Your Creative Career Needs More Than Talent (Kenny Feinstein from Water Tower)
Also available on: Apple Podcasts · Spotify
Kenny Feinstein from the punk rock bluegrass band Water Tower shares how busking, livestreams, and a unique creative identity helped him rebuild his band into a movement. We also talk about learning every part of the music business, building a recognizable brand, and his latest book, More Than Talent: 7 Steps To Attain the Brand, Acquire The Gigs, and Amass Lifetime Fans.
Key Takeaways
Creators should understand every part of their career, even if they eventually hire experts.
Strong visual identity helps people recognize you before they even hear what you do. For Water Tower, punk shirts, bluegrass instruments, and walking toward the camera became part of the brand.
Good content takes experimentation. Kenny emphasized that it took years, hundreds of posts, and paying attention to comments before Water Tower understood what truly resonated.
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Work Smarter Music Marketing (Website)
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Transcript:
Mike: Hey, Kenny. How’s it going?
Kenny: Good, Michael. Great to see you. Love the show. Thanks for having me on.
Mike: Oh, thank you so much. I really do appreciate it. We were just talking before, and I always try to ask, “Who’s listening to the podcast?” I actually find out through my guests who those people are. So I really do appreciate you listening.
I’m really excited because I heard about your project literally last year when you got onto Warped Tour dates for DC and Long Beach. I thought to myself, “Bluegrass punk, that’s the craziest thing I have ever heard,” and I’ve been around the block for quite a while. I respected it so much. I thought, “That’s really cool, blending two very distinctly different genres and bringing them together.”
So I’m really excited about that, but then I got honestly even more excited when I discovered that you have your own marketing agency and, of course, launched a book as well. I love the business side of things, so I’m really excited to do that.
But before we get into all that, I like to start off by asking a very overall question or overall topic. One of the things that came to mind for you was flexibility, because you’ve worn so many hats in a very short period of time, actually. In five or six years, you’ve done so much, from touring, to starting your band, to the marketing agency, to being an author. So I want to know, from your perspective, what flexibility means to you.
Kenny: Great question. Flexibility, for me, always comes back to water, being like water and flowing over everything. If we’re like water, when obstacles come like rocks, we can just flow right around them.
I think it’s easier to be more like water than any other substance because, first of all, we’re mainly made of that, but second of all, it’s easier to figure out what needs to happen next.
Also, yes, this is our sixth year as a band, but I have been in the music industry since I was a kid. Writing my book and doing all these things, I was observing this whole process. But I did start this band as Water Tower in 2020. It kicked the bucket, essentially, because we used to be called the Water Tower Bucket Boys, so it kicked the bucket. That’s why.
Let me also say, I did start the band as Bucket Boys in 2005 in high school, even before then. But in 2012, the band fell apart. I was dealing with addiction, so from 2012 to 2020, there was not much going on, except I was at freeway off-ramps playing music.
But yes, in 2020, I started fresh, and I really learned how to wear all these hats. In the first iteration of the band, I depended on other people, managers, bookers, publicists, everything. But when 2020 came around, the pandemic, that’s when I decided I was going to learn it all on my own.
I took a lot of classes, I read a lot of books, and I used the experience from before to learn how to wear the hats. So flexibility is key in this industry. I always tell people starting out, musicians or anything, if you want to make it in this industry, just learn how to do every part of it as an amateur until you can hire a professional.
Mike: I really appreciate that. That’s literally the same thing I tell every single artist. You should at least understand it, right? Essentially, you are an entrepreneur in a form of a sense. You are running a business, so you should at least understand all aspects of the business.
You may not necessarily be amazing at everything. You might be really bad about marketing yourself or really bad about accounting, or whatever the case might be. But you still have to at least understand it to some degree, because how would you know where you need help or where you’re lacking?
You should understand all the different aspects of things. Especially in the music industry, there is a lot. There are a lot of moving levers and a lot of different pieces when it comes to the music industry.
Kenny: Yes, that’s great advice, and I love that you tell your guests that as well.
Mike: So you mentioned that you started as a kid. How old were you when you started the band?
