The common scam is the producer telling a young hopeful that all he/she needs is a demo and he has contacts that will get him/her a record deal. To make the demo will cost $$$ but he really believes in him/her and will kick in half the money. Several thousand dollars later the hopeful artist will walk away with a CD with 2 or 3 songs on it and it will be the last they ever hear from the "Producer". There will be some story about how the A&R Manager at the record company loved it but ... some excuse.
This goes further, the young artist often walk out with the same 2 or 3 songs as the last 10 suckers. All they have done is record your vocals on the same songs.
Sometimes the artist don't even see the ARIA Award winning producer in the studio. They have unpaid "work experience" kids in there doing all the recording and mixing. There are plenty of audio engineering school graduates willing to work for free to gain experience. Every one gets scammed.
Great material, give the producer $50,000 and he can make a release quality album for the artist. After all they need a good album to get a record deal, right? (Wrong!)
The producer makes the album for him/her, and sometimes it is quite a good album. (Other times what is delivered just sounds dated or unoriginal.) Later the artist discovers that most record companies are not interested in getting a fully produced album. Record companies want input on what songs go on the album and usually have their own list of producers etc. they will suggest their artists work with.
Good managers are really worthwhile. However, there are managers who sign too many acts. They push their acts out there to get gigs and work for them. So they try to have 10 acts doing a gig a week earning a gross of $1,200 each. They get 20% off the top so it is $240 per act times 10 acts gives them a total of $2,400 per week.
This can be a good earner for them and the may not be doing that much more to develop the acts.
Like anyone else, a manager has to earn a living so don't resent paying a good manager. When they are signing as many acts as they can, based on how much money they can make in the short term, it starts becoming a scam.
Manager signs an artist up to a long contract. The manager does a pile of stuff but none of it works. The artist goes off and becomes successful without the help of the manager. The manager then sues them for 20% of everything they ever earned.
The solution to this problem it to put performance objectives in the management contract like: Within 6 months get gigs in 6 out of these 8 venues. Within 3 years sign a recording contract with an advance of $100,000 or more, etc. Obviously they have to be things you both agree on.
Q. What did the agent say about the band? A. Who are those bastards to get 80% of my money?
The worst agents are in the covers band world. There is at least one really bad one running an agency in Sydney. (I wish I could type his name here without getting sued.)
Any agent asking for money up front to represent you is a scammer. No worthwhile agent wants money up front. This scam is especially common in the acting and modelling industry. Typically they advertise for "new faces". You go in and they say you will need a portfolio of photographs or a show reel or a demo and offer their in house photographer or studio at a "discount rate". You pay for the service, get an overpriced disinterested photographic session and they never get you any work. Sometimes there is a fee for putting you on their web site and "promoting you to clients".
Other times they start asking you to do free work to 'get yourself established' or to get paid gigs later. Scam, scam, scam!
There are no jobs for newly graduated recording
engineers. The studio industry is contracting. Engineers with years
of experience and dozens of gold records to their credit are leaving the
industry because they can't get work.
See: http://forum.recordingreview.com/f8/becoming-professional-recording-engineer-17645/
There are jobs that are more fantasy than reality like: professional skateboarder and taste tester at the chocolate factory. There are audio engineering schools churning out thousands of graduates with audio engineering qualification. The potential for disappointment among these graduates almost 100%.
Schools that say "Come and qualify as a recording engineer and get a well paid job doing something you love." are just scams.
We love your act and want to invest money in it. Here is our marketing plan and it will cost $40,000 but we will put in half the money so you just put up $20,000 and we put in the other $20,000. By the way, all the web designers, publicists, video production, graphic arts, photography, media strategies etc. are all done by their in house staff.
In the end you are just buying a service from them and their over worked, under paid staff. They sign enough acts pay all their bills and to run the business from them. They can stay in business without selling anything or doing very much for their artists.
For a fee they will represent you to record companies. They might have a glossy magazine and CD that goes to 1,000 of the most influential music executives. They will tell you about some successful artists who used their service.
It might be true that a successful artist or two has used their service but I assure you that it was not the thing that got them the deal. It was just one of their early mistakes.
Real record company executives have better things to do than listen to a CD full of clueless losers and are more likely to spent time surfing MySpace looking for new talent. They usually have more than enough talent being presented to them by established managers and music industry lawyers than to waste time on unsolicited submissions.
Many boys and girls have seen the "casting couch" without seeing the record deal. I think that is enough detail.
The deals are so bad and accounting so shonky I would have to say most major label deals are scams. Don't ever expect to see any more money than the advance. Today's 360 record deals want to pick up a percentage on everything from acting to merchandise and product endorsements. But you never signed this contract for the money anyway. You get the fame and the girls, they get the money.
You need them for contracts and other things but using lawyers is like playing with snakes, there is real potential to get bitten.
While we are on lawyers, the most destructive then that can happen in your life is an acrimonious divorce. Lawyers will take a bad situation and make it worse then send you a huge bill for their services. Go to mediation, accept the best deal you can get from the mediator as it is all done to formulas anyway.
Anything to do with Nigeria, lottery winnings when you didn't have a ticket, an inheritance from someone you have never heard of from overseas or anything where you have to pay an advance fee to get a huge payout later is a scam.
There are plenty of really good producers, managers, agents etc. out there. There are even a few good lawyers. There are many people in the industry who are really in it for noble reasons and to them it is about the music. Money is essential to pay the bills and if they don't get paid won't be in the industry any more. It is best to talk to people who have done what you are trying to do and ask them who they recommend.
To the scammers: You are idiots - musicians don't have enough money to make it worth your time to steal from them. If you want to scam people go pick on lawyers, doctors and property developers as they usually have some serious money to steal. This lot are greedy and have such huge egos that they think they are smarter than everyone else. These are their weakness that scammers can exploit. Many of them won't even report it because they can't admit they got scammed.
(Also Christians are amazingly trusting. Just say "Praise the Lord" and pray with them enough times and many will be willing to hand over everything to invest in the scammer's 'Lunar Minerals Scheme'. What do you expect from a 'faith based' religion?)
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Copyright © 2009 Mark Ellis