<p>Hi, this is Harry Schnur from musicdynamite.com. </p>
<p>Here’s the transcript from my interview with Moses Avalon-(Artist’s rights advocate)<br />
You can also listen or download the interview for free here: http://www.musicdynamite.com</p>;
<p>Enjoy!</p>
<p>MOSES:“Tech companies, the ones who fit into the category I’m speaking of and the people who support them, they are your enemy. They want to destroy you. The difference between an adversary and an enemy is that an adversary wants to beat you but doesn’t want you to die. Your enemy wants to destroy you.”</p>
<p>Moses Avalon is one of the top music business experts in the United States. Having spent over 30 years in the music business, he has seen the ups and downs and has focused his efforts on helping artists protect their rights.</p>
<p>His artist rights advocacy’s endeavors have helped thousands of artists directly in addition to the 14,000+ who subscribe to his monthly newsletter where he profiles the numerous opportunities and pitfalls in the industry.</p>
<p>As an author, his top selling music industry references, Million Dollar Mistakes and Confessions of a Record Producer, continue to be required reading in over 50 music business courses around the world including the music business programs at such prestigious colleges and universities as UCLA, Loyola, and NYU. </p>
<p>His latest book, 100 Answers to 50 Questions on the Music Business, is a tell-all guide to help recording artists at each stage of their music career.</p>
<p>In addition, he is also a court-recognized music business expert in New York, California, Florida and Puerto Rico. He has acted in an advisory capacity to multiple State Attorney General Offices and the Senate Judiciary Committee in Sacramento regarding the music industry, and he has appeared on numerous television news shows such as Court TV, MSNBC, CNN Money Line, &amp; Bill O’Reilly, seeking the inside information on the music business.</p>
<p>His website, http://www.MosesAvalon.com, contains a wealth of information, resources, and tools for artists. His blog, Moses Supposes, which deals with controversial issues in the music industry, reaches over 13,000 direct subscribers and approximately 100,000 readers through syndication.</p>
<p> In this interview Moses talks to me about:</p>
<p>•how he got into the music business<br />
•why he got out of producing music<br />
•the agendas of the various characters in the music business<br />
•the future of the music industry<br />
•the time line of the music industry<br />
•the battle between the “Tech-Masters, “Copy rightists” and “Copy leftists”<br />
•his point of view on major record labels and the independent road<br />
•the need of a business music plan<br />
•pressing and distribution deals<br />
•Billboard magazine and other industry publications<br />
•his views on independent A&amp;R services<br />
•his position on the Culture Creation Industry<br />
•the common traits successful people share in the music business<br />
•advice for the aspiring music producer<br />
•what he does to relax<br />
•the various services he offers</p>
<p>Let’s go to the interview!</p>
<p>HARRY: How and when did you get your foot in the door, so to speak? How did you start working in the music business?</p>
<p>MOSES: I was in bands, of course, when I was 18, 19, and 20; and then, I realized I wanted to make a living with music. But you couldn’t just plan on making a living as a songwriter or as a guitar player or a recording artist.<br />
So, I saved some money and I bought a small 8-track recording studio. This was at a time when people didn’t have recording studios in their apartments. Now, everybody has them.<br />
But, back then, it was very rare to walk in someone’s house and see a whole bunch of (mind you, this is still the days of the tubes) reel-to-reel equipment and microphones on stands. This is not a normal home décor.<br />
I did that and I was producing the demos of the bands that are on my local block. I did that actually for a while and I made okay living at it; then, I decided to go work at some real studios. I took a big step backwards, went from making a decent living to [inaudible] 0:04:46.3 and getting coffee. I worked my way up as an assistant, and then as an engineer, and then, ultimately, as a producer.</p>
<p>HARRY: Did you go to school for this?</p>
<p>MOSES: I had no formal education at all in any of this. I learned how to engineer by watching other engineers and by reading the instruction books of the equipment. The instructions usually came with the equipment on how to connect the equipment and how to use them. I read a couple of books on signal flow and that was it.</p>
<p>HARRY: Are you currently still producing?</p>
<p>MOSES: No, I haven’t produced anything in a long time—really since I started writing about the music business and doing artist rights advocacy.</p>
<p>HARRY: Why did you get out of producing?</p>
