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Audio

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:51:31 -0400

Audio

Wed, 22 May 2013 21:44:08 -0400

"Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:24:17 -0400

“Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.”

- Theodore Levitt

Why Jimmy Iovine Knows What Music You Want To Hear Better Than...

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:44:00 -0500

Why Jimmy Iovine Knows What Music You Want To Hear Better Than You Do

Wendy Day - How To Get A Record Deal

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:37:59 -0500

Wendy Day - How To Get A Record Deal

"These ****** can’t do nothing that I can’t do That she can’t do, That he..."

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 11:42:07 -0400

“These ****** can’t do nothing that I can’t do
That she can’t do,
That he can’t do,
That you can’t do,
That we can’t do…”

- Frank Ocean

"…you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate."

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 11:02:00 -0400

“…you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.”

- Chester L. Karrass

"COMMIT."

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 10:51:53 -0400

“COMMIT.”

- God

Deion Sanders (Hall of Fame Pro-Football Player) speaking on...

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 10:52:43 -0400

Deion Sanders (Hall of Fame Pro-Football Player) speaking on accepting responsibility….

"There are only 2 industries where the people at the bottom know everything, and the people at the..."

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 15:11:12 -0400

“There are only 2 industries where the people at the bottom know everything, and the people at the top know nothing. Sports and The Music Business”

- J.Troup

"The Happy Birthday Song is owned by Warner/Chappell Publishing, and generates ~$2Million per year."

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 18:21:06 -0400

“The Happy Birthday Song is owned by Warner/Chappell Publishing, and generates ~$2Million per year.”

RIP Chris Lighty - Founder and CEO of Violator Management....

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 18:19:51 -0400

RIP Chris Lighty - Founder and CEO of Violator Management. Architect of the Modern Hip Hop Entrepreneurial Spirit.

Make it happen! #Advice #Life #MusicBusiness (Taken with...

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 13:40:12 -0400

Make it happen! #Advice #Life #MusicBusiness (Taken with Instagram)

Think being an aspiring recording artist is expensive?

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 10:04:59 -0400

Aspiring recording artist can spend upwards of $15,000 to record and launch a CD of original material. That’s peanuts in comparison to the $200,000 a kid with Olympic Dreams can expect to shell out, with very slim chances of ever making a national team, let alone standing on an Olympic Medal Podium…

The 16-year-old gymnast, who became the first black gymnast to win the all-around competition last week in London, stands to make between $1 million and $3 million a year in endorsements, and has already agreed to plaster her infectious smile on the Kellogg’s corn flakes box. Douglas’s forthcoming gold-medal payday makes a new revelation about her family all the more shocking.

Natalie Hawkins, Douglas’s mother, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year in Virginia, court documents show. The Chapter 13 filing reveals roughly $80,000 in debts, and will allow her to reorganize her finances to pay down the total over several years. Hawkins, who went on long-term medical disability in 2009, reported a six-month stretch in which the single mother of four had little to no income.

The news comes the day after TMZ broke the story that Ryan Lochte’s parents are facing foreclosure on their Florida home. CitiMortgage is suing the Lochtes, claiming that they stopped making mortgage payments in February 2011. As with Douglas, Lochte, who won five medals in London, is primed for a slew of endorsement deals that couldn’t be better timed for his family.

Both athletes are—at this moment, at least—national heroes and beacons of American patriotism. But the financial strain their years of training put on their families indicates that investing in a future Olympian may not always be a financially sound decision. How did these families get so broke?

Parents of gymnasts, for one, can expect to fork over upward of $1,000 a month to training facilities to get their child in Olympic shape. Travel costs force that total to skyrocket. Leotards and warm-up suits can run $300 to $500 for a complete set. There are entry fees for each meet and competition. When a gymnast is chosen for the U.S. national team and begins traveling internationally, USA Gymnastics begins picking up the cost of training and travel for the gymnast and his or her coach, but any family member who jet-sets with them does so on his or her own dime.

Of course, only gymnasts training at what’s called the “elite” level rack up that kind of bill. Then again, the most promising athletes begin training at that level when they’re 12 or 13 years old, says Karla Grimes, the general manager at the Gage Center training facility in Missouri. That means six years, at least, of 30-hour gym days and, at Gage, $600-a-month training costs.

Eye-popping expenses are par for the course for nearly every Olympic sport. Membership costs at an elite swim club can run $1,500 to $3,000 annually, says Tom Himes, who coached a young Michael Phelps at the North Baltimore Aquatic Club. Equipment can cost $500 each year. Those slick Speedo Fastskin3 swim trunks Phelps wears? They retail for $395.

“The Olympics are where a moment on the medal stand, representing 300 million people, is beyond price.”

For families, there’s the cost of travel and tickets to the events. Ahead of the London Games, Eddie Adams, father of Olympic swimmer Camille Adams, predicted, “It’s probably going to be around $15,000 to $20,000 for me, my ex-wife, Camille’s twin, my sister, and my sister-in-law to go.” And let’s not forget the grocery bill for those rumored 12,000-calorie, Olympic-size feasts.

