There’s not as much money to be made off music these days but it seems there’s no shortage of people running scams to make money off musicians.
In the last 5 years but especially since the pandemic, the music scene has been speed-running a replay through the previous 70 years of industry confidence tricks. From payola to pay-for-play to advanced fee fraud, there’s not a single racket that hasn’t come back from the dead to claw at a young musician or producer’s wallet.
It’s not clear why this is. Maybe we’re more impressed by online shows of industry cred, social proof and follower counts and artist associations we don’t bother to verify. Maybe we’re just more comfortable now making deals with and sending money to people we’ve never met face-to-face. Maybe it’s that a video or DM which promises fame in exchange for a cash app swipe is way more alluring than some old fuck telling you to work hard and quit complaining.
How to Avoid Every Single Scam Every Single Time.
Don’t pay upfront for services. (You can now skip the rest of this article.)
Scammers are first and foremost thieves of time. They will demand your time and they will get it. You’ve lost that fight before you started. Being in this industry means dealing with people even when our sketch radar lights up like a Christmas tree. It takes a minute to vet even someone you clock instantly and you won’t get that time back.
But they will eventually demand your money too and that part is up to you.
A few people fall for obvious scams, but where people get nailed are the edge cases. Someone claims they have a guy (everyone has a guy) who can get your music on popular playlists for an upfront fee. Someone claims they know bookers throughout the Northeast and can get your ass from flyover country to the DJ booth in a superclub. A hanger-on of someone famous claims he’s the guy behind the curtain and can make that “brand magic” happen for you too. Everyone probably falls for cases like this where they pay up front and feel instant regret as some stranger does nothing and claims it’s your fault as your hard-earned cash disappears up their nose.
Most artists these days are independents and being alone is really hard. The best advice is to be very wary of upfront payments to anyone.
The Album’s Free But the Bots Will Cost You.
It’s easy enough to start your own digital label and upload music that nobody will hear. Why pay an upfront fee for that?
But people fall for this one every day. The label usually claims that the fee pays for artwork (it’s typically boring type on free stock photos) and that — lucky you! — they partner with a company who can promise several tiered levels of promotion that will SUPERCHARGE your album and, of course, your career.
Just so we’re clear: they’re with that company they’ve “partnered” with. It’s them. The label is a setup. The promotion fee for the SUPERCHARGE is the payload.
Goofy record labels like this are never subtle in their approach. One, Beige Records, has sent an identical email to pretty much the entire fucking world with the subject line “[Name] – We Love Your Music!” and claiming to have found your music scouting SoundCloud. They can’t name a specific track — just your “overall sound and energy.” Your VIBE. Beige Records (which also sometimes calls itself Beige Music, sometimes in the same email) even sent this pitch to people with no music at all on their SoundCloud accounts.
Give Me Your Soul and Your Royalties.
Few artists make fuck you money from streaming. It’s mostly “no, fuck YOU” money — a number so small that it might conceivably take you a few thousand years longer than the dinosaurs roamed the earth to recoup your record label advance in the rare circumstances in which you got one.
So you’re probably wondering why streaming royalties are something you need to protect, much less why anyone would actually want to scam you out of them. You might be surprised to know there are many people are trying to get their hands on your Spotify pennies — provided they can get them for free.
Benn Jordan (aka The Flashbulb) made a really fascinating video about a reporter who was offering producers access to his field recordings (on the broad theme of “the ocean”) in exchange for half of their streaming royalties. Like with Beige, producers felt really good that they were “selected.” He didn’t disclose that he was sending these emails out to tons of musicians. Some were flattered enough to say “yes” to a pretty bullshit deal that saw the reporter credited as “co-artist” on more than a thousand tracks released in a little more than a year. (His playlist shows 1,839 songs as of this writing.)
The journalist’s non-profit drew royalties from this instant streaming farm. How much? A manager shared Spotify analytics with Rolling Stone showing that at one point the tracks in this huge library were getting about 50k streams per day, which might have totaled $150 to $200 per day, with more being added all the time. Pretty good music revenue for a non-musician. (The journalist originally called Jordan a troll but after substantial industry coverage apologized and offered back the royalties to anyone that asked for it.)
Kill Your Co-Producer.
It sounds like an edge case but ask around and you’ll hear this story a hundred times. You’re an artist, and one of your peers who gives you extraordinarily positive feedback claims that he has connections with Big Labels X, Y and Z. He says he can hook you up in exchange for co-production credit on this hot new record. To be clear: your track is finished, and your new best buddy did not create a single beat on it (though he may come up with some “suggestions”). He just promises that he can get it properly released on a level that you, yourself, cannot.
