Brian Culbertson – HuffPost 5.29.13

Mike Ragogna: All right, as always, even though I’ve interviewed you five, six, seven times, what is your advice for new artists?

Brian Culbertson: Well, I think if you’re trying to get into this genre–I think there’s still a lot of new artists working on that–what I tell a lot of them is the best way to really get known these days is to start touring with a well-known artist, and then, hopefully, you can be featured during their set. Then you can start being known. Obviously, that’s once you get to a certain level, but that’s definitely helped out a lot of younger artists starting out. Besides that, you’ve just got to find your own talent so that you’re unique and stand out. There are too many people that are copying artists that they like and that’s not really going to do anything because nobody’s going to know it’s them.

MR: Is there any advice you would give to a certain Brian Culbertson way back when you were starting?

BC: Oh wow. That’s a good question. [laughs] No one’s ever asked me that before. “What advice would I give myself twenty years ago?” You know, I wish I would have known more about the actual music business. When you first start out as a kid, all it’s about is making music and it’s all you want to do and you sort of forget that it’s a business and you need to know to protect yourself and to make things happen. Nobody really told me that, and a lot of people don’t say that you sort of learn the hard way over the years. I think I wish I would’ve known more of that, but hey, we all learn somehow. And I do a lot of sit-ins on classes, whether it be high school students or college students, and talk about those kinds of aspects, and a lot of people just don’t think about it yet at an early age. I don’t think it’s ever too early if you know you want to go into the music industry to start learning about that stuff. “What is publishing? What is ASCAP?” You know what I mean?