<p>MOSES: A few reasons—let’s see, what year was it? It was in the early 1990s and I’d worked on a couple of things that did really well so I had some good credentials. And I was hoping that once I had those great credentials, I would, now, have been moving up the ladder to producing bigger projects.<br />
And what I noticed happening at that time was what I referred to as “career compression” which means as I was moving up and hoping to bid on projects that were a couple or 300,000-dollar projects, what was happening was there was a lot of consolidation in the music business.<br />
And I found that I was competing with guys who would produce the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin for those same jobs. They had kind of come down a bit because they were normally working on records that were half a million and a million; and, now, those jobs were gone. So, now, they were moving down a little bit on their ladder.<br />
I was trying to move up. I kind of felt there was no way I could compete with them. And on the bottom side … you know, as a producer, you’re always gonna be competing with someone who’s 22 or 23 who’s coming in and who’s worth cheaper than you.<br />
So, I kind of thought that there wasn’t gonna be as big a future in record producing as it was in the past; and I think I was right with that prediction because of the proliferation of home recording studios. I wouldn’t say it’s eliminated the need for a producer, but it has certainly truncated the need for a producer.<br />
So, there was that; and there was also the fact that to compete with some of the other acts that I was now competing with, I was going to have to do things that I really didn’t want to, things that I didn’t get into the music business to do.<br />
I got into the music business because I love music and I wanted to record music and make music and listen to that music that I recorded and made.<br />
To take the jobs away from the people who I’ll be competing with, I would have had to become, to put it politely, more of a social director which would have involved procuring substances and the services of people I really wasn’t interested in becoming involved with.<br />
In fact, in New York City at that time, I knew very, very few successful producers that weren’t on some level also of felon—that’s a person who would commit crimes that are more than just like jaywalking or something like that. These people, of course, wouldn’t think they were felons. They would say, “Hey, I’m just running a recording studio.”<br />
But when you have a coke dealer on speed dial and people are using your phone to get drugs and to bring them to your studio, believe it or not, that’s facilitation and that’s a felony.<br />
So, I don’t know of any studios that weren’t doing things like that, that weren’t providing more than just recording services. And that’s not the business I wanted to be in. So, I got out of it.</p>
<p>HARRY: And I presume that was in New York in the 70s and 80s?</p>
<p>MOSES: That was in New York in the 80s and the early 90s. I guess, it was in ’97 when I stopped producing and that was when I wrote my book; and the book basically changed my career path from someone on the producing side to someone more on the business side.</p>
<p>HARRY: In your book, Confessions of a Record Producer, you wrote about the agenda of the various characters in the music business. Can you talk a little bit about, first, the artist’s agenda—what is that?</p>
<p>MOSES: The artist agenda is to make and record their songs and they have to be sort in the believer business. They have to convince people at the label, people at the publicity departments, the marketing departments, and advertisers that they are “it.”<br />
They are the “it” of the moment. For the artists, it’s not simply about writing good songs. They have to market themselves.</p>
<p>HARRY: How about the producer?</p>
<p>MOSES: Well, the producers have got an interesting position because he’s between the artist and the label. He’s paid by the artist so, technically, the artist is his employer; but he wouldn’t be able to be paid by the artist unless the label gave the artist the money to pay him.<br />
And so, he’s kind of in a precarious situation. He has to kind of please two different parties who often disagree on what the correct choice of action is. Artists and labels rarely agree on what the single should be and the overall sound of the record. There’s always a push and pull. And the producers are often caught in the middle.<br />
Those situations where the artists, the label, and the producer all agree, that’s great! And I’d like to think that since I left that field, the relations among these three parties have come a long way. I don’t think you see the same kind of act from these relationships today as you did back in the past.<br />
Back in the past, the producer could almost please no one because if the label was happy, the artist wasn’t, and vice versa.<br />
