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Continued from page 51 music library, it’s a music supervisor, it’s an ad agency, and here’s the use.” It’s already conceptualized; they’ve moved on to the next stage, like the final edit; it’s already been approved by the client. Even if you submit a really good song, but it’s not what they need—and I’ve heard these submitted—we can’t send that to the ad agency and say, “Here, change your entire concept, because here’s a cool song.” We can’t, unfortunately. We get people that ask us to do that. I’ve gotten emails from people that find my email address and say to me, “But this is so good, can’t you contact the ad agency and tell them to change their campaign to suit what I did?” You guys [in the audience] are laughing, but it happens a lot. Robin: One I got, the listing had said, “The Rock world is definitely preferred here,” and they sent me a Flamenco track, with a killer guitar part on it. But there is no way that that would create the emotional use that that ad agency had. That’s an extreme example. But the closer you can get, the better. I loved the listing that Michael sent out one day that said, “Get up in your studio and strut to it. If you can’t strut to it, if you can’t move your body to it the way it’s being described, it’s not on target.” Locomotion is a great test for whether your song fits the listing or not. What are they describing? What moves are they describing? What does your song feel like? Are those two things the same thing? And that’s kind of an interesting thing to be doing. Start doing that. It’s what publishers do all the time; it’s just that you are your own publisher. OK, I’m gonna try a little experiment. It could totally blow up in my face and I’ll be embarrassed, but thank God there aren’t like a thousand people in the room [laughter]. What’s your favorite thing about the Road Rally? [Various audience members’ responses:] • How much I’ve learned, and the feedback from real professionals • Understanding the depth of knowledge of the people you brought to try and teach us to pull our heads out of our … and get it together • All the knowledge that I’m learning • All the different courses upstairs, I think Thank you. They have all been to the same exact convention, yet only two of them had answers that
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were pretty close. Do you know where I’m going with this? “Why do I get different critiques on the same song from different screeners?” How many of you have ever thought that thought? Let’s see a show of hands. How many of you have thought, “But that’s not what the other screener said,” right? It’s probably the biggest single complaint we’ve had over the years. If we all went to the Louvre Museum and lined up and looked at the Mona Lisa, and I said write down your impression of what you think of the Mona Lisa. I might notice her eyes, you might notice her skin tone, you could notice her smile, somebody else could notice the shading or the shadows. There are no two people—when given the same circumstance—that will always see the same things. And that’s the way the screeners are, and when you add to that the context that they’re listening for a different listing … a different pitch, their feedback is going to be different. So, while Kevin may be listening for a film and TV opportunity and hear the song and respond a certain way because he’s looking at it through that lens, Karl could be looking at it for a label looking for an artist to sign, and looking at it through that lens. The TAXI member gets the critique and goes, “These people are idiots. They can’t agree on anything.” And there are bass drums, guitar, keyboard, vocal, production, lyrics—all these different aspects—and while one person, or one screener, may notice one aspect because it is key to that listing, or it’s just the first top of the mind thing, another person might notice a totally different thing. So please, when you get your critiques, don’t look for what’s different, look for the commonality—look for the common thread—and take that common thread and use that as the thing that makes you better. Build on the success. One of our members, Joe Aukofer, last year on the Members Guide to Success panel said, “Rather than looking for the negatives in the critiques, look for the positives, and use those to identify new opportunities for yourself.” I thought that was great, and I can think of so many members, but two that come instantly to mind are Steven Baird, Adrienne Serna. Those are people who have walked up to me and said, “I didn’t know what kind of artist I was until I got the critiques and had four or five different people tell me, ‘You’re really good at this,’ or ‘Have you ever thought about doing that kind of music?’” And they totally changed who they were artistically. Boom, all of a sudden they are getting forwards. Boom, all of a sudden they’re making money with their music, they’re having success, because they took that common knowledge from several critiques

and went, “Ah, that’s what I’m gonna pay attention to.” I just saw Paul Otten in the room. Come on out to the aisle for a second, Paul. Paul gets a lot of forwards. I don’t know what your forward ratio is, but all of us at TAXI know your work and love it. You’ve hit a lot of homeruns. How do you analyze critiques? When you look at a listing, what do you do that makes you so successful? Paul: Well, I look at the whole listing a few times. Artist reference, the a la’s. I’ll just take some time off and just download that music, if I don’t have it already, and listen to it over and over to get used to it. I’ll get to know the artist that they’re referencing, and then that gives me the best idea of what a listing is looking for. Do you do actual research? Paul: Yeah, when I started with TAXI, and when I looked at the listings, I compared it to maybe like homework in school, which I hated. But if you get homework to do a report on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and if you want a good grade, you would do the research about the Gettysburg Address, not the assassination of Lincoln. If you turned that in, you’re gonna fail. I kind of look at it that way, but I look at it as cool homework—homework for something I want to do for a living. So I get excited about this homework, and I guess I approach it that way because it’s what I want to do, and I look at it as homework and read everything closely because I want to nail it. I’m determined. You do a great job of it, among the best I’ve ever seen in like 20 years at TAXI. So congratulations on reading all about Abraham Lincoln, Paul. [applause] Oh, here’s one. People often ask if the screeners base their decision on whether to forward or not on how little coffee they’ve had this morning, or how bad traffic was getting to the office? Or do they base it on does this music hit the listing? Kevin: I’m listening to music as if I would walk it into the [listing party’s] office, give it to him or her and say, “I think this is on target!” I’m just looking for the good stuff, the stuff that’s gonna work for the members, and work for the people that we’re screening for. I would say that a more common problem with me is that I will literally have to take a break when I get a few great songs in a row. Then I’m starting to think that I must be nuts. I’m going, “What? Everything here is like right on target. How could this be possible?” And I’ll just take a walk or take a break and make sure… I’ll go listen to some other music. A lot of times I pull up the referenced artist and I’ll listen to them or watch them on YouTube just to make Continued on page 55

Recording - November 2012

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