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I’m about to go to a meeting with an A/R rep that I haven’t met before in NYC to play him some songs I’ve written and produced.
The meeting will start with his assistant offering me water or coffee while I wait outside of his door. Once he finishes his BBM conversation about the weekend, he’ll ask his assistant to send me in. We’ll engage in disingenuous small talk and then awkwardly cut to the chase with him leaning back in his office chair and asking “So what have you been working on?” - a question that I’m always inexplicably not prepared to answer.
The label rep will then unplug the 1/8” cable from his laptop and hand it to me to plug into my iPhone. I’ll thumb to the iPod playlist called “Meeting Demos” and give him the brief on the first project and hit play. I’ll let the song get through the first chorus before I fade it out manually while he checks his email and replies to texts. This process will repeat 5-7 times, punctuated by advice like “I didn’t expect the pre-chorus to go there, but I think it works the way you have it.” or “With the right beat, I could hear that being a good song for [globally successful music mega-star that has no chance of ever hearing this song].”.
After being marginally entertained, he’ll ask me to hand him back the audio cable and will start playing me some projects he’s working on, probably at a louder volume than he played mine. Then he’ll explain to me how important it is to “write hits” and give his thoughts on the decline of the music industry with most of the sentence starting with “Listen…” and “At the end of the day…”.
After some conversation to wrap up the meeting about how much he “loves LA” and can’t wait to get back out there, he’ll shake my hand, walk me to the elevators and tell me “we’ll be in touch”. I’ll make some joke or a pun that will be more entertaining to me than to him, and be on my way.
On the way back to my hotel on the subway, I’ll listen to a playlist on my iPhone that doesn’t contain songs I’ve written.
Wish me luck!
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