Kenny: Well, I started playing in bands more seriously at 14. I discovered that I wanted to be in a band when I was 12, when I got together with my friends and became a teacher, because I knew some guitar stuff. I was with my buddies, and for fun we were like, “Hey, you take an instrument, I’ll take one. Let’s all take an instrument and make something up.”
That’s how I became a teacher. Nobody knew what to do, so I said, “All right, put your finger here, and you play this,” and I was kind of teaching people Nirvana and Blink and stuff. Then at 14, I started a more serious punk rock band.
Then I went to a square dance when I was 17, and my whole life changed. I was like, “I want to do old-timey bluegrass music,” and I sort of pivoted from punk rock seriously into this traditional old-timey music.
But as the years went on, I felt my roots calling. The music that had really been with me, I wanted to put them together. I didn’t know any bands or artists who were doing that with those particular styles, but it just made sense to me that these are my two favorite styles. Let me build them together. That has been sort of my life’s mission, punk rock and bluegrass coming together.
Mike: Amazing. I would’ve thought that it actually would’ve been the reverse, where you started off with a passion for bluegrass and then got into punk and blended them together. But actually, it was the reverse. You got into bluegrass a little bit later.
Kenny: Yeah, punk rock first. Then I realized how similar the styles were in so many ways, like the speed, the subject matter, and the community camaraderie. Like I said, they’re talking about really tough stuff: death, breakups, love lost, really tough subject matter in both. But they’re both very fast and aggressive in a way, so they’re very similar.
Mike: Yeah, that’s actually really interesting. I never thought about those comparisons from bluegrass to punk music before, and that’s really fascinating. That just goes to show you the history of music. You can almost start mapping out how far back it goes and the traditions that still exist today from styles of music that were from decades ago or even longer.
Kenny: Yes. I love that, the traditions of punk rock, the traditions of bluegrass. There are similarities in many styles, but in these two styles, I had a similar feeling. It gave me a similar feeling in my chest when I listened to both of the musics.
Again, going to a live show is where I really felt that similar energy, melodically, harmonically, just in the pit, so to speak, because a square dance is just like a pit. It’s just a little bit of a different expression of it.
Mike: Absolutely. So let’s talk about that. You mentioned that you started the project, took some time off for yourself, and then you came back in 2020, which is a very interesting year to try to bring back a project after quite literally kicking the bucket from it.
Why then? Was it because of the pandemic, or was it just the circumstance that you were ready to get back into music again?
Kenny: Yeah, good question. Basically, I had been at freeway off-ramps making my living, and I had started this before the band dissolved because we always started busking. My first thing was playing on the side of the sidewalk when I was 12, when I first made my first $5 from playing music. Essentially, that’s when I realized that’s what I wanted to do.
But then, as the band progressed, we started going to freeway off-ramps to continue the band because we were kind of having trouble with addiction, and all of us were. We were at freeway off-ramps playing music because that was a place where there was no sound guy, light guy, or manager. We didn’t have to book the gig. We could just show up at any time, play our music, and get money for it. That was the only skill that we had, playing music. That was the only thing we knew how to do.
We did it for years and built it up. At one point, there were six or seven of us showing up to the off-ramp, so I would say, “All right, two people at this off-ramp, two people go to that one, you two go to the one down the road,” and then we’d pool together all of our money at the end of the day, kind of working it like the mob or something.
Basically, 2020 was when all of a sudden we couldn’t do it anymore. They said you had to go inside because of the pandemic, and that had never happened. We didn’t plan for that. I was always very punk rock and against social media and against marketing in a way. I was like, the way we’re going to build our fan base is one fan at a time at the freeway off-ramp. Our initial success was from busking, selling CDs while we were busking, and building a fan base at farmers markets and stuff like that.
Then the pandemic hit. We had been working on a record for seven years at that point. Our debut, I started it in 2012. Don Bolles from The Germs produced it, actually, and Ron Reyes from Black Flag helped us a little bit. In 2020, it was ready, and it was in the middle of the pandemic. At that point, I wasn’t ready to put any more time off.
So I went ahead and learned how to do everything myself because we got put inside. I was like, all right, well, if we can’t be at the off-ramp to sell this record, we’re going to have to do it online.
