Danny O’Keefe – HuffPost 12.7.13

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

Danny O’Keefe: Well, if they’re looking to make money in the music business, go out and tour as much as you can stand until you have a sufficient audience and they love you enough that they will help support you. Maybe they have to help support you with the purpose of other kinds of items. Maybe it’s the cap and t-shirt that makes you your income and your music is the promotional value that allows you to work in a larger and larger set of venues. It’s kind of the way that the recording business was originally. Talking and hearing all the stories from early on, the early recording artists didn’t get paid anything. They were lucky if they got paid from the sessions, or if their musicians got paid, and they got sold records at a discount and then they sold their own records. It’s kind of like that now. Those records are promotional items, it isn’t radio anymore that plays you to the degree that you need to be played. It is those social networks that pick up a song of yours and take it viral and all of the sudden you have an audience that you didn’t have three months before. So the thing is to have a vehicle that really works and go out there and play for whatever you can get.