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From Baking to Changing the Face of The Broken Music Industry
What happens when you go from running your family’s baking business to working in the music industry? The answer is: The Journey of Carl Hitchborn is what happens.
Well, you get the nickname, ‘The Baker’, and note the inverted quotations because you also flip the music industry like a pineapple upside-down cake. This is Carl Hitchborn’s journey in a nutshell. He’s a baker, turned innovator, turned music industry pro. And it all started when Carl realized, “no one in the music industry knows what they are doing.”
He elaborates on this by saying, “the music industry is cracked because it is controlled by individuals who don’t have the artists’ best interests at heart.”
As Carl will tell you, most artists feel that they are successful when they get signed — they believe they’ve just achieved “the dream moment.” But when you look at the average earnings and percentages, the numbers don’t add up. Artists earn anywhere from 10 to 16% of the revenue from their music, their merch, and even their own sound.
Where does the rest go? The majority of the money artists work for goes to the record label, streaming services, and those pesky lawyers. How is Carl’s philosophy different? He created his own record label, High Time, which offered artists a 50/50 split right down the middle and that label was just the beginning for Carl.
From Baking Buns to Making Beats
Carl knew he could not impact the world the way he wanted to by being a baker in his family’s business. So he took what he learned from baking buns and applied it to making beats.
He says, “it’s easy, I have a simple philosophy from years of working in a bakery.” His three rules for baking are the same three rules he lives by in the music industry:
- Make sure your product is viable in the market and you are giving people what they actually want
- Don’t scrimp on the deal — this hurts suppliers and could impact their loyalty or motivation
- Make your key captive audience the target for your marketing
With these rules in mind, Carl set off to shake things up, often ‘going for broke’ to make it big.
