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Ep. 99 - Interview with Kevin Breuner of CDBABY DIY Musician Join Fanbase University http://www.fanbaseuniversity.com Download Free Music Marketing Promotions Guide https://smartmusicbusiness.com/freesonglaunchchecklist CHRIS: Well, hey, guys. I'm super stoked to have the VP of marketing from CD Baby, Kevin Bruener. I'm a huge fan, and he's just done so much for independent artists over the years. The company has just helped me totally change my career over the years, helped me sale more music, and had such an impact. I am super stoked to have Kevin from CD Baby on the line here. How are you doing, brother? KEVIN: I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. CHRIS: Yeah, man. Dude, seriously. I started working with CD Baby, or using your guys' stuff since 2001. KEVIN: Wow, wow. You predate me. CHRIS: That's crazy. Yeah, man. I remember getting the ... It's actually funny. We were moving or something, or I found an old bag the other day and it had the old CD Baby physical credit card swiper in there. KEVIN: Oh, man. That's a classic. CHRIS: For those of you that aren't listening, I guess that shows, people take credit cards ... Before the evolution of Square, we would swipe people's credit cards. I don't even know what we'd call it. It's like a little slip, and you'd fill it out manually. Then, mail them to you guys, and then you guys would, I guess ... I don't know, process them and then send us money or something like that. KEVIN: Yep, yep. That was back in the day. CHRIS: This doesn't exist. Obviously, I guess, they just don't even have that anymore. KEVIN: No, because the Square Reader came out, and there's no longer a need for it. CHRIS: Okay, awesome. KEVIN: Technology, you know, progresses. Things change, which is fine. CHRIS: Yeah. Well, dude, I'd love our audience to hear your story, because you don't just work at CD Baby. You're an artist, as well, too. That's what I love, is like artists helping other artists. I don't know. You just have such an amazing perspective, but I'd love for you to share your story with music, and then also how you started working at CD Baby and everything you guys do. KEVIN: Yeah. Well, I went to Nashville to study music in college. I went to Belmont University. That was one of the most challenging things I've ever done in my life, studying music. The requirements to pass those classes, meanwhile still having to pass history classes, and all these other things. It was insane. It was just extremely challenging. Then, not only that, being in Nashville with so many musicians, all of them who seemed far more talented than I was. It was just one of those big times of perseverance of my life of like, "This is what I want to do. I want to pursue music, and I'm going to make it happen. I don't care if those people are better than me. There's room for us all." KEVIN: While I was there, one of my roommates in college, he was friends with these guys back in Atlanta that were reforming a new band and were looking for a guitar player. I drove to Atlanta, and on my first day, I walked in to just rehearse and try things out with them, they were sending these three song demo tapes out to all the labels in there. This was 1996, by the way. CHRIS: Yeah. I love it. KEVIN: I started playing with them that summer, and doing festivals. They had always been playing ... They'd been road warriors since they were in high school. Every summer, they'd play like 50, 60 shows that they booked. They had a booking agent at the time as well. Anyway, so they had a lot of shows, so I started jumping on, and then by the end of summer, we were signed to a major label under the EMI umbrella, and our debut album came out the following year, and we saw some pretty nice success. KEVIN: We sold about 200,000 copies. We had a Grammy nomination. Dove Award nominations. Some number one songs. That whole machine was going, and the thing I noticed was that with all that success, we were still the last ones to get paid. We were flat broke. I wouldn't say it's all the label's fault. There were some decisions that predated me that set us up with some things, like some debt and all that. It still was, we'd work really, really hard and everybody got their piece of the pie before us, and then we just got to fight for the scraps. KEVIN: Eventually, I just ... One by one, the guys in the band kind of went their separate ways for a bit. I ended up in the northwest, where my wife is from. I just kept thinking, "There's got to be a better way for artists to do this, because we have fans." It's not like we're all frustrated and not making any money because we don't have fans. We do have fans. There's just this big wall between us and them where all the money gets sucked up and we just don't have direct access to it. KEVIN: About that time, I came across CD Baby, and I started writing and recording new music, and started a different band here in the northwest, and started distributing my music through CD Baby. This is like back in 2003, 2004. Just eventually thought, "Well, I