How effective are you in meeting people and creating meaningful and strategic connections? Do you have contacts that can help you take your music career beyond?

In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, I chat with musician Brian Bob Young, who gave this podcast’s music a makeover.

Download the PDF Transcription

Podcast Highlights:

01:11 – Who is Brian Bob Young?

04:16 – Being specific about your goals

04:45 – Reading and writing books

08:38 – Being focused in networking and music production

09:34 – How to cold call or approach strangers

11:37 – The evils of non-sequitur networking and marketing

12:47 – Creating context in conversation and generating opportunities

16:55 – Avoid burning bridges

19:37 – Drama is always created

24:03 – Open mics are a great place to network

27:20 – How Brian wrote the music for The New Music Industry Podcast

33:29 – Music on the podcast

34:14 – Finding a need and filling it

37:03 – Getting your first clients

37:45 – Meeting people (or how David got over his fear of talking to people)

39:35 – Booking gigs

43:22 – How many projects does David have?

48:27 – Begin creatively free

52:16 – It’s not just what you know but who you know

Transcription:

David Andrew Wiebe: Today I'm chatting with musician Brian Bob Young. How are you today? Brian?

Brian Bob Young: Great, David Andrew Wiebe. Thank you so much for having me on, man. It is actually a really cool experience to have a working relationship with you and hear my music be a part of a show that I genuinely enjoy, and then be able to talk about it with you too is pretty cool. So, thanks man.

David Andrew Wiebe: Yeah, thanks for joining me. I guess my listeners have now been hearing your music for probably a few months at this point, right? I've been using it for many episodes. And of course, your name is mentioned at the end of every episode. We should maybe get a sense of who you are and then recount how it is that you came to do some of this music?

Brian Bob Young: Yeah, I guess so. Just like most of the people that have been on the show, I love music and I’m engaged with it my whole life. That's kind of the given for most of us in this field, right. But I guess, I don't want to be too tangential and like a life story of how I ended up on the production side of things. So, I'll just be specific with how I was able to work with you was that I made goals about a year and a half ago of what kind of work would I want on the production side and what projects could I do that would help me to get there that would also be meaningful projects.

And then, happen by actually a kind of like a lightning bolt moment where I was working a bunch of jobs, and I came across a buddy of mine that I didn't even know he was a film producer. He knew that I was starting to reel on the production side and more of the creativity side of the music stuff, which will put a pin in that that I worked on the business side for a long time before doing this. He had a film script and was like, “Hey, do you think you could try your hand on scoring this independent film?” And in the human mode, I was so excited because I love this guy. He's worked on some of my favorite movies actually. He worked on the movie… He was a part of Whiplash. That kind of fell through a little bit for him but I just know that he had worked on projects that I would be really excited about. But at the time, I was not equipped at all to execute doing a film score. I had no idea what would go into that. Neither the resources nor the skill to execute.

So, I learned that pretty quickly and talked to him about it. He said, “Dude, that's fine.” But it really got the wheels in motion of like, okay, if another script or something ends up in my lap, I want to be prepared because you've heard the quote, “Luck is where preparation and opportunity meet.” right? Yeah. So, that's kind of what got the wheels in motion.

One of the first ideas I had was like, why not try to help out podcasts that I like and see if they want their music updated or a little bit more catered to the show and all that. And your show, of course, is one of the shows that I enjoy and reached out to see if you want some updated music that kind of had its own little different sounds. So, that is a little bit of the story of how I specifically ended up on doing the production for your show.

David Andrew Wiebe: That's great. I like what you said about specificity, which is something that Matt Star was very adamant on when he came on the show and talked about that too. So, being really intentional and clear about your goals.

Brian Bob Young: And that's so hard for me man. It is drudgery for me to be specific and not be idealistic in my head in the clouds. It is hard for me but when I do it, obviously, it's fruitful. There's something there.

