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Lesson time: (5min 13sec)
Charlie Rapino on a lesson from Milan's fashion world: you can be the best musician alive, but without a package and a story around your music, it stays just for your friends.
This lesson is part of the course Get signed!
Watch a preview of the full course below.
Lesson transcript:
When did the move occur from Italy to New York?
Wasn't it that you went to, well, in Italy? Literally. It was literally the learning curve.
And then it happened. I moved to Milan when I was pretty young, around 20 or 21. I studied working in a management office, and then I slowly transitioned through a band I was working with to Virgin Records, which was run by Luigi Mantovani at the time.
Branson had just opened their offices in Milan, and the city was booming at that time. During the 60s and 70s, Milan was a very gray city, which looked much more like Coventry, probably. Wow! A fashionable city, with due respect to Coventry, obviously.
I arrived in Milan looking for adventure. I remember the massive Velasca Tower in the center of the city, which was covered on all four sides with a huge Giorgio Armani poster.
These were the years of Giorgio Armani and Gianni Versace, during which the fashion machine in Milan began to really fire on all cylinders. Here I was, filled with inspiration from the scene and a real desire to understand behind the scenes, what branding means, and how it fused with fashion.
There was a book that truly illuminated me: Hollywood Does It Washes It Whiter, by the famous advertising man Jacques Segela. He used to say that the day we start selling any politician like a box of soap powder, that politician is going to win the elections, hands down.
You can see how that happened. Following that concept, Segela was hired by everyone running for the French campaign. He became the spin doctor, capable of transforming complex content into a language that could be easily understood by everybody.
Segela was mainly responsible for the campaign of Fran?ois Mitterrand, distilling a lot of messages into succinct soundbites that are easy to grasp.
Again, this brings us back to logos, iconography, and straplines, which is what really the course is about, or what we're discussing. I think my formation was heavily influenced by the fact that the stark Giorgio Armani logo could sum up everything in one little emblem.
There was a world behind it that you were buying into; I really started to understand there that you can be the best musician on earth, but if you don't create a package around it, that music would be just for you and your friends. Ultimately, it's the entertainment business. The entertainment aspect is the package.
Sometimes the question is: how do you translate your talent into being a success? You can be a person with not much talent, and as Stephen Budd mentioned a few weeks ago, if you put all your effort into achieving success, you can get there.
Unfortunately, there are many people with a lot of talent who will not put in the effort to channel that talent into what we call success; they may even refuse to compromise in that pursuit.
I believe there are some key elements that can help a young artist, songwriter, or producer reach their potential.
Charlie started in the music industry as a freshly minted lawyer, promoting gigs by bringing the likes of Iggy Pop and Patti Smith to a radical Italian university crowd. After working at the notorious Record Plant NYC and soaking up the house scene, he formed the Rapino Brothers with Marco Sabiu, moved to London in 1990 and never looked back. There they took the decade by storm, producing and recording records. After their first hit with Kym Mazelle's Love Me The Right Way, they masterminded Take That's first hit and produced, mixed and fixed many major pop acts during the 1990s, from Kylie to Primal Scream. In 1997, Charlie was the "on air" producer for BBC's "Get Your Act Together", followed by "Full Frontal" on Channel 4. From 1999 to 2004 he was A&R Director for Sony Music International. His energy never lets up. Over the years he has divided his time between management consultancy for Ennio Morricone, consultancy for Rolling Stone magazine, soundtrack work and production consultancy for movies and games (including fixing Iggy Pop to do the voice-overs on the Driver 3 video game), and signing and managing acts through his joint venture label with Sony, Stud Records. In Get signed!, Charlie pulls back the curtain on decades of production and A&R experience to show you exactly what labels listen for, how to shape and present your act, and what it really takes to get noticed and land a deal. read more