might as well get a job here. I'm here in town. Might as well get a job. They happen to be in Portland, I'm in Portland." I've had several other independent bands. The band that was on a label ... I don't think I mentioned. The band's called Small town Poets. CHRIS: Go check them out, guys. Go check them out on Spotify. Small town Poets. KEVIN: Yeah, we started making music again back around 2010, and we'd always wanted to do a couple Christmas records, because we just loved Christmas music. We ended the hiatus with a Christmas album that did decent, and an EP, another Christmas album. Now, we just released another full length album. Not a Christmas record, but just a full length album. It's kind of in that album promotion cycle, and just trying to make it happen still. KEVIN: Yeah, I work at CD Baby. That's my day job. I'm the VP of marketing. We get to do a lot of cool things with artists, and it keeps me energized for doing music and all that. I'm in the trenches just like everybody else, just trying to make things happen. CHRIS: That's awesome, man. You said something profound there with the way the pay goes when you're with your label. It's so true that everybody gets paid first. The label, the publisher, the manager, and then we are, unfortunately, sometimes left with the scraps. The booking agent. I personally love booking agents for the most part, because I feel like they're the ones that really work the hardest to make us money. Yeah, it's really tricky when you don't own your stuff. Did you guys sign like a full deal? Did you guys ever get those records back or do they own the masters forever? KEVIN: They own them. We've had some conversations trying to recapture them that didn't go as I'd hoped for a number of reasons. Actually one album of the band's is owned by Capitol now. The first three albums were on one label and then there was a fourth album on a different label. That label got acquired and their whole catalog got acquired by Capitol. They basically told me, "We're owned by Comcast, which is a content company. You will never get your master back." CHRIS: Oh, wow. Jeez. KEVIN: I've kind of given up on that one, but the other three, we've had some conversations that still have not gone the way I had hoped. You know, there's still time. CHRIS: Yeah, yeah. There's still hope. I'll share quickly my ... I got my masters back slowly. I just actually emailed the label to get a song. There was a single, because I'm really trying to keep a track on it in a live album that I finally got back last week. I'm just so excited to upload it. Even my other albums, when I started to get them back, I was like, "Holy crap. Holy crap. They were making a lot of money off me." I used to get excited about the quarterly, or what is it? Biannually, they'd paid me, I think twice a year. That's a lot, but then all of a sudden when I owned it, I was like, "Holy smokes." CHRIS: You must probably have a lot of stories of artists that got their masters back, and maybe submitting their ISRC codes so that they can keep the Spotify playlists, and not lose those lists, but get their stuff back. Do you get a lot of stories like artist like, "Oh my gosh. Dude, I had no idea." KEVIN: Yeah, we do get a lot of artists that are like, "I got my masters back, and I want to get this back out there." Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, it's so important that you own your masters. If you're not going to own your masters, if you do sign a deal, that you're absolutely sure you understand what you're getting yourself into. You know, I'm not going to say that every label deal is a bad deal, but there's trade offs. There's serious trade offs. They're not going to invest a lot of time and energy developing you as an artist if they're not getting something in return. What they want is content that they can own forever, in most cases. That's not necessarily to your best interest as an artist. KEVIN: Depending on what kind of music you do, and what your career ambitions are, maybe it is the best thing that could happen to you. For most people, who have a long term view of their musical journey, that's not the best. KEVIN: One thing that was interesting when I was in that period of having left the label situation going, "There's got to be a better way," I remember seeing this article that was by Aimee Mann. It was in the newspaper, and it was talking about Aimee Mann, and how she'd been dropped from every major label, and that she had gotten some advances, but had never made anything on the back end. She was talking about how now she was just selling directly to her fans, and she can just sell 10,000 copies directly to her fans and make more money, far, far more money than she was when she was selling hundreds of thousands of copies. It's just kind of the understanding of how much money gets sucked up in that pipeline. CHRIS: Yeah, like I literally had a course that I called How I Make Over 4,000 a Month Selling Music Online. That was until I got my next record back and then the income shot up again. I'm going to have to