D8 Skills #30 & D10 | Abbey Road Amplify - Studio 1

Today, I attended the Abbey Road Amplify Festival celebrating their 90 year anniversary. They ran panels throughout the day in studios 1, 2 and 3, and I was invited to the first two of them in Studio 1:

The first panel was by AIM and was about identifying the best team for success:

I found this extremely interesting and informative. The panellists included many roles within the industry such as a music lawyer, manager, A&R, booking agent, management company + production company owner.

A valuable piece of advice the lawyer gave was that when you sign a record deal, you're signing to that company, and you may be choosing that company because the A&R is particularly talented of you have a great relationship with them for example, but then that A&R could move to a different company and you're still signed under your contract to that record company for however long the exclusive period of the record deal is. He also mentioned that it's not easy to get a key person provision in your contract.

At the end, an artist in the audience asked what she should priorities in her time (being in the studio making music, focusing on socials, videos etc...) as she's right at the start of her career. Immediately all the panelists told her to prioritise the music, because without good music and without enough of it, no one will care about any of the other things she does. They also advised her to figure out how she will perform her songs live. I thought this was really good, logical and simple advice.

The second was by PPL, PRS, and the PRS Foundation and was about all the intricacies of how money can be made with music:

It was really interesting to hear how these companies operate. I understand royalties in much more depth after this session. One piece of advice they gave was to always get as much as you can in writing so that you can later provide proof in any disputes, such as when you and someone you collaborate with decide upon how much each person contributed to the project as a percentage.

Here is the live stream from the event. I was there for the first two, and I will watch the rest of the panels from the video when I have finished the assignments I'm working on at the moment for college.

I snuck up onto the balcony between the two sessions to have a look at the setup they had for the event. I also got to see a great view of Studio 1. It's MASSIVE.