Phillip Glass discusses about the music business

Phillip Glas was recently interviewed byThe Independent and he discussed abouut the music publishing and other aspects of the music industry:
“When I have young assistants who write, I’m making sure they know how to take care of the music, because you don’t know when you’re going to get your hit,” he says. “There was the Beatles’ first album which sold for a ridiculously low amount of money, but mostly in the pop music world they’re more smart about that. In the world of art music, concert music and opera a lot of the voices are still not willing to think about the business part of it.
“There’s an idealism in the people under 30 that I haven’t seen in decades. No one’s thinking about careers or money; they’re just trying to make work, writing music and playing concerts in small places. That was how it was when I was beginning in the Sixties. It’s a vocation, a calling, and they have a passion for it that I haven’t seen in a while. I do think when the ship of state is sinking, the ship of art is going up.”

“For future composers,” Glass adds, “the money will be in performing and in the way music is used commercially. I know some young composers who write music for video games. It makes them enough money that they have time to write their art music. Sometimes people ask me how they can get into that, and I say: you have to know your harmony and counterpoint really well. If you have no problem with the basics of music, you can work quickly.”

He also decided to be his own publisher: “Otherwise I wouldn’t get the income. At the beginning I made most of my living playing and I wasn’t going to give the material to somebody else,” he points out. “If you want to have a retrospective concert then you have to hire my group. That’s still true today.”

“I’ve encouraged my colleagues to own the publishing, not just to give it away. Some of them, instead of doing it themselves, have asked me to be their publisher. And I say: no, that’s not the idea – you be the publisher. Sometimes I’ve taken on their music because I wanted to make sure it was being taken care of; I knew who they were and I wanted it to work out for them.”

Source: The Independent