Editors Note: Oh, Behave!

Jun 1, 2008 12:00 PM, Kylee Swenson, Remix Editor

I try not to get up on a soapbox too often, but recently I was annoyed by a story I heard from a friend of mine who does artist relations at a gear manufacturer. I'm going to be vague about it, as I'm not a fan of publicly vilifying anyone. But let's just say that a producer/DJ sent a rather angry e-mail berating my friend and accusing him of disrespecting an entire genre of music simply because his company hadn't given this producer free gear.

Maybe this guy was frustrated that his first couple e-mails hadn't been returned, but is that any way to get an endorsement? I mentioned this to producer Carmen Rizzo one day (see his awesome advice about music-career time management in this month's “Band Aid” column, p. 56), and he shook his head. I'd had a couple drinks when I brought up the topic, so I couldn't quote Rizzo's response verbatim. But the gist is that if you want to increase your profile as a producer/musician/DJ/artist, you need to take your relationships with gear manufacturers seriously. Rizzo knows this very well. He's worked with Focusrite, Digidesign, M-Audio, CAD and more.

If you go into a job interview, I would hope the first words out of your mouth to the interviewer wouldn't be, “How much money are you going to give me? How many weeks of the year do I not have to be here?” Rather, you should find out what you can do for the company and convince the person on the other side of the desk that no one can do it better than you.

I understand it's frustrating when people don't return your calls or e-mails, but you can't take it personally. Some people are just overwhelmed at their jobs by the amount of people trying to reach out to them on a daily basis. Patience and respect will go much further than, “I just don't understand why you won't e-mail me back!” There were a couple of times when I wanted a particular artist for the cover of Remix, and no amount of e-mails or phone calls could light a fire under the publicist's ass to get back to me. Oh well. I'll try again for the next album release. You win some battles; you lose some. Maybe it'll happen the next time. But the last thing you want to do is have yourself blacklisted by someone in the industry because you were rude or impatient or felt entitled.

Based on my conversations about this topic, I reached out to an artist-relations expert, Randy Fuchs (www.artistrelations.com), who has connected gear clients such as Moog Music, Dean Markley, KRK, CAD, Novation, Stanton and many more with hundreds of major artists. Look out for his advice on endorsement deals in the July issue.

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