The way I looked at it at first was busking online. All right, fine, we’ll go on Facebook Live, we’ll busk on Instagram and stuff. We started busking online every day at 12:00 and 5:00, building a fan base. Every single day, people could count on it, and we’d have hundreds and hundreds of people there with us every day. That’s how we built our initial fan base on the reboot of 2020.
During that time, I really got into it because I was like, “Wow, we’re making more money than we did at the freeway off-ramp now.” I decided to take marketing classes, studied Indepreneur, got a bunch of books on marketing, and really learned how to do it on our own because I was tired of having to depend on a label, manager, or booker.
I was like, “I just want to make it all happen right now. It can’t be that hard, can it?” So we spent that time learning it. Yeah, that’s basically it.
Mike: That’s basically it.
Kenny: Yeah.
Mike: Just learn everything. No, but I appreciate the fact that you did that. At that point in time, you had been a professional musician for close to 20 years, and after 20 years of experience, you went back to the books to learn.
Kenny: Yeah.
Mike: I really admire that. Not only is that something not everyone thinks about, but at the same time, there is that confidence in yourself, like, “Oh, I’ve been doing this for 20 years. What else is there to learn?” Well, quite a bit, right?
I always like to say that we are forever students. The fact of the matter is that you took it upon yourself and said, “Okay, I want to learn these things.” We were talking earlier about the fact that you should know every single aspect of your own career, and that’s essentially what you did. You learned all those different things so that you’re not only not completely reliant on other people, but also making sure that you have the right team that’s making things happen for yourself.
Kenny: That’s exactly it, and that’s a really good way to put it. I tell artists, if you want to build your team, make sure you know how to do every aspect of your career so you know who you’re hiring and what you’re hiring for.
Otherwise, I remember giving a bunch of money to different industry professionals and being like, “I don’t know what this is doing, but hopefully it works.” Sometimes it would yield something, and sometimes it wouldn’t. Ultimately, I remember feeling so helpless because I was like, “Well, I don’t know how to do what they do, but we have to do this.”
It feels good to know. If I’m going to hire someone, it’s always about the who, not the how, meaning if you don’t know how to do it, you can find the right person to do it for you. But it sure does help if you do know the how to find the right who.
Mike: That’s exactly correct.
Kenny: Yeah.
Mike: All right. So you decided that you were going to take the reins yourself to build out what’s now called Water Tower, right?
Kenny: Yeah.
Mike: And just to give an example, now you’re going from busking to promoting yourself on social media and getting the debut album out the door, which is a very different aspect of the music business.
In five or six years from that point, you’ve had so many accomplishments with the project. Just to knock off a couple of them, Warped Tour, we talked about that before, Warped Tour for DC and Long Beach. In addition to that, Telluride Bluegrass Festival, as well as you also did tour support for Nick from 311.
So I know I jumped ahead in a span of five or six years here, but let’s talk about that first step. Once you learned these things for yourself, the different roles, how they play out, and what you should know, what was step one?
Kenny: Yeah. Step one. I’d say in this day and age, because it is different now, in 2020, what we call the great TikTok interruption, TikTok came in and set a new playing field for who the gatekeeper is. The gatekeeper is the algorithm now. Essentially, we’re our own gatekeepers because if we learn how to work with the algorithm, we can open the gates ourselves.
So step one is learning how to create growth content or value content. What I mean by that is content that is going to cause you to grow and provide value for the listener and the watcher, especially because people watch 1.8 seconds on average of a piece of content, then they’re gone.
It’s all about figuring out how to get someone’s attention, how to hook them, how to tell your story, and how to provide some value or an offer from that content. The hook, story, offer, that’s a Russell Brunson concept, but I think about it in every piece of content we do. How are we going to hook them? What’s the story we’re telling them? What value can we provide through this little piece of content? If they see five to six seconds of this video, how is their life better? Is it better?
If it’s not, then the algorithm is going to punish you because it’s polluting the algorithms. What we’re looking for is stuff to contribute to the lessening of suffering as people are addicted to their screens and hit the dopamine in a positive way. Does that make sense?
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. So what was that for Water Tower? What was it for the band? What was the content that you were releasing then?
Kenny: Well, in 2020, we didn’t know how to do any content, so all we knew how to do was perform. We got on livestreaming, and we livestreamed every day at 12:00 and 5:00. We did that for probably, I don’t know. I don’t remember how long we were locked inside. It seemed like a year, but maybe it was less.
