Micky Dolenz – HuffPost 10.19.12

Mike Ragogna: Micky, what advice do you have for new artists?

Micky Dolenz: Get a good lawyer!

MR: [laughs]

MD: [laughs] I’m serious. Well, you know, I would hate to be a new artist trying to break right now into this business the way it is. There isn’t anywhere near the same mechanism and infrastructure of a music business that there used to be. Even though a lot of people criticized it at the time, there was a grooming and nurturing and a development process that the young artists and new artists could go through, and if you caught the attention of an A&R person–a powerful record music man or woman–you had a shot at being developed. These days, there are a lot of people out there and there are a lot of good people and good music, but sometimes, it’s raw. You hear somebody and you think, “Boy, if they could get a great A&R person working on them and working on their music…” and that’s what used to happen. The artists would go into a record company, they’d sign them and invest an enormous amount of money into the development of that artist–the grooming and the connecting them with other great artists, other musicians, say, or other writers. That, basically, doesn’t happen anymore because the record companies, for the most part, went out of business because of downloading and stealing music. They can’t afford to make those investments with all the artists. So I’d say that’s the biggest problem now is trying to find the very talented artists that are out there somewhere and then trying to find the money to develop them, to groom them, to nurture them and make sure that they don’t have to get a job at Burger King because they can’t afford to support themselves.