rename the course. Yeah, I had no clue, and it's not like I got this success manual of, "Do this, and do that, and this is how you do it." I'm on CDBaby.com right now, and you guys spell it out so much of the boost your income here, and the pro publishing. I want to talk about a bit of this stuff that you guys help for artists to make money. CHRIS: I'll never forget, I was on tour, and I literally did a CD Baby podcast, like what do you call it? Like binge. There was one episode that you guys really spoke to me, and I didn't understand at first back then. It was like the black box royalties, and the YouTube. I think it goes with your guys' Pro, when you sign up for CD Baby Pro, and you collect the money worldwide. Could you maybe talk a little bit about that, and some of the money that artists might be leaving on the table that they don't even know about? I'm not good at talking about or explaining it. I'm sure you do a lot better job than me. KEVIN: Absolutely. Basically, the digital world has opened up a lot of things for independent artists. Not only so many new usages of music, and the way music generates revenue, and different kinds of royalties. A lot of these royalties didn't exist 10 years ago, especially 20 years ago, and so the industry was kind of slow to figure this stuff out. The industry's also been used to delaying with the major labels who represent large catalogs, and most of the music out there that's being used in these ways. That has changed drastically, especially over the last five, six years, where independent artists make up about 40% of the music being used on places like Spotify and such. KEVIN: There's all these royalties that are generated that the industry just didn't have a way to collect for independent artists, because they didn't care. It got to a point where people were like, "Hey, it doesn't matter if you're on top of the charts or you have 1,000 streams. That revenue is yours. That revenue is owed to you for the usage of your music by law, and there's no reason why it can't be paid. Especially in the digital world, where we can account for things one for one." KEVIN: Way back in the day, they used to just survey radio stations and all that, to kind of try to grasp an idea of who was owed performance royalties, but now, everything's digital. If something gets played, it's accounted for, and artists should get paid their rightful money. That's been a lot of what we've been doing in the last few years, is really focusing on helping artists get paid these royalties, where they traditionally haven't. KEVIN: I'd say one of the biggest problems with artists, especially artists that have some success rolling, is that most of them are under-monetized, where they're not taking advantage of all of the revenue streams owed to them. Some of them, that money can pool up and sit around for a while, but some of these royalties, after two years, it just gets paid out, which means the major label folks benefit most from that. CHRIS: YouTube, specifically. I don't even think it's retroactive. If you're not monetizing it when the ad, I'm pretty sure that one's not ... You can't go back for YouTube is what I heard, if you don't have it monetized. KEVIN: Yeah, correct, because YouTube, it's all ad revenue, and if it's not monetized, yeah, they won't go back and pay you out for it. I've heard some situations like someone who's had like an explosion of viral content that's happened instantly, and them trying to recover some from the previous week or two, but yeah. If you have something that's been performing for a while, no, that's lost revenue. You're not going to get that back. KEVIN: That's a lot of what we do, is just help artists make sure that their publishing money's been collected. A lot of artists think they have publishing because they signed up with a PRO, and that's not a publisher, that's a performing arts organization. A lot of artists don't understand the opportunities on YouTube, or the world of sync licensing, and also that in a streaming world, there's also a mechanical royalty that's paid out. For about every five dollars that you make off of streaming, there's an additional dollar of publishing that's owed to you. If you don't sign up, if you don't have someone administering those publishing rights for you, you're losing that revenue. KEVIN: That's what we do with our CD Baby Pro product. Our publishing administration service that adds on to the distribution and makes sure that you're getting paid as much money as you possibly can. CHRIS: Just to talk with the YouTube thing, because I was blown away that it wasn't just off of my channel that I was making all this YouTube money. It was the thousands of videos that had my music in it that I had no idea. I had one song that's been uploaded to YouTube 9,000 times, and I get paid on all those, because I've signed up for the administration for publishing and stuff. It's really important that artists need to know that it's not just your channel, but all these other channels and peopl…
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