Mike: It was more. It was close to two years.
Kenny: Then yeah. Every day at 12:00 and 5:00, we went live without fail. Sometimes I was tired or Tommy was tired, and he’d sleep on the couch back there while I was live, or I’d sleep and he would go live. We did it every day. We built a community, and that really helped us get comfortable in front of the camera.
We had been on camera for shows and a couple TV interviews over the years, but never like, we’re in front of the camera entertaining. It’s a different feeling than being on stage because it takes different hooks to keep people in.
So that’s where we started with the content. Let’s just do live content every day. Then we started going back out to the off-ramp, and we would bring the phone, the cell phone holder on the guitar, and attach it to the guitar. We would livestream out at the off-ramp and bring our people with us. We got to integrate the virtual world with the cars that were going by and started building our fan base up that way.
That’s really how it started. Then we evolved to where we are now. Essentially, what we figured out was content walking towards the camera.
Here’s the thing I always tell artists: it’s so important to figure out what your voice is and what value you’re going to provide in your ecosystem online.
For us, we narrowed it down to a visual identity and a type of content. I always say 80%, sometimes 90%, of the people are scrolling with the sound off. So how can we get them to turn the sound on and provide a little value?
For us, we embed a meta-narrative, which I tell people is very important. There’s one narrative, for example, us playing a cover song in bluegrass style. One of our newer songs that’s been popular has been Green Day’s “When I Come Around.” The narrative is it’s a bluegrass band playing “When I Come Around.” The meta-narrative is text on screen sometimes, and that might be related to what we’re doing.
Like, “Have you ever heard fiddle playing ‘When I Come Around’?” That’s a meta-narrative. It’s a narrative on top of our narrative, and people can check it out when the sound’s off. So we may have the lyrics going, then that meta-narrative, then our visual identity, which is generally us, or me, in punk rock shirts, 311, Blink, Rancid, Operation Ivy, but we’re playing bluegrass music and walking towards the camera, generally in a cityscape or wherever we are.
We zeroed in on that through years of doing content and figuring out what was resonating. It just so happened that walking content was resonating. It was natural for us because we were walking freeway off-ramps initially with our fans. We would start at the bottom, walk the row of cars with the livestream, and the walking and playing was just our thing.
People started being like, “Why are you walking towards me? Wow, that’s so cool you’re walking and playing.” So we’re like, “Let’s keep the walking.” Then people kept commenting on what I was wearing, like, “Wow, he’s singing bluegrass and he’s wearing a Rancid shirt.” So we made sure that’s our visual identity. With the sound off, you don’t have to hear us. You see us, and you know exactly who we are because we have a strong visual identity.
Mike: That’s brilliant. That’s really, really smart. I do want to emphasize the fact that it took you a little while to figure those things out. It wasn’t like right off the bat you thought this was going to work, and it just worked. It took time to figure out those are the things that people are really resonating with, and this was standing out.
Kenny: It took years. It took absolutely years to figure that out. Hundreds and hundreds, potentially thousands, of posts to figure that out. We were trying everything. A lot of sitting content, every kind of content you can imagine, we tried. Then we accidentally stumbled on the walking content, and we just analyzed it and found that people were resonating with the shirts, people were resonating with the walking, their song choice, the fact that we’re doing punk rock covers a lot of the time, and our originals too.
So yes, it took years to figure out what our visual identity was.
Mike: That is extremely important. I think just in general, it’s something that’s going to catch people’s eye.
When I started my independent record label a while ago, I was trying to find a way to have myself be recognizable because I’m a very introverted person normally. It’s kind of funny, hosting a podcast, but normally I’m a very introverted person. So I don’t have that charisma that other people have when I’m out and about, especially at a show.
I wanted to find something that would help me stand out, and I incorporated a fedora hat into my look. It was very recognizable. People saw me from the audience, and they knew me from that fedora hat. That became my look for a very long time. It did exactly what I wanted it to do, which is that when I went into a room, people recognized who I was.