Even the more obscure sports—the ones whose stars won’t end up on a corn flakes box or the cover of Vogue—can be prohibitively costly. The annual price of training for Maya Lawrence, an Olympic fencer, is estimated to be $20,000. “It did affect my parents,” she says. “Once I decided I wanted to go to competitions, they really supported me.” Teodor Gheorghe, COO of USA Table Tennis, estimates that top-level players shell out $15,000 for each of the six to eight years it takes to perfect their games; a good paddle alone costs $300.

And with athletes devoting essentially their whole lives to training, there’s typically no room for side jobs or normal careers. While some competitors snag sponsorship deals to offset the lack of steady income, others, like weightlifter Sarah Robles, barely scrape by. The 23-year-old first-time Olympian lived on just $400 a month—her stipend from U.S.A. weightlifting—as she trained full-time for the London Games.

Ryan Lochte wins gold in the men’s 400m individual medley.

All of that may seem worth it for a shot at the medal stand; in addition to high-profile endorsement opportunities, a gold medal comes with a $25,000 cash prize. Each member of the “Fab Five” gymnastics team that took home the gold medal in London will make a base salary of $100,000 for participation in the 40-city Kellogg’s Tour of Gymnastics Champions that will run from September to November.

But not every American athlete enduring the outsize cost of Olympic training actually makes to it the Games. The Gage Center, for example, trained gymnast Sarah Finnegan, who went to London as an alternate for the 2012 U.S. team, as well as Courtney McCool and Terin Humphrey, who were on the 2008 Olympic team. But Grimes estimates that there are roughly 20 girls at Gage training at elite levels, and writing those accompanying checks. For most of them, the Olympics aren’t even in the realm of possibility. So what’s the motivation?

“If there’s no gold medal, there’s a college scholarship,” says Grimes. “There’s some monetary value there.” It makes the financial struggles during those years of training worth it. “I liken it to paying for college early.”

Take the case of Bridget Sloan, who was a member of the silver-medal U.S. women’s gymnastics team in 2008, when she was 16. She was 10 when she started the elite program, with the initial goal of being a college—not an Olympic—athlete. “I figured if I kept with the elite program, I would get an elite scholarship,” she says. It wasn’t until five years later, when she made her first world team, that a trip to the Beijing Games even emerged as a possibility. Still, following her 2008 Olympic journey, Sloan, unlike teammates Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin, rejected endorsement deals and retained her amateur status in order to retain NCAA eligibility. She was only a sophomore in high school at the time, and still had dreams of competing in college.

Sloan is heading to the University of Florida as a freshman in the fall, after having taken a year off to train for the 2012 Olympic trials. (She injured herself just prior to the competition.) She received a full scholarship, proof she says, that the years of expensive training were worth it. “I hope [other] families realize that and don’t think they wasted money on leotards and scrunchies.”

The burden placed on American athletes, whose families must foot the bill themselves for more than a decade of expensive training, is in stark contrast to that of the world’s other Olympic powerhouse. China, the only country topping the U.S. in the medal count, boasts a government-backed national sports program, churning out gold medalists with dizzying success over the past two decades—all on the government’s dime.

As the financial struggles of the Lochte and Douglas clans make headlines, one can’t help but wonder if the U.S. should follow suit and pony up the cash for the training of its own Olympic stars. But there’s the questionable zeal with which China trains its athletes—taking them away from their homes at a young age and placing them in training facilities for arduous daily workouts—which makes the idea much less appealing.

Take the case of diver Wu Minxia, who won gold for China in the 3m synchronized springboard event. Her post-victory euphoria was promptly wrecked when her parents finally revealed to her that her grandparents died the year before and her mother battled—and defeated—breast cancer. “It was essential to her this white lie,” Wu’s father told the Shanghai Morning Post, explaining that he didn’t want the bad news to derail his daughter’s diving career. Is there a possibility that a U.S. government-backed sports program could foster the same, possibly abusive excess?

While most sports’ national organizations cover the training and travel costs for an athlete once they make the national team, some say that’s not enough. NBA star and former Team USA member Dwyane Wade caused a stir last spring when he suggested that athletes (specifically, NBA players) should be paid to participate in the Olympics. Such a practice would be more valuable to athletes like Sarah Robles than a multimillion-dollar NBA supernova like Wade. For those struggling Olympians, a substantial paycheck would be a godsend.

But it’s unlikely ever to happen. National organizations are already struggling to support their athletes. As the economy falters, costs of competition rise and sponsorships dwindle. Many sports are bleeding money, and it’s affecting their Olympic presence. U.S. Ski and Snowboard was forced to institute pay cuts across the board for its staff, and introduce layoffs just prior to the 2010 Olympics. It considered requiring its athletes to pay more of their expenses. The U.S. Bobsled and Skeleton organization found itself tightening its belt and sending only one men’s bobsled team, instead of two, to European competitions that year as well.

