It's Never Too Late!

No matter where you are in your career, if this is a new beginning or if you’re a seasoned veteran, still looking for that big break…just remember, its never too late for “it” to happen.

Here are few of my favorite bios and real life success stories. I’m sure many of you know these stories but I’m almost certain, there’s something in it you didn’t know. They all had a price to pay. Enjoy!


Colonel Sanders created the KFC fast food chain at the age of 66. He was the eldest of three children, Sanders was only five years old when his father died. His mother, a homemaker, had to take a job peeling tomatoes in a factory to make ends meet; she would sew at night to earn extra money. Sanders learned how to cook so that he could raise his younger siblings, he took his first full time job at the age of 10 and dropped out of school in the sixth grade to work full time on a farm to support the family.

Sanders held a variety of jobs. He sold insurance in Jeffersonville, Indiana. Then he started a steamboat ferry company that operated on the Ohio River between Jeffersonville and Louisville, Kentucky. Eventually, Sanders took a job as secretary of the Columbus chamber of commerce. There he met an inventor who discovered how to operate natural gas lamps on a gas derived from carbide.

While working on the railroad in Illinois, Sanders took a correspondence course that allowed him to earn a law degree from Southern University. A local judge permitted him to use his law library and local lawyers helped his studies by explaining law terminology. When he lost his job with the railroad, Sanders began practicing law. He had some success in the legal field working in the Justice of the Peace courts in Little Rock, Arkansas. Sanders ruined his legal career, however, by getting into a brawl with a client in the courtroom. Although found innocent of assault and battery, Sanders' legal practice was through.

In 1929, Sanders moved to Corbin, Kentucky, and opened a gas station along U.S. Route 25. When tourists and traveling salespeople asked Sanders where they could get something to eat nearby, he got the idea of opening a small restaurant next to the gas station. The restaurant had one table and six chairs and specialized in Southern cooking such as pan fried chicken, ham, vegetables, and biscuits.

In 1937, Sanders tried to start a restaurant chain in Kentucky, but his attempt failed. Two years later, he opened another motel and restaurant in Asheville, North Carolina, but this too failed.
Sanders continued to alter his chicken recipe to get the seasonings just right. In 1939, he devised a method to cook chicken quickly because customers would not wait 45 minutes for a batch to be fried up in an iron pan. Sanders used a pressure cooker, a new invention at the time, to cook chicken in nine minutes.
Some time later, Sanders began sending his spices to other restaurants in an agreement that he would make five cents on every chicken sold that was seasoned with his spices.

And I reiterate; he was 66 by the time KFC as we know it today, was created.


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Berry Gordy, Founder, Motown Records. Gordy dropped out of high school his junior year to pursue a career as a feather-weight boxer. His fighting career ended when he was drafted to fight in the Korean war, after serving for two years he was discharged and returned home to Detroit and started the Three-D Record label but that business soon failed.

Gordy worked for his father for a short period and then as a chrome trimmer on the assembly line at the Ford Motor Company. The monotony was formidable, and Gordy's way of overcoming it was to write songs in his head, some of which were recorded by local singers.
Decca Records bought several of his compositions and when Gordy compared his royalty checks to what Decca made from the modest hits, he realized that writing the hits wasn't enough. He needed to own them.

At the suggestion of a friend, teenage singer William "Smokey" Robinson, Gordy borrowed $700 from his father and formed Motown.


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Maya Angelou, Author & Poet, was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents divorced when she was only three and she was sent with her brother Bailey to live with their grandmother in the small town of Stamps, Arkansas.

At age seven, while visiting her mother in Chicago, she was sexually molested by her mother's boyfriend. Too ashamed to tell any of the adults in her life, she confided in her brother. When she later heard the news that an uncle had killed her attacker, she felt that her words had killed the man. She fell silent and did not speak for five years. Maya didn’t speak again until she was thirteen.

She dropped out of school in her teens to become San Francisco's first African American female cable car conductor. She later returned to high school, but became pregnant in her senior year and graduated a few weeks before giving birth to her son, Guy. She left home at 16 and took on the difficult life of a single mother, supporting herself and her son by working as a waitress and cook, but she had not given up on her talents for music, dance, performance and poetry.

When she began her career as a nightclub singer, she took the professional name Maya Angelou. She toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess in 1954 and 1955. She studied modern dance with Martha Graham, danced with Alvin Ailey on television variety shows and recorded her first record album, Calypso Lady (1957).

During her years abroad, she read and studied voraciously, mastering French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and the West African language Fanti.

Maya Angelou returned to America in 1964, with the intention of helping Malcolm X build his new Organization of African American Unity. Shortly after her arrival in the United States, Malcolm X was assassinated, and his plans for a new organization died with him.

Angelou involved herself in television production and remained active in the Civil Rights Movement, working more closely with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who requested that Angelou serve as Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. His assassination, falling on her birthday in 1968, left her devastated. With the guidance of her friend, the novelist James Baldwin, she found solace in writing, and began work on the book that would become I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The book tells the story of her life from her childhood in Arkansas to the birth of her child. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published in 1970 to widespread critical acclaim and enormous popular success.

Her screenplay, the first by an African American woman ever to be filmed, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.


"Only as high as I reach can I grow, only as far as I seek can I go, only as deep as I look can I see, only as much as I dream can I be.”

Five Mistakes Band & Label Sites Make

Here's an article that Steve Fortuna of The Kopy Katz sent to us. This article was written several years ago but still holds true today, we think its awesome. Enjoy!


Five Mistakes Band & Label Sites Make
Merlin Mann Dec 6 2004

Admittedly, this is well off our usual fare, but please indulge me in a public service message on behalf of music fans across the Internets—five mistakes that band and label sites make (and a few tips on how to fix them). One data point from a fan.

