Cover photo: digitalcowboys.com

Hi everyone! Today on Drooble – the social network for musicians, we have a special guest with much to say about music, for he has probably done more for online music education than most people on this planet. Meet Dave Kusek – a music business career coach and Former Vice President of Berklee College of Music, Founder of Berklee Online, Founder of Passport Music Software, co-author of best-selling music business book, The Future of Music, and Founder of The New Artist Model. There’s much more that can be said about Dave but it would be best to let him tell about himself. Read his thoughts on the music business these days and on the connection between success, self-management, the Internet and planning your career as a musician. Good reading!

Hey Dave! When and how did your relationship with music begin? Did you play any instruments? Did you you know it was your thing right away?

Well, like many people, I’m sure, I was very influenced by my family. My mom is a music teacher so I learned to play music when I was quite young – piano and singing, and guitar. So I was very much influenced by that and all the music playing in our house. I played in the school bands and, of course, we made rock and roll bands in high school. I enjoyed doing all of that and got a love for music like everyone else who starts that way.
I figured out early on that, although I loved music, I probably wasn’t disciplined enough to be a performer. So I gravitated more to the business side and the technical side in a very conscious way. Early on I got involved in working at one of the very first synthesizer companies. We made electronic drums and keyboard instruments. There was a small company called Electronic Music Labs and I got a job there when I was seventeen or eighteen, I was lucky. I met a lot of musicians who flowed through there at the time who were just amazing and that, again, kind of solidified my thinking that I was never gonna be that good. But maybe I could do something on the business or the technical side, so I learned programming and marketing, so that I could be part of the music industry without necessarily having to be a performer or a songwriter.

How did you end up working at Berklee?

I’ve always been an entrepreneur in music. I started the very first music software company called Passport in the 80’s. We made sequencers, recording and audio editing software, music notation transcription software, etc. We had a good run back in the early days with the Apple 2 and the Mac, when it came out. I was fortunate to be part of the evolution of personal computing, on the music side. I ran that company for quite a while and then eventually sold it. We moved to the Boston area and I got involved with Berkley. It was actually the first real job I ever had because I’d always run my own business. They were nice enough to let me basically start an online school as a startup. At the time Berkley had very little web presence and no online effort of any significance. It was a very well established college and had a huge reputation so we created a plan to create an online version of it. So we created the very first online music school and we learned how to teach music remotely. At the beginning it was fairly difficult because the bandwidth or the screen resolution weren’t quite there. There was no YouTube, no iPhone, Facebook or any social network, or anything.

A rather revolutionary endeavor at the time – how did you convince the college to go for it?

Yeah, it was challenging to get the faculty and the students on board and to actually make it work. That was the hard part and took us quite a while to really figure out how to teach music online. There’s performance and songwriting, and business, production, and engineering, and many, many other areas of music to teach. We started with music theory and eventually created a line of pro tools courses, and music business courses. They became very popular, the school grew and today it’s called Berklee Online. It’s really the world’s largest music school anywhere in terms of the number of people we were able to reach.

Photo: hypebot.com

How did you go from Berklee to what you’re currently doing? At some point you decided to write a book?

Well, yes, during those years my colleague Gerd Leonhard and I wrote a book called The Future of Music that we managed to published. It was a very crazy time in music and the disruption was just beginning. We were lucky enough to be able to interview a lot of people and get a good understanding at that time of where we thought the business was heading. The book was very well received, I think we sold 60 or 70 thousand copies so far. That was great because it gave me a platform to begin blogging, which, of course, was fairly new at the time and allowed me to kind of build a readership independent of Berkley, based on the book. After 14 years at Berkley I wanted a break so I left and took some time off. Then I decided to come back into the market with a new artist model project. I wanted to take advantage of the technologies that we have now, the platforms, everything that’s changed – the Internet, social media, bandwidth, screen resolution, storage. Now it’s always on, it’s in your pocket, in your hand. So I wanted to recreate a music school that was much more affordable and accessible, much more in tune with the reality of 2015, when I started. By then we’d seen the record companies collapse and the game changed for musicians. So I wanted to help artists more in the current time than in the way it used to be.