But, now, I think artists who are signing to major labels and dealing with large budgets, they are much more realistic.</p>
<p>HARRY: How about the label’s agenda?</p>
<p>MOSES: The label’s agenda is simply to make money any way they can off the artist’s work.</p>
<p>HARRY: In come the lawyers—what’s their agenda?</p>
<p>MOSES: Everyone’s agenda, of course, is to make money. But unlike the labels, artists, and producers, lawyers make money off of acrimony. They profit off of other people disagreeing; and you think they’re actually profiting off of people agreeing because the lawyers are hired to make a deal, to make contract.<br />
The reality is that it’s the disagreements that really pad their bill because there are so many drafts that go back and forth and so many notes; and every time they make a phone call to the other side, the client is being charged another thousand dollars.<br />
Lawyers really make money off of acrimony. It’s a difficult business model. If you’re a good lawyer, an honest lawyer, then, you are going to try to minimize the amount of acrimony.<br />
But if you’re a dishonest lawyer and there are plenty of those, then, you can create acrimony just to pad your bill.</p>
<p>HARRY: Let’s talk a little bit about the future of the music business. What are some things that we, as musicians and artists, need to consider in this new environment?</p>
<p>MOSES: Well, we need to consider the role of the traditional entities that make up the music industry; and I think before we can talk about the future of the music industry, you have to first define what the music industry is. And that, in and of itself, is becoming a flexible term.<br />
The music industry used to mean your top five distributors and the fifty or so labels that they owned plus ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, plus the musicians’ union, plus the various trade organizations of the RIAA and the NMPA; and then, you had a handful of significant independent labels; and then, you had Disney kind of over on the side here which wasn’t really part of the music industry as we defined it.<br />
Today, the music industry almost defies the traditional definition because you still have all those other things that I just mentioned but you also have gaming companies; you also have Facebook, social networking; you have Google; you have iTunes and Apple. You have all these companies that are peripheral to the music industry but play such a significant role in its functionality that we really do have to start to include them as part of the music industry on a practical level.<br />
This is the most important think, I think, any artist needs to focus on—how are these people playing a role and how is the definition of the music industry changing?</p>
<p>HARRY: Now, with that, correct me if I’m wrong, when the music industry started out in the United States, it was primarily managed by musicians or folks who understood and appreciated music. And it was, perhaps, after the 1970s that the music business was, I guess, we could say, infiltrated by number-crunchers in Wall Street where creativity and quality of content was kind of overlooked.</p>
<p>MOSES: I would say that your timeline is a little off. </p>
<p>HARRY: A little off?</p>
<p>MOSES: Yeah. The music industry … once again, if we’ll define the industry as the entities that control, distribute, and finance the work, the music industry was never controlled by musicians; but it was influenced, inspired, and invested in mostly by music lovers, people who did have an appreciation for music as an art form and who were passionate about the music itself.<br />
And I would say that that started in the late 50s and continued on into the late 70s; and you had various expansions and contractions during that period but, pretty much, everyone involved at the executive level was a music enthusiast.<br />
Starting in the late 70s, you start having the interest of large corporate buy-outs; and that was when you started seeing Sony buying CBS and things like that; and that’s where it really started to corporatize.<br />
And then, in the eighties, you see Vivendi buying Universal and larger labels buying up smaller labels. By the early nineties, it was completely corporatized, and that’s when Wall Street really gets involved.<br />
It wasn’t bad when non-music business entities had bought into the music business because they were still letting the music enthusiasts run things; but when Wall Street gets involved, prior to that, because, now, all these companies are a lot more public … and, for example, the recent in and out of Warner Brothers which they financed by going public, this was what really took it to a new level where … once you go public, the product pretty much ceases to matter. All that matters is the numbers; the music is just a way to make the stock go up or go down or show some corporate benchmarks.</p>