This scam often “works,” in that the scammer will indeed often hook you up with a well-known (though usually long in the tooth) label. It’s not because he has a silver tongue or is well-respected or even well-known in the industry. He’s just shameless, pushy, a born salesman who will send 20 emails an hour to get his foot in the door.
He’ll usually take whatever they offer for a contract and tell you to sign it because “that’s how it works in the business, trust me.” Sometimes he’ll take all of it. But that’s not the scam. That’s playing with found money, because he didn’t do a fucking thing to earn whatever the payout is.
The scam is he’s now used you to build up his own discography, and just like he pushed his way into the door of a record label, he’ll push you out at the first opportunity too. You’re one of many, an unknown entity compared to the “impressive” discography the scammer has built up — not to mention the publishing he’s taken without writing a single note.
This happened a lot when studio time was expensive and making a record was more arcane art than engineering. But it still happens today. Flavio Lodetti (aka “FLOD”) built a discography going back 9 years from tracks that were stolen wholesale mingled with “co-productions” he never produced. I tracked down multiple “co-producers” who outlined exactly how his scam worked. He didn’t have any connections or any obvious musical ability at all. He just found young and inexperienced producers and conned them into giving him co-production credit in exchange for his “connections,” which basically amounted to him spamming the shit out of every label he heard about. Nearly 80% of his releases were “co-productions.” He did this all the way up until he was exposed — daisychaining phony co-productions all the way to Nervous Records (“Don’t Stop,” which was “co-produced” with Mauro Venti, who actually wrote the track.) Out of hundreds of tracks that were once for sale on Beatport under Lodetti’s aliases, we weren’t able to find evidence that Lodetti composed a single one.
Fixers get a fee, not your publishing.
Managed Decline.
If you’ve got a manager who used to be your roommate or your DJ buddy or your favorite bartender and they’re learning as they’re going along, this is not about them. I hope you become a rock star and they become your protector and benefactor, pouring drugs or vitamin-reinforced grape smoothies down your throat until the money runs out.
What we’re talking about are fake managers who claim to have serious connections to well-known artists, their platinum records and millions of streams. They’re everywhere on social media and if you don’t have connections in the industry already it can be hard to verify anything about these people.
But you can judge them by their actions. Artist managers will take a percentage of income. An artist manager who will only take you on in exchange for upfront cash just told you what their business is: they make a living by taking money from artists, not by making money for them. This is a totally indisputable statement.
“But,” you say, “I was contacted by THIS company, and they’ll handle PR, bookings, everything, for a flat monthly fee. Are they legit?”
Some are going to complain about this. I’m going to say it loud for the people in the back: artist management takes a percentage, not a monthly fee. Artists do not hire managers on month-to-month basis, and management does not take on artists on a month-to-month basis. An initial get-to-know-you trial is understandable, but an artist-management relationship is by definition conceived to be a long-lasting one, because management is investing in you, and you are building something with them.
“But—”
Okay: maybe not all management agencies that charge a monthly fee are scammers, but all manager-scammers will charge a monthly fee. If they sent you a cold email to try to sign you up and later reveal they charge a monthly fee, the odds of this being legit approach zero.
But here’s the kicker: the purity of their intentions really don’t matter. It’s still bad business for an artist, no matter how they do the math. Imagine an agency has a warehouse full of artists like you, each paying a monthly fee in lieu of a percentage. What is this agency’s profit motive? To make one artist more money? Or to sign up as many artists as they can? The more they work for any individual, the more they lose. Their profit is based upon taking money from you, not making money for you. It’s a fucked up series of incentives. And this is why (presto!) artist managers do not charge a monthly fee.
The Vicious Circle and the Virtuous Cycle.
The scamming business is a good business because, in the music industry, there’s always a new generation coming up. There’s a constant churn and because of that there will always a shortage of information on how the industry actually works.
Music industry scams hit in a different way than ordinary confidence tricks, though. In the rest of the capitalist hellscape we live in, transparency and knowledge inoculate the unwary from common scams. In the music industry there are plenty who know everything I’ve written here and still walk into scams anyway.
I get it: the music industry can be a soul-crushing enterprise. Some will do anything to find a shortcut, or just want the crushing to stop.
That’s why these scams fade for awhile but never entirely go away.
Recently, an artist checking the references of a rogue PR agent recently asked me if that agency could guarantee a review in 5 Mag. I’d never heard of them before, and told them that no, nobody could say that but especially not them.
“So,” the artist asked me, “do you think I should still hire them?”
Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20 from Pixabay
