The gentleman in front of me is Daniel Holter, who is a producer, composer and owner of Burst Records in Milwaukee. Daniel has thousands of songs licensed every year on virtually all of the top shows and produces commercial music for such varied clients as Goldman Sachs, GM, Microsoft, GE, and Gatorade. Since forming the Burst Collective in 1996, he's created various music libraries including the Gravity Music Library, the Velocity Music Library and last year's BurstLabs.com, which caught the ears of Extreme Music and Sony/ATV Music Publishing and resulted in a really sweet deal. Daniel also had the lead single on Columbia Recording artist Emma Roberts with his song, "I Wanna Be," as a result of a deal he made through a TAXI listing. Mr. Daniel Holter.
Dean Krippaehne is based in Seattle. He is a producer/songwriter/musician. Dean currently has over 100 songs with several music libraries. His recent placements include the ABC soap One Life to Live and ABC Family's Lincoln Heights. 2008 has also brought Dean a Billboard Top 10 album and two gold records in Europe. His cuts include Stefanie Heinzmann, American Idol's Sarah Burgess and America's Got Talent's Sarah Lenore, among many others. Virtually all of Dean's deals have been the result of connections made through TAXI.
This is Richard Harris, a songwriter/producer, signed to Peer Music Publishing. He is originally from the U.K., as you will hear when you hear his voice. Richard now lives in Los Angeles, is a soon to be father—a first-timer. Congratulations on that. He is currently writing for artists on Atlantic, Universal, Motown and EMI Records. He has had great success with TV placements and commercials. Recent placements include One Tree Hill, The Closer and Cold Case. Richard has also been a TAXI member and recently joined our A&R team. Mr. Richard Harris.
I wanted you guys to meet these guys because they are what every TAXI member wants to be, presumably. First of all, they are all incredibly nice guys. They are all incredibly humble, good people, and I consider them all friends. As a matter of fact, Richard met my daughter Sara at a Road Rally maybe six, seven years ago or something, and she kept saying, "Dad, you've got to meet this guy Richard. He's really talented." But, frankly, I ignored him a little bit because I didn't want the other members who were at the Rally to think I was playing favorites, that if my daughter liked somebody that I would give them special attention. Sorry that I slighted you.
Daniel, you and I first met as a result of you getting your song, "I Wanna Be," cut by Emma Roberts on Columbia Records. It was a forward that went to our mutual friend Marshall Altman. It was the first single from that album, but you earn the majority of your living from a production music library that you started in Milwaukee. How did you go from being like the folks in this room to becoming a guy who runs his own little empire that's not so little anymore and earning a really nice living? He's living the dream because, as he just said to me outside, "Hey, I get to wake up every day and do nothing but creative stuff now, and other people take care of the business end and make the money." How did you go from being these folks to being you?
Daniel: Wow. It's been a long journey. It's been one step at a time. It's been investing almost 100% of everything I made every year into more material. The film and TV game is a numbers game, so the more pieces you have earning little bits of money all week long, all month long, all year long, the more of those you have keep adding up, because they don't go away. So now, cut to 12 or 14 years later, the combination of that, plus working my ass off for a decade, has paid off.
How many hours a day did you typically work during that decade or so?
Daniel: Mercifully, it's much less now. But when I was building the company, it was 100 hours-a-week.
Real hours. Not 100 hours a week surfing the Internet thinking about it.
Daniel: No, I did a lot of that too. That's inspiration, creative inspiration.
Now, now, don't set a bad example.
Daniel: You know, I always wanted to do this bad enough that I worked a full-time gig—doing music, thankfully—but working 40, 50 hours a week for the privilege of working the other 40 hours a week on stuff that I loved. I'm a long way from loving everything I've ever done, but it has all paid the bills, and it has all been in music. So that's a pretty big bonus, you know. I never had to dig ditches or deliver the mail, which are all valuable efforts, but I have zero marketable skills beyond being in the music business. So I worked fulltime to be able to do the stuff and invest all the money I was making on the side until eventually that kind of cross-faded into being able to do that less and less.
My fiancé, actually, is like, "You're working all the time." And I respond with, "I'm never working." It's not work ever anymore, thankfully. But the accounting and the lawyers—those conversations get tedious and have nothing to do with being creative. I am thankful that those are much more diminished in my life, and it's much more about having fun and making music, which is fantastic.
