee. His interview with Jeff Hampton came the Friday before his March 1st deadline, so he had resigned himself to working a “crappy retail job” and decided working in a management firm was more interesting and took the job. He started out answering phones, taking out the trash, and scrubbing toilets with a college education for about the first six months. Around that point the day-to-day manager for Creed was fired, and an opening was created. Randy was promoted to being the day-to-day manager of Creed and at the age of 23. This was right around the time Creed was doing it’s world tour’s and being featured on MTV and VH1, so life got crazy really fast.
His schedule went from ‘clean the toilet and answer the phone’ to ‘red carpets, promo schedules, and arranging insurance for when the band played on top of the Reno and trying to not blow up the helicopter filming it with pyrotechnics’ and this hectic world of music on the road became his schedule until the band broke up in the fall of 2003. In the start of 2004 former members of Creed joined forces to create Alterbridge, and Randy began managing them, as well as Sevendust. He managed them until 2007 when he parted ways to start Fly South Music Group with a friend named Mark he met working at Hampton’s who was managing Paramore. Randy and Mark and a mutual friend John started up Fly South in the middle of 2007 and have since signed several artists including Brooke Waggnor, Boyce Avenue, and Whole Wheat Bread. Most of their artists have yet to break into the main stream of music, however the artists are growing in fan base and popularity even as I type this.
When asked how new artists are picked Randy chuckled and said, “Well there isn’t a science to it really. At least not in my opinion.” He explained that he signed Brooke through a friend of a friend of a friend who knew someone in Nashville who saw Brooke play an open mic night and only knew one person in the music industry who passed her name along. After working in the music industry for ten years now, Randy said that a network already existed and things just fall into place at this point. He didn’t know how a person would just set out and find someone to manage by a certain deadline, there are simply too many variables involved.
Randy has a unique opinion on where he as an artist manager fits in the distribution chain in today’s industry. Prior to the emerging paradigm that is dawning on the music industry today record labels had a stranglehold on distribution and marketing of music, however today this isn’t the case as much any longer. Today, the artist has options available to distribute their music on their own that the labels aren’t even needed any more except for the mega-hits over night. Randy said “I know an artist who had a moderately big record in the early 2000’s and sold a million units, and never made a single dime off the record. The still have not recouped after 1,000,000 albums.” Now most of Randy’s artists distribute all their own CD’s and all their own merchandise. One artist registered 300,000 downloads in 2008 for their songs and Fly South handled all of the distribution of those songs. Prior to the explosion of the internet and digital music, without a label an artist couldn’t get radio, and without the radio they couldn’t sell tickets to their shows. The industry is much more hands on now than it ever has been.
A key piece of advice in distributing digital music Randy offered was to make sure to find a way to create awareness around your release. With the over saturation of the market currently due to the fact that “any idiot with garage band who knows three chords on his guitar can sell a CD” an artist has to find a way to show their product in a unique light. Various ways include releasing covers of other people’s music on Youtube, or releasing an EP for free to get people to realize what your band is doing. Hitting the road and selling your music online and from the trunk of the van is still a possibility and a decent way of creating buzz around your music. The biggest thing to keep in mind when breaking into the industry is “that there is a lot of shit and distractions out there – the hardest thing to do is to stand out from the crowd” according to Randy.
Randy feels that for the recording industry, the business is as bad as it has ever been, but feels that for the business of making music – it has never been better than it is today. The resources available to artists to record and distribute their music is great; however, from a business standpoint it’s hard for consumers to find things that they like in the pile of media available out today. The biggest advice Randy had to offer to someone like myself trying to get into the industry is to research the industry constantly, with the way things change today you can’t expect to land a dream job without knowing where things are going. Also he said to educate yourself on as many facets of the music business as possible. The final word of advice he offered was don’t be afraid to work REALLY hard to break in; if that means rolling t-shirts and cleaning toilets, while the work might suck, do it better than anyone else they offer the job to; then the only way is up.