<p>In order to get that, you still need good music to make all those numbers go back and bad music to make those numbers go down. So while you might have Wall Street firms who invested in the music industry indirectly, they’re still interested in seeing good music even if they themselves don’t know what good music is.</p>
<p>HARRY: So, today, we now have the tech masters such as Google, Yahoo, and AOL who are now participating in the music game. Is there a battle between these two forces, the labels and the tech masters?</p>
<p>MOSES: I would say that there is, and I would say that it’s not so much the labels and tech masters as it is people who control content who are copy rightists. They believe in protection of copyright and copy leftists which is a term that’s become popular in the last few years.<br />
Copy leftists are not just technology companies although they do make up the majority of copy leftists, and they are people who believe that copyright has become too powerful and too strong; and it’s being manipulated purely for purposes of profit.<br />
Which side of this argument you’re on really depends on your politics. But if you are an artist, there is no choice. You have to be on the copy rightists’ side. This has been a very interesting time particularly for me as an artist rights advocate because when my book first came out in 1998, it was all about exposing the major labels, and how horrible some of the contracts were, and what you had to do to make a living within that system.<br />
Today, I find myself being a major label apologist because the system that they’re holding together is being infiltrated and guided by entities who just don’t want to pay for music, who want to use music as a free toy at the bottom of their serial box and give it away for free because they’re selling internet services.<br />
And so, I find myself saying, “Well, wait a second, I never said, ‘Screw the labels.’ I say, “Screw the labels but use protection.” And you want to make a deal with labels; you just want to make a good deal and want to know how to protect yourself. You don’t want to ignore labels out of some odd sense of paranoia when this is your best shot at success as a recording artist.<br />
I think what I call the “tech-masters” which is just my own term for people who are on the technology side of business who want to devalue copyrights, what these tech-masters have done is they have very, very cleverly propagandized to artists, writers, publishers, and people in music industry and it got them to turn against the labels.<br />
They’ve taken advantage of the fact that everybody thinks major labels are thieves; and to some degree, they are; but they’ve taken that sentiment and they have completely twisted it into a feeling that “Yes, we should support the Googles and the P2Ps and the LimeWires of the world who are helping to devalue copyright. We should support them because the major label system needs to die; and once it dies, then, a phoenix will rise from the ashes that will somehow be better than the last version of it.”<br />
Well, anyone who studies history will surely know that that is a folly, that assuming that they win, whatever will rise will be just as evil and corrupt as what was there before. They will be good and bad in it. They will be good in that they will finance new talent; they’ll be bad in that they will exploit that financing and take more rights than they probably should.<br />
Nothing is really going to change. And to quote, Pete Townshend, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”<br />
But what will probably happen if tech-masters win is we’ll have an enormous amount of destabilization; and destabilization is bad.<br />
And so, in my opinion, people who want major labels to fail because they don’t like the way major labels are controlling the business, that’s equivalent to saying, “I want my bank to fail so that I don’t have to pay my mortgage.” Meanwhile, if your bank failed, your whole country’s economy would go into the toilet.<br />
So, it’s not a one-sided wish. There is no music business without major labels. They are the banks of the industry. They are financing all the endeavors. Without them, we wouldn’t have recording studios and producers; we wouldn’t have careers.<br />
So, it’s okay to hate them. It’s okay to define them as your adversary. But it’s not okay to call them your enemy. They are not your enemy. They’re your adversary.<br />
Tech-companies, the ones who fit into the category I’m speaking of and the people who support them, they are your enemy. They want to destroy you. The difference between an adversary and an enemy is that an adversary wants to beat you but doesn’t want you to die. Your enemy wants to destroy you.</p>
<p>HARRY: So are you saying, in other words, that if the tech-masters do win, are we headed for a musical Renaissance or are we headed to the Dark Ages, so to speak, in terms of creativity?</p>