I share that with you. I feel so privileged every day to get up and do what I love. My entire adult life has been spent either pushing faders or working in the music industry. Yeah, I've worked a lot of 20–hour days. I mean, leading up to the Road Rally, I haven't had a Saturday or Sunday off in nearly three months. I love what I do. So, yeah, it feels like work, it wears you out. I constantly write to TAXI members in our newsletters about it. It's the greatest thing in the world to guide your own destiny, and when you do something that you're passionate about, it doesn't feel like work... that much. I mean, certainly manual labor would feel more like work. Or working for the man would feel more like work.
Daniel: Or putting on a tie would feel more like work. Yeah, it's a great life. You're exhausted, but it's really not work. I don't consider it work. My family has, often.
Getting paid to do what you love... Dean, you're a performing artist and songwriter like virtually everybody in this room. How did you get your first break, and how have you leveraged that into what has become the fulltime pursuit of writing and recording music primarily for film and TV?
Dean: Well, like a lot of people here I've been a performer and a musician. I've done that for years and years. And one of the things that happened to me was in the mid–'90s I got a small indie record deal to do smooth Jazz—or somewhere between smooth Jazz and acid Jazz. We finished the CD, the record company pulled it, but I managed to get the masters. So, as time goes by, I joined TAXI. I'm still looking to be a star, but it's not really working, I don't know why; I guess I don't dance well enough. But I had these really well-produced tracks from this record deal. And these TAXI listings would keep coming up for TV and film. I didn't know anything about that, but one day, maybe six years ago, I decided to submit... There was a listing for neo-soul tunes, and on our smooth Jazz CD two of the songs kind of fit that new neo-soul-thing that they were doing. So I submitted these tunes, got forwarded, got a call from a music library and still didn't think anything about it—I wasn't pursuing the film and TV listings—until I got an ASCAP royalty check from the songs that had been placed on a soap opera. I remember getting the check and reading the numbers on there and seeing that one song could get played three times in one episode, and I just went, "Whoa, I want to learn about this business." That was like four years ago when that happened, and ever since I've been just trying to learn and sprint and get into more libraries, get more placements. And that's kind of how I got into that end of it. Now I'm all about the libraries in film and TV. Wow, you can build a career through TAXI listings on this stuff.
What was it that you learned that you didn't know about libraries before? Were you utterly ignorant about what libraries were, what they did, how you got paid? And, if that was the case, how did you learn more?
Dean: I would read all of the stuff that TAXI had. That was really one of my open doors. One of the guys, Matt Hirt, who has done this, I would read a lot of his interviews and watch the videos you did with him. I would read the stuff that you had put through there, and just started to put the pieces together and going, "Wow, there are a lot of these shows that do a lot of music, and in some of these genres I do okay. Where do I have to go? What are the libraries?" I started researching the libraries. I started coming to the TAXI Road Rallies, going to the workshops here, which was huge for me. I think at my first Road Rally my eyes just got opened. I went to quite a few production music library panels; I listened to the songs that were being played and saw where the bar needed to be on the various genres. Just studying and working hard at it, trying to develop my craft, and all those other things that you do. Does that make sense? I'm babbling.
No, you're not babbling. You make it sound easy, and, frankly, I don't think it's that hard. It's not rocket science so much as it is persistence. You persistently kept moving yourself forward.
Dean: In one sense, for me, it is easy. But in another sense, one of the things that it has changed in my life is that now I work really, really hard at it. I have two days a week that are full production days, where I'm producing 10 hours a day. And I try to get at least two tracks done a week. Some of the other days are just writing, but I'm working. I'm working at this, and I'm working all the time really hard. I think, for me, for so long I just wanted a hit record to fall out of the sky, so I'd write a little bit, submit stuff. One of the big differences in me is that I actually took this thing on, and I'm gonna work, and I'm gonna work really hard. I get up every day, get in the studio, write stuff, try to write better, learn your studio, learn your software. All those things, just keep getting better at them.
Richard, even though I ignored you at several Rallies, hopefully I wasn't rude to you.
Richard: I totally understood where you were coming from. I totally got it at the time. It was cool.