Today we have the Internet which is practically full of free information on any existing topic. When you’re new to something, however, you can never be sure which piece of advice is worth following and which is just something someone copied from somewhere to fill their website with content and attract search engine users. Would you say that, in terms of music business, it’s possible to manage just by looking hard enough online or should one always turn to a professional for real help?

I think it’s possible to search around online and find certain relevant videos and information and instructions. But two things are really important: you want to look for some kind of coherent system that you can apply to your music. What we did was try to reimagine what a new artist model would look like. We deliberately chose for the project a name that shows it’s a new game, it’s not radio or record label based. It’s very much entrepreneurial environment, it’s audience based. So we put together a program that is very comprehensive. It takes a look at what your goals are, what type of team you have or need, what your strategy’s going to be for going into the market, how you’re going to create revenue, what’s gonna make you happy, how you’re going to attract people to your cause and to your music, what your marketing and financial plans looks like, whether you want to use a crowdfunding technique, how you organize your social media, etc. We organized all of this effectively into a musicians’ business course that you follow to get yourself moving.

There are seven and a half billion people in the world today, a lot of which create, promote and sell their own music. And then there’s the Internet. How can one stand out as a musician with so many others trying to do the same?

I always tell people that the main thing you need to do is be as unique as possible. The biggest mistake you can make is to try and be like everyone else or even be like someone else. The world doesn’t need more of what we already have. The way to break through is to be different. And even though there a system, an approach to taking yourself to market that can be very similar across the spectrum of talent, exactly what you represent and how you express yourself – that is the part that really needs to be unique. If don’t do that, you have very, very little chance of ever breaking through to any significant degree.

We look at how can you be different, how can you differentiate yourself in the market. How can you get just one small thing going, that brings you forward in your plan. How can you get that one thing happening that you can replicate it again and begin to build momentum? Instead of trying to do 56 thing simultaneously, do one thing really well and repeat it, then grow your business from there. People are already starting to realize this. You can predict, kind of, what’s coming by looking at certain markets and try to extrapolate whether it will hit your market as well. And if it does, you need to think about how it will change and how you can adapt what’s happening to your own career, so you can hopefully ride the wave ahead of everyone else.

What have you been up to these days? Any upcoming project we should be excited about?

We just released a new music theory course at hitmusictheory.com – it’s brand new. We’re just now one month into the life of that site, just got the first few hundred people sign up. I try to take what I’ve learned on the business side and apply it to making music, songwriting and production. Because when I looked across people that know the language of music, know how to write song, how to convey emotion, I found that business and marketing are very important, but if you don’t have the music together, you’re not going anywhere. That’s why we started that.

Considering your background and current endeavors, it wouldn’t make sense to ask you if you believe in online music education. But do you think there are enough places on the web where people can meet other musicians, connect, work on projects together and create real music online? Do you think Drooble can fill this gap?

I think that the risk/reward equation has changed for the record companies, for the music publishers for sure. You can meet people online but what you really want to do is meet them in person. And I think music is very similar, it’s very early I think. Many folks have tried to do online music collaboration or online musician networks. I’ve seen dozens of companies try to do it and today all of them have failed. But I believe it’s still early in the game – like streaming, there’s not a critical mass yet. There may be millions of musicians collaborating online but it’s really important to strattle the real and the online world. Make sure, whatever strategy you have for building your online community, that you also remember people love to get together and play, listen to and enjoy music, participate in that experience.

It’s a next step for the evolution of music that there’s a good strong online community. Right now, to be honest, you’re fighting Facebook and it remains to be seen whether a very vertically focused musicians’ social network can survive as a viable business. It’s a very attractive idea, given all the people that have tried to do it, but actually being able to execute it, creating a revenue model that works and a customer base that is just enthusiastic about it – that’s the challenge. You can try, it’s definitely worth the effort.

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