The one piece of advice Neal Schon would give young guitar players: “It took a long time to learn all that”
As a young artist or band, it’s hard enough getting your name out there, let alone knowing how to navigate the many and varied pitfalls of the music business.
While the focus as a fledgling musician tends to be on songwriting, and crafting the right songs that will capture the ever-shortening attention span of today’s audiences, it’s important that the intricacies of music contracts, should they come around, are fully understood.
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It’s advice that Journey guitarist Neal Schon would give his younger self, and any budding artists around right now.
“It comes down to how much you understand what your situation is about,” he says in a new interview with Billboard. “I would tell a young player, ‘Get involved in [the business]. Know what’s going down with the contracts, understand it, trademark yourself. If something shady comes by, know what question to ask.’ It took a long time to learn all that, but I’m happy we have.”
The music business is ever-changing, and never more so than right now. Once upon a time, the process was: Write a song or three, pitch them to a label, get signed by the label, and they would take care of the rest while you simply wrote, played and performed.
Now, artists have to be masters of many trades, and most often have to record their own music, film content, grow their social media following and often even plan tours on their own. This is rendering a label’s place in the upward trajectory of an emerging artist ever more obsolete. M. Shadows – of newly label-less metal outfit Avenged Sevenfold – recently took aim at major labels, suggesting they only exist in this day and age to make artists come up with a “fake viral TikTok moment”.
So as artists are needing to handle their own business affairs now more than ever, it’s important they are astute about the pitfalls that may come their way, as Neal Schon explains.
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