David Lowery of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven – HuffPost 1.24.11

Mike Ragogna: Nice. So, what’s your advice for new artists?

David Lowery: You can’t look at the past to look at what to do to make yourself successful. I think that’s my number one advice, I’m teaching a class on the fundamentals of music business right now. What I wanted everybody to look at is what everybody did last year isn’t necessarily going to work this year. Also, the fundamental rule–never sell your publishing. The publishing is actually the rights to your song in abstract. It’s fine to sign a record deal, but keep the rights to your songs, the publishing. Essentially, that’s how I’ve enjoyed such a long career making a living in the music business, I’ve never sold all of it, I always kept most of the rights to my songs. That’s served me very well.

MR: And it’s awful when young, hungry artists or bands sign those obscene “360″ deals.

DL: The students in my class, even after two weeks, could tell you why that won’t work based on the simple fact that you can’t have every artist out there touring, there is not enough audience for that. People have enough money to buy an artist’s CDs, but people cannot–there’s just no way–always be going out. You can’t have a live-based music business, that’s not going to work. What happened this last Fall is all the concert promoters started doing what Camper and Cracker and a lot of other indie bands have been doing for years–everybody went on the road trying to make money to play for their fans. Well, if I was a concert promoter, l wouldn’t be booking the artists with the same fan base in the same two weeks because people are going to start making choices about which bands they can actually see. Live Nation had the same problem by trotting out all of their classic artists into these huge amphitheaters and filling them about twenty percent, you know?