Saturday, June 28, 2008

John Hiatt On the Music Business

One of my favorite artists, John Hiatt has an interesting perspective on the music industry woes via Reuters:
"People have to be 'record men' again," Hiatt said. "They actually have to learn a living. You get a record out there, it sells 50,000 copies over the course of 18 months. You have to work it, because they don't buy 50,000 the first week. It's great to see people who actually love the music back in business in these smaller concerns. I've never seen people take more vacations than these big record company people." It also helps that Hiatt keeps his overhead low by recording his albums at his 97-acre (39 hectare) Tennessee farm. He spent about 10 days recording the basic tracks for "Same Old Man" a year ago with guitarist Luther Dickinson and drummer Kenneth Blevins. Since Hiatt owns his masters and his publishing, he has complete creative control.

His new album is titled Same Old Man and I'll be seeing him in August.

2 comments:

Von Allan said...

Thanks for pointing that out. My wife and I are big Hiatt fans ourselves! :)

Anonymous said...

I subscribe to your blog for the book publishing insight, but appreciate these little nuggets. I'm a huge Hiatt fan...