Your varied positions right out of school sound like they provided a good range of work and the opportunity to enable you to learn a lot and build a good practice.
And I got lucky. There is a certain amount of fortuity, luck, fortune, hard work and experience that go into that. I did the volunteering with the band early on because I was just happy to help out. At Davidson I had been on the concert committee and had a radio show. I was always interested in music but I was interested more in the business side of music: how does it work?
Were there any concerns with presenting these songs prior to the album's creation or release?
What was really interesting about those shows is that when you play something in 2007 live it goes over the Internet. It's on peoples' cellphones and it's immediately all around the Internet. We decided it was fine. We decided to kind of go with the flow.
In fact, a lot of the early word that Accelerate was a really good record was because of that and it didn't hurt us. It's hard to tell exactly what the effect was, but we didn't ever sense that it did. What it did do was let people hear these same songs live, rougher versions of them that eventually get perfected into this beautiful masterpiece ... same songs. They still bought the record.
It was a very successful record for us. We didn't feel like it hurt; in fact, it probably helped that there were some advance fans. People in Atlanta who would have loved to have been there ended up seeing it on YouTube. It ended up being a good thing. But it definitely at the time felt like it was kind of risky.
Over the years did you ever feel any power struggles with defining your duties as manager against the duties being imposed or put on you by others in the business?
I've always tried to approach things with collaborative, pardon the cliché, but as transparent, fair-dealing, and direct and, you know, just good clear communication ... but no, the world's definitely changing in the way record labels, managers and agents and artists and advertisers operate. There are just so many more variables now than there were when we started.
How so?
When we started it was a really simple world. When we started you made a record, you got a record deal, you put it out and you toured. You might make it. These were pretty much the possibilities.
Now, there are so many more ways to release records, so many more ways to promote records, so many more ways to reach people. So everybody's doing it, so it's a more cluttered world but nobody really knows what the magic combinations are to make it any more.
One thing is for sure, you can't monetize the sale of the recorded music the way that you once did. Sales are just not the same. There are other things, streaming services, touring, etc. There are just so many more variables now so it's a much more complicated world than the one we started in.
