"Before I started at Berklee, I was a practicing music lawyer in Boston. My work as a lawyer was primarily transactional work, meaning contracts. I did record contracts, publishing contracts, partnership contracts, and management contracts."
"I'm also a performer. I've been doing what I would describe as progressive, experimental rock, a lot of free improvisational music. I've been recording since the late 1970s."
"I teach in the Music Business/Management Department, which prepares students for careers in the business side of the music industry, as opposed to the performance side. That's not to say that they can't be performers as well, of course. My students could go to work for a record company; they could work for a publishing company; they could become an artist manager. I've had students who are at Apple, working for iTunes. I have other students who are lawyers at Warner Brothers."
"I think that the role of the music business professional is to support artists and art, as opposed to the goal being to take music and turn it into profit. To me, there's a difference of commitment and motive that's absolutely critical. I think that's part of the explanation for why the music industry is in such bad shape, because it's been a profit center for people who really don't care about music at all."
"I try to get this idea across to my students in several ways. I play them music every class. I talk about music all the time. I talk about the motivation. I try to highlight the people who are doing the right kind of job. You see it mostly in the indie realm, artists like Ani DiFranco. I'm a big fan of artists who do their own self-promotion and serve as their primary business engine."
"I have a very philosophical orientation, trying to find big-picture meanings, and I also use very strategic kind of thinking. I want my students to take away the sense of being able to really think in a dynamic way. I want to them to be able to solve problems through a multi-layered process of questioning assumptions."
