149 – A Conversation on Networking & Collaboration – with Musician Brian Bob Young

How effective are you in meeting people and creating meaningful and strategic connections? Do you have contacts that can help you take your music career beyond? In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, I chat with musician Brian Bob Young, who gave this podcast’s music a makeover. Download the PDF Transcription Podcast Highlights: 01:11 – Who is Brian Bob Young? 04:16 – Being specific about your goals 04:45 – Reading and writing books 08:38 – Being focused in networking and music production 09:34 – How to cold call or approach strangers 11:37 – The evils of non-sequitur networking and marketing 12:47 – Creating context in conversation and generating opportunities 16:55 – Avoid burning bridges 19:37 – Drama is always created 24:03 – Open mics are a great place to network 27:20 – How Brian wrote the music for The New Music Industry Podcast 33:29 – Music on the podcast 34:14 – Finding a need and filling it 37:03 – Getting your first clients 37:45 – Meeting people (or how David got over his fear of talking to people) 39:35 – Booking gigs 43:22 – How many projects does David have? 48:27 – Begin creatively free 52:16 – It’s not just what you know but who you know Transcription: David Andrew Wiebe: Today I'm chatting with musician Brian Bob Young. How are you today? Brian? Brian Bob Young: Great, David Andrew Wiebe. Thank you so much for having me on, man. It is actually a really cool experience to have a working relationship with you and hear my music be a part of a show that I genuinely enjoy, and then be able to talk about it with you too is pretty cool. So, thanks man. David Andrew Wiebe: Yeah, thanks for joining me. I guess my listeners have now been hearing your music for probably a few months at this point, right? I've been using it for many episodes. And of course, your name is mentioned at the end of every episode. We should maybe get a sense of who you are and then recount how it is that you came to do some of this music? Brian Bob Young: Yeah, I guess so. Just like most of the people that have been on the show, I love music and I’m engaged with it my whole life. That's kind of the given for most of us in this field, right. But I guess, I don't want to be too tangential and like a life story of how I ended up on the production side of things. So, I'll just be specific with how I was able to work with you was that I made goals about a year and a half ago of what kind of work would I want on the production side and what projects could I do that would help me to get there that would also be meaningful projects. And then, happen by actually a kind of like a lightning bolt moment where I was working a bunch of jobs, and I came across a buddy of mine that I didn't even know he was a film producer. He knew that I was starting to reel on the production side and more of the creativity side of the music stuff, which will put a pin in that that I worked on the business side for a long time before doing this. He had a film script and was like, “Hey, do you think you could try your hand on scoring this independent film?” And in the human mode, I was so excited because I love this guy. He's worked on some of my favorite movies actually. He worked on the movie… He was a part of Whiplash. That kind of fell through a little bit for him but I just know that he had worked on projects that I would be really excited about. But at the time, I was not equipped at all to execute doing a film score. I had no idea what would go into that. Neither the resources nor the skill to execute. So, I learned that pretty quickly and talked to him about it. He said, “Dude, that's fine.” But it really got the wheels in motion of like, okay, if another script or something ends up in my lap, I want to be prepared because you've heard the quote, “Luck is where preparation and opportunity meet.” right? Yeah. So, that's kind of what got the wheels in motion.