As the startling news of the Douglas and Lochte family financial woes stun sports fans, the idea of paying Olympic athletes—or at least giving some sort of monetary respite to their families—is a nice one, but it’s not plausible. Besides, says Mike Lopresti at USA Today, what these athletes and their families are getting from the Olympic experience is already immeasurable compensation.

“The Olympics are where a moment on the medal stand, representing 300 million people, is beyond price,” he says. “Opportunity is the treasure that is offered at the Olympics. The chance to hold up a championship, not to a happy owner or satisfied season-ticket base, but a country. The chance to lean over and have someone slip a gold medal over your head. For many it will be the most cherished day of their sporting lives. That’s not enough for someone? Then why be there?”

…and she just restored my faith in artists. #Hope...

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 22:38:10 -0400

…and she just restored my faith in artists. #Hope #MusicBusiness (Taken with Instagram)

Dear Aspiring Artists...

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 17:44:00 -0400

Yes, you’re immensely talented. You have the look, you have the swagger, you have the hopes and the dreams. Some of you even have the work ethic. But you’ll never make it. Here’s why…

You’ll never make it because you’re not willing to invest in yourself. You’re not willing to invest in your dreams. You’re not willing to put your money where your mouth is, and fund your own career. You won’t pay for producers, you won’t pay for writers. You scoff at the cost of studio time, and if by chance you DO have original records recorded, you won’t dare pay to get them mixed and mastered.

That’s interesting. Because you just paid $200 to get your hair done. You paid $300 for those jeans, $150 for that shirt and $700 for that purse. Those shoes? $400. That jewelry on your wrist and around your neck? $2000. You riding real clean on those $3000 set of 24” rims too.

You’ll never make it because you’re more willing to invest in your LOOKS than you are in your CAREER.

I know what you’re thinking. I’m talented. I can sing. I can rap. A record label is going to DISCOVER me. And when they do, I’m going to be rich. I’m going to be all over the radio, on every radio station in the country, and on arena stages all over the world!

There’s just one problem. YOU’RE DELUSIONAL.

People getting “discovered” based on their talents doesn’t exist anymore. Singers aren’t discovered at talent shows and in coffee houses. No executive is going to happen to see you singing your cover songs at a hole in the wall gig. Nobody is going to pass your CD of cover songs to somebody, who knows somebody who knows somebody.

You want to know the REALITY of the situation? Your dream doesn’t exist anymore. The internet killed them. Record labels aren’t making enough money to make the investment into Discovering and Developing you. They aren’t making enough money to take a chance on pumping millions of dollars into you, only to have your album flop.

Record labels aren’t looking for artists with TALENT. What they are looking for, are artists with DATA. That’s the only thing record labels care about. Not your talent, not your look, nothing…

Record labels care about the APPEAL that you have. How many people are interested in you? How many Facebook fans do you have? How many YouTube views do you have? How many Twitter followers do you have? How many shows do you do? How many people are paying to see those shows? How many times is your song being played on the radio? How many times are your records being downloaded by people? HOW MANY RECORD HAVE YOU SOLD?

Why does any of this matter, you ask? Because record labels are about MAKING MONEY. That’s why it’s called the Music BUSINESS. They don’t give a shit about your talent. They’d sign a deaf mute monkey to a record deal if it would make them money. And all of that DATA above is the way that record labels can prove that people have an interest in what you do, and that they’ll be able to make money off of you.

But you’ll never get a record deal. Because you’re too busy spending more money on your clothes and shoes than you are to invest in getting QUALITY, ORIGINAL RECORDS DONE. Cover songs aren’t good enough. Mixtape songs aren’t good enough. Why? Because the record label can’t make any money off those songs, so it means nothing to them.

You want a record deal in 2012? Then first make the monetary investment in some PROFESSIONAL QUALITY original records for yourself. Because that’s the only way you’re going to get people to love YOU is through YOUR MUSIC. Your records HAVE to compete with what’s being played on the radio right now. Your records have to be able to compete with the quality of your favorite artists.

If you don’t have quality original records, you have no chance at a career in the music industry.

So don’t quit your day job.

The Internet has your money… (Taken with Instagram)

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 00:35:50 -0400

The Internet has your money… (Taken with Instagram)

Congratulations to my client GIANNA (@giannawolf15) on the...

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 17:48:00 -0400

Congratulations to my client GIANNA (@giannawolf15) on the release of her first original song, EXPOSED! Click Here to Buy it on iTunes! and check her out on Facebook! www.Facebook.com/giannawolfmusic

"Free work has no value…"

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 12:00:25 -0400

“Free work has no value…”

- Wendy Day, Rap Coalition

"Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or..."

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 16:45:51 -0400

“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

- Winston Churchill - Entire Commencement Speech at Harrow School