Beyond 10,000 Hours featuring composer ANDREW SHAPIRO
“It’s just another story caught up in another photograph I found”
A music class was presented to my mother as an after-school activity, so she signed me up. I liked it and it came very easy to me. After the second year, the teacher told my mom that she thought I should try clarinet. For whatever reason, it clicked for me and became just part of who I am. In the 3rd grade, I started piano lessons for a bit but mostly stuck to clarinet. By the time I reached 6th grade I started sax, which is very similar to clarinet. It came easily for me. I can also play a little of the flute as it is the same fingering as sax.
Around my Junior year of High School, I started to write music and got back into piano. In college I took a music theory class and the teacher lit a fire under me. Suddenly, I became a music theory and music composer guy, which opened up the world for me. I transferred to the Oberlin Conservatory where the theory teachers were amazing.
“If you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new”
During winter term at Oberlin, you were expected to get a job of some sort, and I lucked into interning for Philip Glass. Even after the internship was over, I kept going there and hanging out. Philip was really nice to me and gave me his time, which is invaluable. As a result of working there, I became totally inspired to make music. I was so moved by the work the people who worked with Philip did and how hard they worked and how much they loved music. I knew there was a guy who worked with Philip on music placements which I thought was really interesting but didn’t know the first thing about it.
“Music is playing inside my head”
In the early 2000s, I started working with a company called Pump Audio. Pump specialized in independent music licensing. They would send external hard drives, called ‘Pump Boxes,’ delivering massive music libraries to clients. This allowed music supervisors, editors, video game companies, etc, to have immediate offline access to a curated library of independent music. Let’s say they were like a pre- Play MPE! I started getting placements from this because Viacom was one of their clients; you could hear my music on A&E, the Biography Channel, Spike TV. Eventually Getty bought Pump Audio and while I kept adding new music, I wasn’t making any money. A friend said to me, ‘you should pull your stuff and do some work for hire‘ so that’s what I started to do.
That’s why I love Play MPE. It’s just fun to see and learn about people and places all over the world who are checking out my tracks! That’s pretty cool! Conceptually, a lot of what I’m doing with my PR efforts is buying/earning/creating “lottery tickets” for my music…the lottery tickets are the chance for the music to be used for all kinds of things. And dollar for dollar, Play MPE is, without a doubt, the best deal out there for the return I get. Using it is a no brainer, particularly their end of year catalogue campaign where for $175, I can send an album deep into the ether. It’s hard to imagine using that money more wisely.
“I lie awake, I drive myself crazy”
The first song I ever released was called “Airbox,” so I called my publishing company Airbox Music Publishing. I do a little bit of everything – solo piano music, synth pop, violin, percussion, songs. Airbox implies there is no limitations.
Sometimes, I make myself crazy trying to figure out how to sync my music and other times it just happens organically. I spoke on a panel at a music conference with hopes of networking while there. On the flight home, I sat next to a nice woman whose son-in-law worked in advertising. She introduced us and we did some work together – so the conference didn’t yield any work, but the flight did! My wife once sat next to someone at a bar, started talking to him about me, and I got work out of her conversation with him.
It is a super saturated music market right now. To be successful, you have to be comfortable with the randomness of it all and be patient. I write the best music I can, and then I try to find a home for it. I’ve spent time researching and developing relationships with advertising agencies. You have to talk to everyone, like the aforementioned woman on the plane, or the guy you went to high school with whose wife works in advertising or a friend of a friend that knows someone working in film. Uncertainty is hard, it’s nerve wracking, but if I am digging the music I am writing, that helps ease the uncertainty. I can control what I work on, and how hard I work on it. What’s the magic bullet? It’s knowing and being emotionally connected with the fact that there is no magic bullet.
Do you want to send your music to music supervisors, brand curators and radio? Sign up for Caster and get your music out there. Who knows when it might be your lottery ticket that hits.