“I Can't Be Bothered
  With All That Work”

Kenny Kerner

I've worked hard all my life. Each day after high school I delivered clothes for a place called Renex Cleaners in Brooklyn. I made $5 in salary and another $3 in tips. My parents gave me an allowance of $5 a week so I figured that by working, I came out ahead by $3. The store was about three miles from school so my parents gave me bus fare, which I kept to bring my grand total of profit to a whopping $10. I was the ultimate business man!

I kept this work ethic all of my life and it paid off big time. I would never have discovered KISS if I were lazy and decided not to walk the half mile to pick up a box of demo tapes every week. I would never have earned 18 gold and platinum record awards as a producer if not for the fact that I was able to sneak into studios and ask a lot of dumb questions and then co-produce the debut album of a band I managed.

All of this was extra work for me. Extra work, with no pay but extra work that paid off later. That's the way most of Generation X was brought up. But things are a lot different these days, aren't they? Today artists seem inundated with the amount of work they have to do on their own to achieve success. Why aren't the record companies coming out to see me? How come I'm not signed? Why do I have to do all of this marketing and planning and publicity and booking and e-mailing by myself? What the hell happened here?

What happened is a thing called laziness. And it's terminal. There is no cure. It is usually preceded by a series of excuses that artist uses to explain why his career seems to be standing still. The excuses are followed by denial. "I can't do that. I don't know anything about marketing. What the hell is branding, anyway? I don't have the time. My band mates don't want to help me." Sounding familiar? I hope not!

The Internet destroyed the music business that I grew up with and, in its place, provided an opportunity for independent artists to flourish … with a little bit of hard work!

Get off of your collective asses and work. Find out what it is that makes you or your band different and unique as artists and promote the hell out of it. Send e-mails to everyone you know. Do an entertaining short video or interview for YouTube or Facebook or MySpace. Twitter your little fingers off.

Don't just go out and play a show, make it an event. Give people a reason to spend their hard earned money. And you better have a great show when the curtain goes up. Instead of cooling down with a beer in the dressing room, get out there and press the flesh. Meet the people who came to see you. Network with them. Ask them what they liked and didn't like. Get their contact information. Work the room, baby!

If you're lucky enough to have a friend make a video of the show, get together and watch it a few days later. Discuss it. Review it. What can be better? What looks stupid? Call the people who came to see you and thank them. Boy, that'll blow their minds, won't it?

Give away one or two songs on the Internet for people to download. Let them live with your music; let them spread the word to others. Let them promote you.

All of this stuff takes a lot of time and even more planning. That's why it's called... Building a Career. So don't be terminally lazy. Careers will not come to you. You need to structure them. So put down that video game. Drop that beer. Use your head and think about all of the things that you are not doing now because they take too much time or because you're doing something else you like better.

Close your eyes for a second… now picture yourself standing in a puddle of sweat on stage at Staples Center or Madison Square Garden in front of 15, 000 people screaming your name. The lights are so bright you can hardly make out a single face but you hear them chanting your name … over and over again… louder and louder.

You can sit there with your eyes closed and dream forever or you can wake up and do the work it takes to achieve THAT kind of success. So what's it gonna be?