Image Credit: Kaykay Blaisdell
Dan Petel, founder of songwriter-producer management company This Is Noise, has been in the music industry for 20 years. He started out playing in bands himself and still introduces himself as a “failed songwriter and producer.” However, he soon realized that people more talented than him were struggling to make it and decided to help them instead. He set up a studio in his parents’ garage to work with local bands, with Kirkpatrick being one of the first to get involved.
The balance has shifted, with many clients doing more admin-based publishing where they are expecting the publisher to collect and do sync and not do much creative. The majority of the creative A&R work that a publisher would do is now done as the management company. Petel jokes about this with his clients, who are on their fourth publishing deal since they’ve worked together. Publishers have the advantage of structuring deals to be able to sign somebody, giving them the better terms.
Petel believes that the key to success is providing a team and a backbone for someone’s career. He believes that it’s more competitive because he can’t write a bigger check, but he just has to be a better manager than everyone else. He has a couple of clients who have taken off maternity or paternity leave, and he focuses on picking up career songwriter-producers who can write catchy music, whether that’s EDM or country music.
With most of his clients, Petel has started at zero, rarely having them pick up a producer-songwriter after they’ve had mainstream success. He has done his best starting off with someone when they’re essentially a kid with a guitar and want to be a big producer. When Petel gets a call from them at 2am, he knows that it’s over something really important. He and his clients have the kind of relationship where they rarely cry wolf, so he knows when they are calling me at 2am, it is over something really important.
Carlos De La Garza, for example, has a successful career without a pop hit. He’s coming off a rock album Grammy win with Paramore, his daughters are in a band called The Linda Lindas, and he’s been producing, mixing, and winning Grammys for 20 years. His career is very successful without ‘hits’.
The over-consumption of music and abundance of content has led to a decrease in the windows for some of these pop hits. Petel has had success getting songwriters deeply involved in projects, such as TikTok, which has been a vehicle for exposing people to music. While there are some artists who have had hits that probably have no business singing, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t amazing, incredible voices having huge success in music.