David Andrew Wiebe: I'm at the same boat for sure. And the thing that I kept talking about this year and continue to talk about this year is publishing 10 to 12 books. I think I'm set up fairly well to do that. And even if I don't reach that goal, if I end up with five or eight books, I think I can still say, “Okay. If I want to do 10 the following year, I can at least make that adjustment.”

Brian Bob Young: Two things there. Not to go on tangents with it but I know listening to your show that you're like a voracious reader. You read a book a week last year. Is that true?

David Andrew Wiebe:  I did that in 2015 and 2016. Yeah.

Brian Bob Young: That's insane. I love to read too but I just got done this book called Educated by Tara Westover. Have you heard of that?

David Andrew Wiebe:  I haven't.

Brian Bob Young: It's a memoir of her gnarly story of growing up in an oppressive Mormon household off the grid and how she ended up studying at Cambridge and educating herself and becoming this wonderful speaker and author.

So, I tore through that book in like a week but I'm reading the Subtle Art of Not Giving an F right now and I've been on a month, which is like half the size. So, you know, if I'm passionate about it I can get through it but if not, I'm going to take my time. But I know that you were doing that because it's kind of like the CEO thing, right, of like CEOs read a book a week and now they're like awesome.

David Andrew Wiebe: Yeah, no, it's exactly right. I was inspired by that for sure. But another thing that happened was, I think, I want to say its Triple A accountants, it actually might be Double A Accountants. I'm going to look that up real quick but it's it was Shas Nawaz. Shahzad Nawaz is the managing director. It's Double A Accountants. I interviewed him once. It was for a different podcast. I was doing pre-interviews to kind of get the guests answers and coax out cool tidbits from them before they actually went on the show and did the real interview.

Brian Bob Young: Gotcha.

David Andrew Wiebe: But he sat there. Some people you create a relationship with. He sat there and talked with me for I don't know, 10, 20, 30 minutes after the show. I was asking him because he just seemed like really competent with marketing.

Brian Bob Young: Oh, cool.

David Andrew Wiebe: And then he told me, “Oh, well, the reason I know how to do this is because I read a book a week.”

Brian Bob Young: Good. I am always reading. I never stopped reading.

David Andrew Wiebe: Yeah. He recommended me some Dan Kennedy material, which at the time I was not into but I am actually really into it now, which is funny.

Brian Bob Young: Right. I assume you've read like the Seth Godin stuff and all that. Yeah.

David Andrew Wiebe: Oh, yeah.

Brian Bob Young: Yes. That's like, if you haven't, it's like get out of entrepreneurship. It's like the Bible of entrepreneurs. But anyways, yeah, that's it. That's enough. I'm reading everything I could go off on. I love reading but that's really cool that you're able to do that.

David Andrew Wiebe: Yeah. And getting back to what she said too, yeah, I think for a long time I was not terribly specific. It still can be a bad habit of mine at times. But what happened through much experience and reading and learning and growing was there were some people that were just not worth working with. You begin to learn that through experience, you know, kind of the warning signs, “Is this going to work out?” Or is this really going to be just a total disaster that they're going to be constantly calling me, which I don't accept calls from clients to begin with. Except on a completely scheduled basis. Are they going to be a huge bother? That's just going to suck up my time and I'm not going to make any money on that.

Brian Bob Young: Yeah. Well, I hear you on the specificity can be kind of like… or probably like an umbrella to our entire conversation because you talked about one. We talked about networking and some of the music production creativity side. All of it has been slowly learning how to be focused for me, because I am naturally just not a focused individual. And whenever I would read or experience any sort of opportunity, I realized that it's because people were able to focus and achieve what they wanted to achieve and just sit down, put their head down, work hard, but also be really passionate about it. So, maybe that can kind of transition a little bit into the networking side. Because I feel like that's been my experience with networking is because I've achieved at least some level of being focused there and not just like, walking around Nashville trying you're trying to run into a bigwig.

David Andrew Wiebe: Yeah, I think one of the biggest things that I noticed is when you talk to me, it wasn't like you were talking to a complete stranger. Like you didn't know anything about me. You were actually asking very specific questions. I find that something that people don't do well.