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Richard Melville Hall, a.k.a. Moby, is one of the most important dance music figures of the early '90s, helping bring the music to a mainstream audience both in England and[…]
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Question: What's your advice to young musicians?

Moby: It seems like for young musicians to get their foot in the door in the industry, it depends what type of musician they are and what they are ultimately gunning for.  If you are a 19-year-old aspiring Justin Timberlake, where you want to be a huge pop star, then you get a high powered music lawyer, you have a million deal with Sony or BMG or whomever, and you work with all the hot producers and you come up with a record that sounds like everything else on the radio.  So that’s one route which is tried and true and not very interesting, if you ask me.  The other route is to do as much as you can yourself.  You know, to be a band living in LA or New York or Minneapolis or Seattle or wherever, and writing great songs and producing your own music and having a MySpace site and a Facebook site, an ILike site, where you can actually get your music in front of people, and then, because of that dialectic then exists between the musician and the audience, you put up a piece of music, and if it is a good piece of music, the audience responds; or if it is a bad piece of music, they tell you why they think it is bad and hopefully you can learn from that.  And I think the musicians end up being able to craft better music because of that sort of like instantaneous dialect.

Recorded on: 6/16/08


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