That was just one simple little thing I added that made something recognizable about me. It worked very, very well. Then I was able to build from that. Over time, I realized I didn’t need that anymore because now people knew who I was, and I was able to build a lot of confidence myself. I realized I didn’t need to lean on that as much anymore, and I could lean more on my overall personality or other types of visual traits.
Kenny: I love that.
Mike: Thank you. But that’s the thing, right? It’s about the thought process. That’s the other thing too. It wasn’t just the trial and error. It was that you were paying attention to what was working and what was not working.
I think that’s important because sometimes we get so ingrained in “let’s keep releasing content” that we don’t always have the ability to take a step back for a second and go, okay, you said it best yourself: is this providing value to somebody? Is it actually giving something to somebody else?
Going back to that initial question, if the answer is “I’m not sure” or “no,” then okay, what can I change so that it does? Not only does it hook them in, but it essentially rewards them for sticking around for the entire video.
Kenny: I love that. Exactly. You nailed it.
Mike: That’s fantastic. So that was step one, and that still took years to develop. Was your success through social media and the content you were creating, was that how you got these opportunities later on, or was that through other methods?
Kenny: I would say that’s a big part of the ecosystem in this day and age, content and providing value online, growth content, value content. That is a big part of how we got our opportunities, yes. But it also comes from being out there on the street.
We met amazing people just playing at the freeway off-ramp. Bill Burr would always tip us. I remember one time Bill Burr came up and Tommy said, “Hey, you’re my favorite comedian,” and Bill Burr snapped back, “You’re my favorite banjo player.” Just little quotes like that. Really cool things like that.
So being face to face, doing content. Also, some stuff, which I actually talk about in the book. I wrote it as a step-by-step process, and it’s seven steps in order for a reason. One of those steps is busk. I believe step two is busk.
But the first step, though, was to invest in yourself, invest in ourselves. What I mean by that is in our craft. Invest time into learning. Invest time on YouTube by getting better at playing guitar or better at singing. Hire a teacher, hire a vocal coach, a publicist, hire radio, whoever it is that you need to hire to learn stuff.
Also, do all those things on your own, but if you don’t know how, then it’s important to invest in yourself, in your brand, visual identity, whatever it is. That’s step one.
So I would say the first thing we did was invest in ourselves. We invested in solid recordings, a good studio, Nightbird Studios here in Los Angeles and Deer Lodge Studios in Portland, and investing in a solid producer, Don from The Germs. I invested in a vocal coach, Roger Love, and just made sure that I could be the best I could.
Mike: I like that.
Kenny: This was already years into doing it, and I’d taken many lessons too. But any money I made from busking, besides the stuff that went to rent, the rest I put into the album and making a good solid product. That’s step one of this book.
Mike: Yeah, so we’ll definitely get to that in a second here. I do want to talk about the music marketing agency that you developed. That’s very different because you’re now offering services to artists on the other side, which I thought was brilliant.
It’s like, here’s all the experience that I’ve learned over the years being a musician myself and literally wearing so many hats. Now I can provide that as a service to artists and help them develop their own career. So can you talk about starting Work Smarter?
Kenny: Oh, yeah. Work Smarter Music Marketing was started by accident.
Mike: I love those.
Kenny: Right? Yeah. During the pandemic, I took a lot of classes. Shout out to Indepreneur and Circa, who I believe is a revolutionary marketer. He started the agency Indepreneur, and that was the first agency that we hired to kind of look under the hood of what they’re doing and really understand how they are working with artists.
I basically hired them as an agency, but I also took their courses, as well as other courses. I studied Russell Brunson and Dan Kennedy, a lot of different marketers to understand where this was all coming from because I had no idea. It was a completely elusive science to me.
But it’s science that makes a lot of sense once you start understanding what the psychology of influence means. So I started learning how to run ads for Water Tower, show ads. If we had a show coming up, how do we run an ad? Meta ads, essentially. Of course, you can run ads on any program now, but Meta was the first. It came out around, I think, 2012. Meta is still the most robust and the deepest and the OG, and all the other platforms are sort of modeled after the Meta one.
I learned it through taking courses in Indepreneur. I’ll tell you, I did the course probably 20 times, and this is a long course. I didn’t understand it because it takes me a second. I remember putting the speed of the videos at 75% and just sitting there in the pandemic for 10-hour days watching the videos over and over and over.
