Cameron Jaymes: Lessons From a Music Business Mentor
On May 18, 2022, Members were invited to a Zoom meeting with HOME’s new Writer in Residence - Cameron Jaymes.
He shares his personal story of transformation from artist to writer to producer and publisher. And then he takes a deep dive into the lessons he has learned from his very notable music business mentors.
Check out the video and transcript below for some wisdom that will help you on your own journey to greatness!
I started as an artist, about 15 years old…
All my friends were in bands; it's like cool to be in bands right? I met a family friend who was a producer. He actually ended up becoming quite a brilliant Grammy award winning producer whose name was Mike Busby, otherwise known as busbee. I was the first artist he developed.
I signed a record deal when I was 18-19 years old with Capitol Virgin Records and a publishing deal with Universal. It wasn't for me I realized over some years, and I guess like, you know, there are a lot of stall outs with major labels.
I loved being in the studio.
I liked playing live shows, but I loved being in the studio. So I was always asking for recording budgets. And at some point busbee said, (we're having a conversation as dear friends)
“I think you don’t like being an artist as much as you like being in a studio; being a studio rat.”
And I really identified with that. I always wanted to write songs, but I didn't just wanna write songs, I always heard in my head what they could be.
That was maybe 2008 or 2009. I started making that pivot and spent a few years just producing anything I could produce. That was kind of the realization to me. You know, it's so hard to do anything or make money in all of this.
If I was gonna die on the hill, I was gonna die on the hill doing the things that I absolutely was so passionate about.
That's kind of how I ended up in songwriting and producing. And now I’m in publishing. Because, as I've grown in my career, I love working with young artists, writers and producers, and I want to help them have those realizations (like busbee helped me have).
I think a lot of us don't get great mentors that can help US work through that.
I was lucky to, and I am again now with my publisher, Dann Huff, who is a huge country producer. We still to this day are having coffee every month, just talking about what's going on up here (in your head), not always about what your proficiencies are.
L: Were there other lessons that Busbee taught you along the way?
C: We're always looking for a yes. Yeses, mean survival in music, right?
It's like… someone said, yes, I might make some money!
We're living for a yes, because all we hear is no all the time. And we start to try to avoid nos. With busbee, I would say at times he was so hard on me. He knew that the most important thing he could teach you was to challenge yourself. The thing I try to teach, and I have two writers signed to me now, is like, and I try to tell them, you have to sort of love what you do and be a little bit dissatisfied.
You gotta know that you make your greatest thing that you can make. And then you gotta like, do it again. And you gotta push further and harder. The moment you start cruising, it feels scary to people like busbee.
“What does this mean if we’re just cruising? It means this is the best it's gonna ever be.”
And so, that’s the drive - is this good enough? Is this finished?
And I think that's the other thing he really taught me was to have a skeptical eye towards what ‘finished’ is… is this really the best we can do? Is this actually that good?
We think what we do is great because we know the vision. We hear it in our head differently than the world hears it.
But is it competitive with what everybody else is hearing? And I'm not saying you gotta be like pop music. It doesn't have to be Arian Grande. It doesn't have to be country music. It could be indie. But is it competing with that other dope thing? It was so great to have a mentor that was always asking that.
That sort of mentality really helped me a lot to learn, to finish to scrutinize.
Not everybody's the greatest lyricist or melodic writer, not everybody's the greatest track writer. And we all have these specialties…
But there's a really great role in learning to be an editor.
Knowing when a lyric is finished doesn't mean you wrote the whole lyric. It means you just know the level of the taste of ‘that's a done lyric’. So you can push your collaborators harder. He (busbee) just put his money where his mouth is.
And I learned that most of the people that are in the music business and that are making the things that we all wanna make, the people that challenge me are all challenging themselves.
That process is super important.
As creatives, hold yourself to the standard of the kind of career you wanna have.
If you wanna be Quincy Jones, you've gotta get into the mindset of people like Quincy Jones.
You've gotta treat your records, even if no one's gonna hear them, like Quincy Jones treats a Michael Jackson record. This is the most important record.
And then from Dann Huff, I've kind of learned the other side of it, which is sometimes that things are just gonna go your way. And sometimes they're not. You do all that you can, and then guess what - it might flop.
A lot of times it’s got nothing to do with you. It's so outta your control, it's such a game and that's the hard part for us to hear as creatives. You just have to make the records, love them, and you have to sort of just let them go and let them do what they do.
The wind might just blow your way. And next year you could be winning a Grammy for album of the year. And then sometimes it feels like you're stuck in gear for three years.
People that are legitimately where you want to be are all feeling the same thing. It does not matter how many hits you have, how many millions of dollars you have in the bank. The people that have a million dollars in hits are still literally bashing their head against a wall going like, what am I doing with my life? And I don't say that to be depressing. I say that to say, hang in. Wherever you're at right now, nothing's gonna change. Except hopefully you can pay your rent better or buy a home. The madness of music will always be around us.
You are your own business.
Like we tend to think about record labels or publishers and we wanna be part of their business.
And the truth is, your career, whether you're a songwriter, producer, artist, whatever it is, you are the business.
And that's something that I've seen bring major growth in my career is just building my own mechanisms. I gotta build things that then these people can come in and do business with.
But if I'm just in the machine of record labels and whatever, I live or die by it. I started learning in the last five or seven years, how to be enterprising and entrepreneurial in my career outside of purely writing songs and producing records.
You start to realize that you're your greatest advocate. You are your greatest business structure.
You sort of start by building that small little thing. People will be drawn to it. That's a great idea. Let's throw $50 million at. And it's like, that's basically what publishers and labels and all these different people are really great at.
They look at something and go, oh, that's a cool little startup over there that writer, I wanna like throw money at. Whereas, a lot of creators get this idea that they're gonna go into those companies and become a business.