<p>MOSES: I would say that if the tech-masters won and music was completely devalued … I don’t think this will happen, by the way. But if it was to happen, if music was completely devalued, if copyrights became meaningless, we would surely enter a dark age from a creative point of view not just for music but for all forms of art.<br />
And then, maybe a renaissance would happen after that, but I don’t know. I don’t even want to take that gamble.</p>
<p>HARRY: You mentioned in your book, Confession of a Record Producer, that tomorrow’s music industry has the potential to be one of the most honorable and spiritually powerful industries in the world. How is this going to come about?</p>
<p>MOSES: I think it is coming about. I don’t think the tech-masters are winning. I think that copyrights are secure. I think the more articles I read written by bloggers about how copyrights are dying, the more I believe that that’s like the last gasping of a certain person who’s about to drown.<br />
It’s pretty clear from the way governments around the world are reacting that copyrights are here to stay and they’re going to enforce them. Even China is recognizing that copyrights are important and is entering into treaties with us.<br />
So, I see a time in the not so distant future where we actually have some kind of unified global copyright law that everybody abides by; and once that happens, we will have the financial stability to now start investing more in the arts. And I’m hoping that that will inspire good people to stay in this business because the way it is now, a lot of good people are leaving the business. They’re going into other fields, and the only people who are staying in the business are the super wealthy or the super desperate.</p>
<p>HARRY: What are your views on an independent route, or a major label route? Or do we even want to get involved with the major labels?</p>
<p>MOSES: If your business model as a musician involves the selling of hundreds of thousands or millions of records, you have no choice but to get involved with a major on some level. I don’t know anyone who sold millions of records without a major label being involved, and, usually, involved very intimately.<br />
While it may be possible, I just don’t know anyone who has done it. So, if that is a necessary component to success for you, you’re going to have to entertain doing business with a major label or a major sponsor which is basically the same thing.<br />
If you think that some soft drink company is going to give you a contract for investing a million dollars in your band and the clauses are not going to read identically to the way they would in a major label, then, you’re really kidding yourself because they’re going to be the same.<br />
So instead of calling it a record label, it’s going to be a soft drink company. But someone is going to be your daddy. So there’s no way to do that.<br />
Now, if you’re business model does not depend on selling millions of records, if you have another business model, another way to make money, then, no, you don’t need a major label and you could stay so-called “independent.”<br />
I don’t like that word “independent” because no one has been able to really define it for me. What is an independent label? A guy who is selling records out of his bedroom? Okay, but eventually, if he’s good, if his product is good, he’s going to grow to a point where there’s going to be a demand for it; and once there’s a demand for it, he’s going to have to get involved with a distributor. All distributors are tied to major labels. There you go.</p>
<p>HARRY: By the way, I love your blog, Moses Supposes. In your blog, you mentioned that need of a music business plan. Can you talk a little bit about that?</p>
<p>MOSES: All businesses need investment capital, and to raise investment capital, you have to show your potential investors that you really understand the landscape of the business and that you have a good angle to pursue it. I mean, you have to know your competitors. You have to know how things are going to pay; you have to know what schedule they’re going to pay on. You have to be able to manage your investor’s expectations about when you can return their money.<br />
And so, these are things that are all reflected in a written business plan. I urge every person who is trying to capitalize their career to write a business plan.</p>
<p>HARRY: What is a pressing and distribution deal? What are your views on this type of arrangement?</p>
<p>MOSES: A pressing and distribution deal is just basically a record deal except you already recorded the master and you retain the rights to it; and now, you’re just asking a distributor or a major label to brand it, so to speak. They’re going to print the units. They’re going to monitor the distribution off iTunes and other digital distributors. And they’re going to collect your money, and they’re going to take a percentage for that and pass the rest on to you.</p>