I told a lot of my friends to get it. I was like, “You should get this if you’re trying to learn it.” My friends were all like, “Dude, what? That’s too much, bro.” It was just too much for a lot of people.
So I started distilling the information. I had a friend, my best friend, Jessica Babin. She was sitting right in that chair back there, and she’d watch me do this for about a year. She just watched. Then finally, after a year, I started getting calls. People saw our marketing and saw all these opportunities start to happen for Water Tower. All my friends started calling me like, “Dude, would you do that thing you did for you, but do it for me and I’ll pay you?”
People started paying me to do the thing. Then all of a sudden, I was not working on Water Tower anymore, and I was like, “I’m spending too much time making everyone else’s dream come true. How can I automate myself, for one?” I started building courses.
Then Jessica learned how to do it from watching. She was like, “Wait, people are paying you to do that?” She knew how to do it at this point from just watching me. She didn’t really think anything other than, “I’m just watching him do this,” because she was here, and we would hang out and talk about music.
So she learned how to do it. Then she started taking on these clients I didn’t have time for, and I started organizing the business. “All right, I’ll talk to the clients. Here’s what we’re going to do. You do that part of it.” Then we grew from just me and Jessica, who started it, to having other people who work with the team now. A lot of the guys in Water Tower are on board too.
Really, that’s how it is. It started by accident. Everyone came to me and said, “How are you doing this? Do this for me.” I started doing it, and Jessica started doing it. That’s how it started, by accident.
Mike: That’s brilliant. I always love those stories. That goes to show that when people are literally coming to you saying, “Hey, we like what you did,” or, “This is amazing what you accomplished. Can you show us what you did?” I mean, that’s the biggest call.
Yeah, it was sort of on accident, but at the same time, you set yourself up for that type of success. That goes to show that when you can showcase what you’re capable of doing, sometimes that’s the best way to develop a business around that. Other people need this as well.
I completely agree. That’s truly amazing.
Kenny: Thank you.
Mike: So let’s talk about the book.
Kenny: Oh.
Mike: Congratulations on launching a book, first of all. The book is More Than Talent: Seven Steps To Attain The Brand, Acquire The Gigs, And Amass Lifetime Fans, which is what we’ve been talking about pretty much this entire time. But why a book?
Kenny: Good question. It hit me like lightning. I don’t know what lightning feels like, but it was a jolt.
I study nonstop, and I read nonstop. On the left side of me, there’s a stack of books. On the left side behind me, here’s another stack of books. Then I have a stack over here. When I’m not playing music, I love reading and I love studying.
I was listening to a book in an airport, because when I can’t physically read, I put on a book on tape. I was walking through the Denver Airport, and I was listening to a book by Dan Kennedy. He’s kind of what we might call the godfather of modern marketing. He said in his book something like, “Every great movement has a book behind it.”
He was talking about different movements with a book behind them, and then it hit me. It was like, what I’m creating with Water Tower is not just a band, it’s a movement. It’s a community.
The community that we build in Water Tower, and our fans are called The Owls, are a family. They’re a community, and we help each other. Some of The Owls make merch based on old picks because I throw out shreddy picks, or they make art and they sell them to each other. They make earrings out of it.
We have communities in the Owl ecosystem where they’ll go travel together. Some of The Owls went to travel France and Germany together, or travel the U.S., where they come to our shows together and become friends. They become community.
Because what we created was a family together in the pandemic, it started out of that culture of, “Let’s get together.” So I realized what we’re building with Water Tower is a community and a family.
Then also on that same side, what’s coming out of Water Tower for all my artist friends who are trying to do it is teaching them how to do it for themselves, so a community around the marketing part of it. Marketing is really fun when it’s not so elusive.
So I realized we’re a movement in that moment, and every great movement has a book behind it. That’s when I realized I have a book to write to help people, because I kept saying the same things to artists over and over. Every day, I’d get a call, and I’d tell them the same thing. “This is what you’ve got to do.”
It’s a revelation for a lot of these artists. So I was like, I need to automate myself into a book so people can just read it and get the manual that I wish I had when I was coming up.
I went to music school. I studied music my whole life. I got a minor in business, but music business is something that traditionally has been extremely elusive, especially because it’s been out of the hands of the artists.
