Hey,
Prophet, I think, is right in saying that 'it's not WHAT you know, but WHO you know', people's music doesn't get signed and airplay because of their talent necessarily, but because the label bosses get involved in shady deals with the radio stations (who are owned by big companies who also own the labels).
An example: if you listen to different stations that have similar format and content, you will notice that there are some tracks which are NEVER played on one station which are played to death on another, logically they should both be playing them to death.
However, because of some stupid deal that one artist has with the label (who has indirect ties to a station), the station will put that track into rotation until the label wants a different one played. And because there is some bad blood between that artist/label and the second station/parent company, the second station won't play the artist's tracks at all. It's completely political!
A problem with these recording schools is that they are SO expensive and they don't guarantee you any work in the recording industry. I've mentioned before that everyone I've ever met who went to such a school ends up working at music stores paying off their debts to the school instead of working in a studio. If you read about a lot of the people who do make it big in the industry, all the way from engineers and producers to masterers (sp?), they got their start by simply doing internships or acting as gofers in studios where they managed to slowly learn the trade and meet all the right people, eventually they get work doing small mixing/recording jobs for no-name bands and eventually make a name for themselves.
Certainly, as a graduate you may know a lot of stuff, but there are tons of others out there who know a lot more who never went to school, they just got stuck in and went for it.
In Briellz's defense, not everyone can be lucky enough to get into such lucky internships/gofer jobs, and going to a school is probably the next best thing. You get the hands on experience of working a real console, patch bay, mixdown deck, etc., plus you get to learn some audio and arrangement theory with all the latest gear and software. And who knows, with all that experience, you may be able to start your own production project instead of working for someone! It's just a shame that it's so darn expensive.
I'm not saying that people who graduate from these schools ALL end up working at McDonalds or anything like that, surely a percentage of the graduates do in fact get jobs in the industry somewhere or else these schools would go out of business; I just haven't met any!
Briellz, you're going to probably have a lot of access to all sorts of different facets of the recording industry, you may come across something in one of your classes that you'll truly be interested in and it will take you on a path that you may have never thought of before going to school.
I went to university to study French, my goal in life was to live in France and teach English. In a German class there was this guy who liked industrial music, he had me round to his place and showed me his little studio which had Cakewalk 3.0 running on an old Intel 486 with 8mb ram, MS-DOS 6, Korg MS1r, Alpha Juno 2, TX81Z, and some HUGE home-made speakers. After messing around with his gear, I was hooked and decided that I wanted to learn how to sequence my own techno music. I started buying synths, then I built my own computer, replaced all my Radium cracks with licensed versions...
After graduating I did live in France for a while teaching at a high school, but it was crap pay and the shops all close at 6:00 pm, I came back to the states and was able to use the knowledge I got from building and troubleshooting my own music computers to get jobs making training videos for companies, setting up small networks, audio transfers, simple database stuff, etc. Now I make pretty good money as an IT consultant for one of the businesses at the airport.
The point is that if I had tried to stick it out as a dj I may not have done so well as everyone and their mom is a dj now. Because I met someone in a German class who showed me his synths and sequencers, it sparked my interest in something I knew nothing of. I got more involved in that interest, and over time it developed into a pretty good career and a fun hobby. To think that I went to school to study languages, and now I mess with computers and synths...
School is all about opportunity, so stick with it Briellz, don't let anyone (including me) discourage you.
"Knowledge is Power"-Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Nick