Too much Flash...

Okay, I get it. You’re creative. Awesome. But you’re totally wasting my morning as I helplessly wait for your designer’s dancing sausages to finish loading. Perhaps worst of all, most all-Flash sites prohibit your fans from creating deep links to artist, album or song pages. Your fans are trying to drive people to the cash register, but you insist on making them watch a puppet show before they can even enter the damned store.

Tip: Use Flash like you would cilantro—sparingly and for a single high-impact effect. Nobody wants to eat a whole bowl of cilantro, and nobody wants an animated death march when they have a “passionate task” to complete. Also, build your pages to make it super-easy to link to anything. Use sub-page anchors, and clearly identify why they’re there.

Crappy or non existent mp3 metadata...

If I load up the mp3 of your big single and it says it’s “Song” by “Artist” on the record, “Album,” you’ve completely blown it already; I have no way to ever find you again. Ditto for file naming. Remember: people often download dozens or hundreds of songs at once, so it’s really unlikely they’ll remember where Track%2007.mp3 came from.

Tip: Fill every possible field of ID3 data with rich, correct information. This is the digital version of an album cover, so give the kids something to read while they’re rocking. Basic track info is a no-brainer, but also consider adding cover art, track number, composer credits, genre and year information, and—duh—add a link to your web site and email address in the comments field. Posting an MP3 without metadata is like Safeway ordering the hair-netted sample lady not to tell hungry customers which aisle those nummy chicken fingers are in.

Too artsy, too fartsy...

People are visiting your site because they want to learn more about bands and music—not to have a guided tour of your designer/brother-in-law’s Photoshop brush collection. Don’t be cute with the design, section naming, or navigation. Don’t make your visitors solve a Rubik’s cube to pull up your lyrics page.

Tip: Let the music be the star of the show and provide fast access to what your visitors really came for: 1) mp3s/downloads, 2) lyrics/discography, 3) show dates, 4) contact info, 5) where can I buy this (preferably pointers to buying online for immediate download). Photos, old setlists, and diaries—anything that paints the personality of the band—are all great, too, of course, but they’re still secondary to posting and updating the holy pentagram of items above. Save the artsy stuff for when you inevitably quit music to take up oil painting.

No search...

Chances are good that fans coming to your site arrive with something extremely specific in mind—often a fragment of lyric or the name of one obscure song. If your site contains more than a handful of pages, provide a clearly labeled search box (or link to a search) on every page, and test it. Make sure your search works and drives visitors to your most popular pages without the need for pecking around.

Tip: Google has a free service for providing site search. It’s not perfect or 100% timely, but it works, and it’s free, and it’s better than nothing.

One-way communication (served one way)...

Your fans are not empty vessels or just (ugh) a street team; they have things to say too. Provide a clear contact email address (plus separate ones for press and booking inquiries if you’re all famous and whatnot) and consider having a fan message board and mailing lists for tour and release updates. Read your email, and answer it.

Tip: Consider creating RSS feeds for your most frequently updated stuff (Sloan’s site does this very well).

Just in general? Don’t let your web designer build a portfolio piece on the back of your fans and your business. Ask your fans what they want, watch how they use your site, and then give them what they like without a lot of hooptedoodle.

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Article link: http://www.43folders.com/2004/12/06/five-mistakes-band-label-sites-make

Thanks again Steve!

A Great Booking Agent

A great Booking Agent with well placed connections can make all the difference in getting a band or entertainer in front of the right audience and increasing their profile. A great Booking Agent will also take care of the negotiations with promoters and venues when it comes to the pay for performances and the arrangements for things like backline and the best accommodations.

Although you can list your EPK with a basic, online booking service, nothing can take the place of having a professional agent (who is not a band member) contacting venues on your behalf. It’s proven that an agent with connections will have an established rapport with promoters, which will drastically increase your chances of getting booked rather than paying to post your EPK online and “hoping” that you’ll get picked out of the hundreds of other bands listed on the same page!

Here are a few basic things you’ll need before an Agent can book you:

You’ll need marketing materials, the most important factor is how you create and market your image. You will want a press-kit; head shots, a demo, business cards and a nice band website (not your MySpace page).

What type of agent do you need? Someone to just book dates, someone long-term to boost your career, or someone who can increase your income. It’s true that some agents or agencies are better in certain areas than others. We at The O.M.G. are at our best while working as long term, income and career enhancing agents. It can be difficult to work with a band that is impatient and seeking very short term gain (wanting a regular night club gig by this Saturday) and unfortunately we have to turn away those anxiety ridden bands on a daily basis.

We aim for the very BEST and the 'best' gigs normally book 6 months to 1 year in advance. Yep, you know the ones.

However, if you decide to promote yourself or send Press kits on your own, PLEASE review our list of DON’Ts:

-Address materials to "whom it may concern" or "contact."
-Address materials to a contact at another label or radio station and forget to change it on your cover letter.
-Misspell your contact's name.
-Write "requested materials" or "personal" on the envelope unless instructed to do so by the recipient.
-Include little bits of paper (song lists, confetti, fortune-cookie fortunes) that fall out, get lost, and annoy people.
-Brag or make demands. You're asking people to do you a favor by listening to your music, not the other way around.
-Send music to labels or DJs who have nothing to do with the style of music you make. It's a waste of their time and yours.
-Talk about your great lyrics in vague, incoherent phrases.

Good packaging and selling can make the difference between success and obscurity. The days of the band member or leader making all the calls are long gone. We make working with a professional agency a dream come true and when you think about it, it’s a whole lot cooler to say… “Call my Agent”.