You wonder sometimes if it even worth it! I work on the side of my normal job for a company doing some work for their artists. Get them out in the press put up meeting with industry professionals and so on. Usually I don’t even get paid for it. Here and there they pay me a dinner or a ticket when I travel. I do it mainly becuse I know they don’t have the money. Now they got a big chunk of money to develop their company from the government and they called me up tell me that they are hiring a new person in their office.
– Yes this person we are hiring doesn’t have that much of experience; she is fresh out of school. So we were thinking that she could go alongside you so she can work up her network and get a feeling how the industry is working.

I was kind of stunned. You never paid me for any of the work I have done and now when you get money suddenly I should teach someone to do the job I never got paid for. So I went on.
– How much do I get for that?
– Well our budget is very estranged. We don’t have that much money. We were thinking if she could just follow you on your trip to The Great Escape next week, we can buy her tickets.

Never got to their mind that I had bought my tickets, trip and hotel by myself.

– And then I saw that you were on another conference two weeks after can you fix her tickets to that one so she can follow?

Since their budget only covered the new employee there was not calculation to pay me anything. They also insisted that they will send her to The Great Escape and that I should take care of her, and this is how it works. They don’t think.
I just ended the conversation really saying nothing. I guess they believed that I would take care of their new employee during the first conference and fix ticket to the second one.

The fact is that they pay her to do that job so why should I do that? Just to be nice? Like oh I do all the work and then you can take my salary?

Practical they will be thrown back a couple of years. The things I build up I just take with me, I won’t pass that along. The sad part of this is having seen it all before.

In the evening I went on a show in Stockholm. There I bumped into a guy that they choose for a government project a couple of years ago. Same procedure, I worked to get the project started when they got money they hired a local guy with no connections. The project never become successful, it just turned into that they paid three years this guy a salary. I spoke with the guy for a while; he has now left the music industry and was working in a cloth store. Another waste of VAT money in Sweden I would say.

That is also tragically, many of the projects gets bad names since they are unsuccessful. The problem is that the idea is good is just that they never employ people that actually has the education, and no this education you can’t get to be in a school. Still they think if we hire young kids they will fix it.
Then another person came by. It was a person working for a record label doing the same stunt a couple of years ago. Not exactly the same, they mainly wanted me to work for free with no percentage and if I got lucky I would be paid. Back then I always showed a bit what we were doing and helped them in a couple of months. Then of course they fucked up and I left the building and I haven’t seen them in years.

I have seen though that the project went to hell just a couple of months after I left.  Mainly because they thought if they had some people in the network it was good enough. But these people where loyal, they usually are since they know I’m still here and that project is long gone.
I had to ask anyway how it was with the project. And he told me all the problems they got after we left. I just nodded. I guessed that he really didn’t get that these problems came since I left and just let him keep on talking. Then he stopped and started to talk about a new project he had and if I was interested to work with that since I did a good job on the first one.

I’m stunned they really don’t think. Is it even worth to explain for them that they really, really fucked up? And if you fuck up, you’re gone. And if I was the mob I would just shoot their heads off! Luckily I’m not the mob, I’m just a person wondering how stupid people actually can be and how many projects I will see going down because of incompetence?

I just saw a post just like this from a friend, I guess it’s life in the music industry.