For many musicians, it can be hard to know where to start with the “business” side of their career. Most would rather focus on their art than on sifting through the details of copyrights and publishing deals. But those details are important for any musician, and especially crucial for those making a living from their work.
Since 2019, The Ella Project, which offers legal assistance to and advocates for New Orleans musicians, artists and culture bearers, has hosted an annual music business intensive called Crescendo. The series gives a detailed overview of the music industry, from licensing and streaming royalties to music contracts and festival gigs.
This year’s seven-course Crescendo series starts Sept. 26, and will run each Tuesday through Nov. 7 at the New Orleans Jazz Museum. Crescendo is free to attend, and while organizers encourage artists to attend each session, it is possible to pick and choose the sessions. RSVP is requested via ellanola.org/crescendo.
Led by Water Seed co-founder and drummer Lou Hill and attorney Bri Whetstone, this year’s Crescendo includes workshops on intellectual property; publishing and revenue streams; working with labels and covering master recordings and record deals; streaming royalties and performing rights organizations; music contracts and band agreements; gigging at festivals; and releasing, pitching and monetizing your music. Check out the full syllabus here.
“It’s an entertaining course,” Hill says. “It’s not just myself and Bri lecturing. It’s an open forum. It’s a conversation. We’re presenting real life situations and practical advice for these situations.”
The majority of the sessions will be led by Hill and Whetstone. But there will be guest participants, including Jason Doyle, the Jazz & Heritage Foundation’s director of production, technology and facilities, who will talk about navigating festivals as a musician.
Whetstone, an attorney focused on intllectual property law at the firm McCranie Sistrunk Anzelmo Hardy McDaniel & Welch, developed Crescendo from small workshops she hosted for The Ella Project on general business terms musicians would frequently encounter.
“There’s often just a basic lack of knowledge” about the industry, Whetstone says. “You really don’t know all of the things you don’t know.”
She asked Hill, who also runs Moonrise Entertainment, to speak during the first Crescendo and they struck a partnership for future editions.
“I went to a similar kind of conference, where Lou came to speak, and he was talking about all these revenue sources that I hadn’t thought of,” Whetstone says. “Partnering with Lou makes a lot of sense because we’re coming from different angles.”
The music industry is evolving quickly, says Gene Meneray, who co-founded The Ella Project with Ashlye Keaton. “The textbooks are out of date by the time they’re printed.”
But “the real secret sauce,” he says, to the series is having the perspective of a working musician and a practicing attorney.
“New Orleans has always been a live music town, but we’ve seen nationally that live music still has to recover” following the height of the pandemic, Meneray says. “Those other revenue streams become so much more acute now.”
One recent area of emphasis has been on the growth of new technologies, including artificial intelligence, and what it could mean for musicians, Whetstone says.
“I think everybody is very focused and curious about how digitized everything is,” she says. “We’ve spent time talking about being able to go to a sound library and being able to create so much digitally, rather than finding a local musician. That has copyright implications.”
New Orleans, for its abundance of talent, has always lagged behind in the availability of educational resources for musicians. But there has been an increasing number of organizations and programs working to change that in recent years.
New Orleans musicians “need as much information as possible,” Hill says. “And the reason we need it is because it’s not about individual success, it’s about the whole community of musicians and music business entities.”
This year’s Crescendo sessions also will be streamed on Zoom. To register and find more information, go to ellanola.org/crescendo.