<p>HARRY: What do you think of Billboard magazine and other music industry publications out there?</p>
<p>MOSES: Billboard tends to represent the point of view of major labels. While they occasionally do cross the line a bit and will say something that kind of embarrasses them, you’re rarely going to see anything in Billboard that embarrasses major labels because major labels make up the bulk of their advertising so you’ve got to consider the source.<br />
Given that, the journalism is fine given that they have a filter, and that filter is to make the industry look productive.</p>
<p>HARRY: Could you recommend any other publications that cater to the working musician or aspiring producer or songwriter?</p>
<p>MOSES: There are tons of them. If you’re talking about equipment and gear, then, there’s Keyboard, Modern Drummer, Guitar Player, Bass Player, and EQ. All those magazines are fine in terms of keeping up on gear.<br />
But if you want to keep up on the politics and you want to keep up on the business side, there aren’t really any magazines for that. There is Hollywood Reporters, Esquire; and then, there’s my blog.<br />
There are also a few other blogs. There’s Chris Castle’s blog which is Music, Technology, Policy and there’s The Deans List and mine, of course, Moses Supposes.<br />
But you have to really go to the blogs to get the inside dope on what’s happening on the business side.</p>
<p>HARRY: And what are your views on independent A&amp;R services like TAXI?</p>
<p>MOSES: I’ve written a lot about this in my books so I could just refer people to read what I have there. I don’t have any problems with TAXI. They’re not breaking the law. I’m dubious as a success track record that they can actually produce.<br />
I think if you’re living in somewhere like Taiwan and you’re trying to infiltrate the United States’ market, it probably couldn’t hurt to be a member of TAXI. But if you’re already living in New York or LA and you’re having problems networking, TAXI is not going to make it any easier for you to make that great contact than it is by just networking in LA or New York, or Nashville.</p>
<p>HARRY: Okay, here’s a pretty esoteric question so bear with me. Some people believe that the entertainment business should be called the “culture creation industry” where our morality and the issues we think about, the music we listen to, the clothes that we wear, and our ideas about reality are manufactured by think tanks and scientists who work for the establishment, who, then, disseminate these trends through the media from the top down to the unwashed masses below? Or do the music and trends that are with us today actually come from the grassroots which is then promoted by the various entertainment industries?<br />
So, as an insider of this music business, from your experience, who ultimately, in your opinion, makes the decisions about what we hear on the radio and what we see on MTV? In other words, who sets the trends?</p>
<p>MOSES: That’s an interesting question because if I answer that the latter is true, that the grassroots sets the trend and the corporations just capitalize it, then, everybody out there who believes the opposite, that it’s all just contrived by a government think tank, they’ll, then, think, “Ah, Moses is either brainwashed or he is part of the conspiracy.”<br />
So, I don’t know if there’s any way to answer that that will satisfy everybody out there. But I will say this. As someone who has worked on creating and marketing music or with people who create and market people for 20 years, I don’t think it’s possible to scientifically manipulate people’s tastes. And I think that if it were possible, then, every fashion company, Music Company, and Movie Company would be doing just that because we wouldn’t have so many failed movies and so many records that make no money.<br />
If we just had a formula that we could follow that we knew was going to be successful, every movie would be hit. We’d make far less movies which means we’d spend a lot less; and each movie would be a hit if we knew of an exact formula.<br />
Unfortunately, we don’t. We do have templates. We do know that movies need to be about 90 minutes long; otherwise, people would feel bored. We do know that songs need to be 3-1/2 minutes long; otherwise, they won’t fit into certain radio formats and people would start to feel bored.<br />
We know from doing this for over 50, 60, and t0 years that there are certain things that work and don’t work. You want your hero to be likeable most of the time in a movie; and you want your song to be about something that people can relate to.<br />
These are templates we can all follow. But exactly what type of drum beats for you, exactly what type of melody or what kind of chord change to use, I don’t think there are formulas for predicting exactly what people are going to like.<br />