You are more than gracious. But you fared really well without my help, entirely based on the quality of your work. Tell the audience how the Road Rally and some of the other conferences... It's funny, Richard has been screening at TAXI, but I see more of Richard on the road at other conferences that I speak at than I actually do at the TAXI office. Tell everybody how you leveraged just simply walking up to people saying hello at these other conferences into now you are living the dream as well, more so on the record company side it sounds like lately than film and TV. How did you do that?
Richard: Well, I think you're thankful and you're lucky that you're amongst your peers and your friends. We are all kind of on the same journey, and different stages of that journey to some extent. When I moved here six and a half years ago, I had already known about TAXI back in the U.K. I was in a band and it wasn't really as big in the U.K. at that point, so I came here and I saw TAXI to begin with as an initial way of meeting a lot of people. And having this accent does help a little bit. It makes you kind of exotic to begin with, which is kind of nice. I mean, the great thing is that everybody is quite friendly. I don't know how many first time TAXI people are here this time at the conference...
Let's ask. How many of you are first-timers? A good portion. Great.
Richard: Wow, that's good. And that's where I was when I came here six years ago. Everybody was open to talking to everybody. It's hard not to when you've got like 2,000 to 2,500 people crammed into that lobby area at one point. I met my good, good friend Rob Grad, who is back there. I literally had to sit next to him because there was only one seat left in the place, so I sat next to him. He was with another good friend of mine called Robbie, who is now a really good friend. We just got to talking and that was it.
I learned very quickly on in this business that you can't say no to anything. So when I got invited to anything, if somebody said, "Have you heard about this? Do you want to go?" I'd say yes, and I'd figure out how I'd get there and everything else. Then that just started turning into different opportunities. I think, with me, with TAXI I felt the more people I met, the more opportunities came along. And then I would start to bumping into the same people, especially at some of the other conferences—A&R people and publishers and stuff like that. Slowly but surely, like these guys, I started to pick up some work.
I wasn't really doing the songwriting thing to begin with. I had come from the U.K. as a band member and as a writer in a band, but I saw that the music library business and the TV commercial business as a way to make a living. So I started to make those connections, through TAXI, and through some of the other things like the Durango Songwriters Expo, and began to supply music, and eventually got into the libraries and just kept building up catalog. I got that first BMI check and it was like one page. It was like a quarter of a page listing with one thing on there. And now, I don't know, it's like 20, 25 pages, and it's just the most random shows I've never heard about that keep paying. I'll be sitting there watching HGTV and my wife will go, "That's your piece of music," and I check in six months to make sure they've paid... make sure those cue sheets went in, you know.
My personal philosophy is, no matter what you do, as long as one good thing comes out of it, it's been a worthwhile experiment for me. And TAXI was a big part of that, and continues to be part of that, because I still continue to connect with people. And those people lead you onto other people. Like it says with this Connecting the Dots panel, it's only in hindsight when you look back do you realize all the people that introduced you to the place that you've gotten to. And, of course, winning the TAXI President's Choice Award at the Rally thing was very helpful for me a couple of years ago. That's when the switch over for the songwriting came along.
I know that Steve Melrose is important in your life now. He's a dear friend of mine. He's been on panels here numerous times. And I'm sure your connection with him is that you're the only guy in America that can understand his Scottish accent. It is so heavy.
Richard: I've learned to speak Melrose-ese. It takes a while. Sometimes he'll ring me— I was talking to him on the phone last night—and he'll start rambling and I'll say, "You've got to stop. I don't know what the hell you're talking about." And I've probably agreed to something I really don't want to do.
He and I were in a car together. We were both at the Kauai Songwriters Festival about three or four years ago—probably around the time you first met him—and he said, "Look, let's play hooky and run off-campus. Do you have a car?" So we drove to Wiamea Canyon or something. We spent three or four hours in the car together, and as we pulled back into the hotel when we were driving up that long windy road, he looked at me and he said, "You haven't understood a word I've said for three hours, have you, mate?" And I said, "Nope." For those of you guys who are new to the Rally, Steve Melrose has the thickest Scottish accent of anybody you'll ever meet in your life, not to mention he sounds like a pirate.
Richard: He does. He acts like a pirate sometimes as well. [audience laughs]
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