Sound Royalties Presents: John Oates Talks Fame, Fortune, and Managing a Hit Music Career
If you missed our featured session at SXSW 2024, we’ve highlighted some key takeaways from the discussion. Watch the full session in the video below!
1. Your music career is a business. You have to run it like one!
Understanding the business side of the music industry is imperative for creatives, especially when it involves grasping the intricacies of the publishing world and entering agreements. Oates believes this goes back many decades, but now, the newer generation of creatives are much savvier about navigating what is notoriously a very complex business. This is due to virality, instant success, learning from the past, and all of the newer ways people can be seen and heard.
Oates talks about how 25 years ago, there were 30,000 new songs a year competing for radio, whereas now it’s around 60,000 to 150,000 songs being uploaded to streaming platforms every day. This can be daunting to new artists, but if they have a better knowledge of all the aspects of the industry, like all the places to collect royalties from and how to build a supportive team, they can position themselves for success.
2. The way people access and listen to music has evolved over time, enhancing music consumption with new innovations in technology.
One of Oates’ biggest revelations was the confluence of American pop music, the radio’s invention, and the phonograph’s creation. He believes these three things are wedded together because there would be no American popular music without a widely accessible delivery system. In this case, the invention of radio and phonograph. It is hard for this generation to imagine because of the multidimensional ways we can access music at our fingertips from streaming platforms.
As previously mentioned, the vast increase of music production in the streaming era has drastically changed with technology, making the pool of new music even larger. Oates goes on to say that there was a groundbreaking moment when people could finally hear music in their homes that wasn’t being played in real-time by a musician. On the flip side, he also believes that it will be very hard to replicate the certain magic of an audience and a live performance for listeners. One thing is for sure: popular music has always reflected the culture and technology of the moment.
3. Maintaining ownership of your music copyrights bolsters the lasting income power of your catalog.
A creative’s catalog is their legacy. Maintaining ownership of copyright allows creatives to generate more revenue over the years, and in the age of viral moments, the potential is huge. This can be seen specifically for Daryl Hall and John Oates with their song, “You Make My Dreams Come True”. When Oates shares this story, he touches on the point that he granted the license for his music to be played in the movie “500 Days of Summer”. While not having any idea of how much of an impact his song was going to have on the world, through the power of resurgence, he was pleasantly surprised. Oates shared that, to him, it was the perfect cinematic symbol of falling in love for the first time. While watching it in the theater, he saw the emotional impact his music could have, even 30 years later. If he had sold his catalog, he would have never seen the direct effects his music could have over decades.