Carl Palmer – HuffPost 3.3.14

Mike Ragogna: What advice do you have for new artists?

Carl Palmer: Today the market has so much of everything. There are so many different genres of music that just didn’t exist when I started and there’s nothing wrong with that. If there’s art to be created, let’s create it. But it’s really, really difficult. Years ago we would build up a reputation through going out and playing and building up a solid base of real loyal fans, not just in the country that we’re from, but on a global level. That’s very important, but on the other hand you can cut to the chase here and suddenly be doing a broadcast from your bedroom every Saturday night on a webcam and have people sign up for it. You can do it a different way, and isn’t that fantastic? The only thing that is really important here is that it doesn’t matter how you do it, whether you do it the old way or whether you do it from your bedroom or whatever you’re doing, you need to know that you’re good at what you do and you can produce this music live. Producing it live is very, very important today, mainly because CD sales are what they are. New albums, unless you’re a mega, mega, mega star are merely a calling card. Downloads don’t make you money, you’ll be living at McDonald’s all your life unless you’ve got an album that is selling so, so, so many. So at the end of the day you need to know that you can go out and physically perform in front of people, because that’s what’s left. If you’ve got new material that people enjoy, who knows, you might start to chart, and if you chart you’ll play bigger places and wouldn’t that be great? But really, the deal is, you’ve got to be so good live these days because there are so many of us doing it in all genres of music. So really it’s a case of perfecting your craft as much as you possibly can because the live situation is the only thing they can’t take away from musicians right now. Playing a tour like we did years ago where you go out to promote the CD, you didn’t even consider making money on tour, you went out to promote your vinyl, your CD, cassette, whatever it was. Today it’s the other way around. You’re going out to make money from touring and your CD is the calling card.