When you look at things like Elvis or Jimi Hendrix, or countless stories where the management, the label, and the people in the business roles in the band’s ecosystem are either taking advantage of or pulling the wool over the artist’s eyes so they don’t really know what’s going on.
I wanted to make sure that we could empower them, because I didn’t know how to do it, and I was never taught that in school. I got my degree in jazz. I studied music nonstop, but nobody was teaching me the business side of it. I was learning that on my own piecemeal, and I really learned when I committed to studying marketing outside of music so I could apply it to the music business, because there are not a ton of books on music business.
Now, I will say the Donald Passman book is amazing. I love that. I love the Ari Herstand book. Jesse Cannon has a great book. So there are some great books there, but I wanted a simple one. This is not a very long book. It’s 160 pages, and I wanted a step-by-step guide about how I did it. I made it into seven steps, and yeah, that’s basically it.
It struck me when I was in line at the Denver Airport, every great movement has a book. I was like, I can automate myself very simply for my friends to read so they can just have me in their room next to them and learn what I did to get our success.
Mike: That’s amazing. Congratulations on launching the book. That’s exciting. When this recording comes out, the book will be available, so we’ll definitely make sure that it’s all in the show notes.
Obviously, I don’t want to give away too much in the book itself, and we talked about a number of topics that are covered in the book. But if you were to boil it down to the main takeaway that you want anybody to take from the book, what would that takeaway be?
Kenny: The main takeaway is that there are steps to this thing. There are seven steps in the book, in order, for a reason. If you follow these steps, even if you just spend a year on one step, it will change your life.
You could look at it as if you’re coming fresh to music, spend a year on every step. Eventually, you work all the steps as one. Or if you’ve already been in music your whole life, read the whole book in a few days or a day. It’s not that intense, and apply what you need to apply. Be like, “Oh, I need to take a little step one, three, and seven. I already have steps two, four, and five. Maybe I just need a little bit from step two.”
It’s kind of like a little buffet, a marketing buffet for your music. You can take what you want and leave the rest, but it’s all crucial to a music industry career.
I also want to say, last week, Amazon is like the Spotify for books, right? You get three categories. Mine is in music business, performing arts, as well as entertainment, and it hit number one in all three last week for pre-orders. So I’m really excited about that.
Mike: Congratulations. That’s incredible.
Kenny: Thank you so much. I appreciate that. That’s exciting. But yes, to answer your question, it’s a seven-step book, and I think every step has something that can help people.
Mike: I really appreciate the fact that you mentioned that if you are just starting out in the music industry, each of these steps is going to take a while. I don’t think that’s emphasized enough.
When you’re reading a book, and this is not any fault of the authors, but usually when you’re reading a book, you go, “Oh, well, I’ll just knock these out,” and go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Then all of a sudden, things will start happening for me, which can happen. It’s possible.
But I appreciate the fact that you emphasize that if you’re coming out of this, it may take you a year just to do one of these steps correctly.
Kenny: Yes.
Mike: It takes time to figure these things out, understand, and learn. You talked before about how, through Indepreneur, you were literally studying the course for an entire year, going over and over and over again until you got it.
I appreciate that you mentioned that because I don’t feel that it’s emphasized enough that sometimes these things can take a while to nurture, develop, and understand, and that’s okay. Sometimes it comes more naturally to people than others. Some people are able to pick it up very quickly, and others do not pick it up that quickly. It takes a lot longer.
I do really appreciate that you mentioned there’s that aspect of patience that comes along with this journey. Again, it also depends upon where you’re coming from. I’ve been doing this for over 18 years now, and there are always things that I’m learning. I’ll go back and think, “Oh, this is a fundamental of the music business, and I just never thought about it this way before,” or that particular strategy never came across my way of thinking.
There’s always something to be learned, and that’s something you have to really understand at the end of the day. There’s always something to be learned, and it sometimes takes a long time to work on those things.
Kenny: It does. It really does. It takes some time, and I appreciate you mentioning that.
For some people, it’s going to be different for everyone, but what I always recommend is try to do something that might take you five years and cram it all into six months and put everything behind it. You’re probably not going to get there, but you’re going to get very far, probably farther than you would think.
