When you consider which fields are most entrepreneurial, what comes to mind? Tech? Energy? AI?
How about music?
“Every musician is their own business,” explained Ethan Ellestadt, executive director of the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans (MaCCNO). “You need to know the business side as much as the music side if you want to succeed.”
This starts with simply getting enough jobs to begin paying the bills, which means promoting one’s music, which means creating marketing materials ranging from press kits to websites. Outreach to clubs and other gig opportunities is a constant; then contracts must be signed, which requires knowing the difference between a good contract and a bad one. Except for established bands or solo performances, the next step is hiring additional musicians for the gig, in essence bringing on staff and the responsibilities that come with that.
Performing rarely provides a living by itself. So, into the mix go things like teaching music, placing one’s work in advertising and/or shows, and producing and selling merchandise. For songwriters, there are issues of copyrights, marketing songs, contracting, monitoring residuals and more.
And none of this even considers the small club owners, music producers and the rest of the music economy.
Yet few musicians have the capacity to manage those business demands.
“Business is a new skill that must be acquired,” commented Danovon Calhoun-Bettis, MaCCNO’s director of engagement and partnerships, professional drummer, and leader of the Bettis + 3rd Degree band. “If you’re serious about it, you have to become an entrepreneur.”
“It’s all the things they don’t teach you in music school,” concurred Hannah Kreiger-Benson, director of programs and research for MaCCNO, full-time working pianist, trumpet player and vocalist, and staff member of the Loyola University music department, from which she holds a degree. “Being a musician requires an outlandish cross-section of different skills. If you are a musician, you are a small business.”
Yet she pointed out that the archetype of a tech entrepreneur is “massively different from musicians. That archetype directly butts up against the musician type.”
The distinctions are many. While entrepreneurs often manage their business out of their homes or a small office, musicians travel to every job, often with their equipment. Music is often a cash economy, which requires a different type of accounting — and even when bandleaders are paid by check, much of the money goes to the other band members, while they receive the W-2 form.
Perhaps most significantly, there is no capital support. Banks don’t lend money to musicians, and angel investors don’t hang out in clubs looking for their next big investment.
All this plays out in a city and region that are internationally renowned for music, yet are sorely lacking in support infrastructure for those who produce the music. This starts with the fact that few gigs pay a decent wage.
“Musician pay has not gone up functionally in 40 years,” observed Kreiger-Benson. “Normalizing good gig pay is not a legal change, it’s a societal change.”
That said, the city of New Orleans did adopt a musician pay ordinance, which requires any city agency that hires musicians to pay a respectable wage. Kreiger-Benson noted that this doesn’t directly change the private sector, but it sets a standard that makes decent pay seem less outrageous.
Helping musicians sharpen their business acumen is the purpose of a new MaCCNO initiative dubbed “Bandleader Bootcamp.” The program addresses every aspect of what it takes to be a bandleader, from incorporating a business to managing taxes, from licensing to marketing, grant writing to contracts.
“We have to create a more equitable system, create opportunities for folks who don’t know how or where to access them,” explained Ellestadt in describing the boot camp.
“If we can perfect the business acumen, we can put a Bourbon Street in every major city and spread our culture around the world,” Calhoun-Bettis elaborated. “The goal is to change the livelihood of our culture-bearers” — in essence, to enable some of the world’s greatest musicians to be equally accomplished entrepreneurs.
Keith Twitchell spent 16 years running his own business before serving as president of the Committee for a Better New Orleans from 2004 through 2020. He has observed, supported and participated in entrepreneurial ventures at the street, neighborhood, nonprofit, micro- and macro-business levels.