A friend of mine named Jay Frank wrote a very interesting book called “Future Hit DNA.” It’s a pretty good book and Jay goes into all kinds of theories about what’s it’s going to take to write a hit song in the future. But his theory is based on how technology is affecting the way people consume music.<br />
And his theories are pretty good, but if whoever poses this question really believes that it’s all government think tank formula, then, they’ll just believe that Jay’s book is either a product of that trying to control us so that’s completely way off base.<br />
But I find it very hard to believe that our government is smart enough to do that; and even if they were, how could they possibly keep it a secret? We can’t even manage our wars; we can’t balance our economy; we can’t have a decent health care system—but we have the time and money to control the formulas for how movies and records are produced?</p>
<p>HARRY: For those who are successful in the music business, is there a common denominator that they share?</p>
<p>MOSES: Probably! You have to be a bit of a gambler. And I think you have to be a bit of a sociopath, certainly narcissistic. You have to believe wholeheartedly that your taste in music is better than most people because you’re going to be asked to invest or gamble on a particular song or a particular artist. And you have to believe that you’re right to have the guts to do that even if you turn out to be wrong.<br />
And if you are wrong, you want to bury all those and just focus on the times that you’re right because unlike law or medicine, there is no degree to be a music expert or to be an A&amp;R person. These are jobs that you inherit or you earned through internships.<br />
All of it is based on reputation; and because all of it is based on reputation as opposed to measureable credentials from schools, you have to be the kind of person who can convince others that you’re right; and that requires a certain amount of salesmanship, narcissism, and whatever the standard ingredients that go into those kinds of charismatic, maverick-type personality.<br />
So I would say that those are common traits among people who are successful in probably many businesses but certainly in the music business.</p>
<p>HARRY: If I were your brother and I had ambition and talent and I wanted to become a music producer, what advice would you give me?</p>
<p>MOSES: I would say invest in recording equipment, learn the trade, develop an understanding of copyright. I would say take my course, my online Confessions workshop course which is 16 hours of private music business instruction that you can take right from your computer.<br />
Obviously, read books, mine, but not just my books. Read other books as well. Go out and find a brilliant unique talent that you can sign to an exclusive agreement.</p>
<p>HARRY: So what do you like to do for fun outside of working on the music?</p>
<p>MOSES: I’m a poker player. I like to play cards. I play competitive and tournament poker for relaxation. And I’d spend time with my family and that’s pretty much all I have time for.</p>
<p>HARRY: And you also have a consulting division.</p>
<p>MOSES: Right! We have two sides to our company. There’s a non-profit and a profit. And by non-profit, I don’t mean that I’m a government 501(c)(3). The money that we take just gets puts back in the advocacy efforts.<br />
On the non-profit side, we do a lot of free workshops, my blog, my lower-tiered consulting service that’s subsidized by donations so people can get like a thousand-dollar consultation for $250 dollars. So we have all that and that’s our advocacy side.<br />
We help artists get out of a bad deal. We’ll tell you what a contract means if someone is giving you a contract.<br />
And on the profit side to finance all this, we have consultancy. So I consult to artists, labels, managers, producers, and other companies trying to get in the music business. I testify in music business cases. And those are done at professional rates and professional fees.</p>
<p>HARRY: Are you, guys, open to, perhaps, consulting to folks who live in the United States?</p>
<p>MOSES: Oh, yes. I have a lot of international clients. I’m usually at my desk at five in the morning because it’s like 8, 9 or 10 in the morning over in England. I have clients in Australia, England, and China. We’re all over the globe.</p>
<p>HARRY: Thanks a lot, Moses.</p>
<p>MOSES: You’re welcome.</p>
<p>HARRY: That’s the end of my interview with Moses Avalon. For more interviews about the music business and music creation, go to musicdynamite.com. Until the next time, I’m Harry Schnur.</p>
<p>Harry Schnur is a Producer, composer, studio musician, concert performer and broadcaster. His work has been heard on television, film, radio and albums. Harry currently lives in Taipei, Taiwan.
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