Do your best to cram this all in as quickly as possible. Give yourself six months to do everything in this book, a little bit of everything, and it’s going to completely transform your life.
Mike: So we can start wrapping things up here. I do have a couple of fun questions for you to end the interview. The very first question I have for you is: what was the very first concert that you ever went to?
Kenny: It’s funny because the first concert I ever went to was one that I played. Before I could go to concerts, I was playing backyard punk rock shows in Mexico City. So it was my own show, a house party.
But the first concert I went to that wasn’t my own was Red Hot Chili Peppers and P.O.D. in Mexico City. It was raining. I was 14, and I was in the pit. They were lighting off, in Mexico, fireworks are essentially just dynamite. They were lighting off little sticks of dynamite in the pit.
Mike: Yeah. Wow, that’s crazy. That’s your official concert concert. That’s nuts.
Kenny: Yeah, where it was like 20,000 people. We’re in an arena. I’m 14. It was crazy. It was absolutely nuts, and I’ll never forget that. It was the By the Way tour, so John Frusciante was there.
Mike: I’m very jealous now because By the Way is my favorite album of theirs. That’s by far my favorite album. I have it on vinyl.
Kenny: What are some of your favorite songs? I love “Dosed.” I love “Dosed.” And obviously “Zephyr” and “Can’t Stop.”
Mike: That’s what I would say. “Zephyr,” “Can’t Stop,” even “By the Way.” All three of those songs are incredible off that album.
Universally speaking, that’s one of the few albums, because I’m a very picky music listener, so it’s really challenging for me to find an album that I enjoy listening to from start to finish. By the Way is one of those albums where I enjoy every single song off of that album.
Kenny: Me too.
Mike: But I did really like I’m With You, the one from 2011.
Kenny: I like that too, with Klinghoffer. Yeah.
Mike: Yeah, that was really good. I was very lucky. I was able to get floor seats at, I guess at the time, the Staples Arena. It was the LA arena, for the Chili Peppers show. It’s the only time I ever got to see them, but I did get floor seats for that one, and that was amazing.
But dude, By the Way back then, those days for Chili Peppers? Oh, man. Very jealous.
Kenny: Yeah, it was cool.
Mike: All right. Do you have a go-to artist that you’re listening to right now? I’m going to put the caveat that it cannot be one that you’re associated with.
Kenny: Playboi Carti.
Mike: Oh, that’s an interesting one. Okay.
Kenny: Yeah, I love Playboi Carti. I was going to say Blink-182, but we’re tangentially associated with them because we play a lot of their music. So yes, Playboi Carti. Love Playboi Carti, love Future. I just love that kind of hip hop, especially the modern stuff.
Mike: Absolutely. Very cool. All right, last question for you. If you were only able to give one piece of advice, and I will say this to a fellow musician, what would that one piece of advice be?
Kenny: Go out and busk. That’s where you’re going to learn everything. It’s real-time feedback on your music, your songs, your craft, and your performance, and you’re going to make money doing it.
We need money because it’s a tool in society. We need music because it’s what we do. Go out and make money for your music, get paid to do it, and get better all along the way.
Meet your fans. Go out and busk. That’s the most important tool I could tell anybody. The biggest musicians in the world have done it, Ed Sheeran, Bob Dylan, The Beatles. They started busking. So if it was good enough for The Beatles, it’s good enough for you.
Mike: I absolutely love that advice. That’s amazing. Well, thank you, Kenny, so much for coming on the show. Really do appreciate it. It was such an honor to have you.
We’ll definitely make sure that we have it in the show notes. Please, everyone, definitely check out the book. We’ll make sure that it’s in the show notes for people to find very easily. We’ll also make sure we have links to your marketing agency as well in case any of you out there also need that type of help.
Thank you so much again for coming on the show. Really do appreciate it.
Kenny: Hey, thanks for having me. It truly is an honor to be here and talk to you. I loved your questions.
Last thing, did I send you a copy? Do you already have a copy of the book?
Mike: Not a physical one yet, but I did get a digital copy of it.
Kenny: All right. I sent it last week. It should be there any day. If it doesn’t, let me know.
Mike: Awesome. Thank you so much. I really do appreciate it.
Kenny: Thank you, buddy.