Collaborative experiences fuel success in the music industry, as demonstrated by Bill Mullin‘s remarkable 40-year journey. From drumming in basement bands to building recording studios and publishing music, Bill has continuously adapted and embraced new opportunities. Join Bree Noble as she explores Bill’s diverse career path and the importance of networking, creating immersive experiences for audiences, and finding balance amidst the hustle. Discover how Bill’s story exemplifies the power of collaboration and audience engagement in navigating the evolving music landscape and achieving long-term success.

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Crafting Immersive And Collaborative Experiences: Lessons From Bill Mullin’s Career

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the show. My name is Bree Noble and I am here with Bill Mullin from Significant Media & Music. This is going to be a treat because he has been in the industry for over 40 years. There’s so much that we can unpack and so much that we can learn from his experiences. The first way we do that is by hearing his story.

We figure out how he got from where he started to here. I know many of you are maybe in the beginning of your career or you’re at a crossroads. You’re maybe at an inflection point or pivot point and you’re wondering, “Where do I go from here?” We can learn from other people’s stories. Bill, I would love for you to take them through your journey. How did you start in music and how did you end up where you are today?

Bill Mullin’s Musical Journey

Thanks. You’re going to hear what might look like a checkered past and various ways that I survived and, in some cases, thrived within the business. I want to start by turning your folks on to something that I think would be a good resource, having considered what you’re trying to do to aid them in their own survival skills and their own artist development. It’s a book by a guy I know, David Ruttenberg, and it’s called The Music Career You Don’t Have Yet.

Within that, it looks at a holistic approach to how you can make ends meet, how you can nurture your skill set in terms of the business side, as well as the music and even in the area of promotion and those types of things. He cites any number of side hustles as a for instance. That’s so that you can stay relative to the industry and, at the same time, have flexibility and adaptability.

As I tell you my story, that’s probably one of the greatest aspects of how I’ve made my way. Darwin didn’t say that it was survival of the fittest, the biggest, the badest, and the strongest. It’s the survival of the most adaptable and us in our lives who can adjust. Some of that means exposing yourself to as many different opportunities as possible.

My beginning goes back to like most of us being captivated by music. It’s magic. It moves us and realizes that we want to express ourselves. I was a fairly introverted kid. Drumming caught my attention. That’s where I began with several years of everything from the rudiments to getting the basic capabilities of reading. That benefited me at a time when there were lots of bands during the ‘60s and ‘70s. It seemed like garage and basement bands, left and right. I was able to make friends. I was able to have places to play at that point types of teen dances.

The scene has changed so much. Some of what I have to say is not necessarily current. I do know some of the current scenes. As a kid. I was exposed to a fair amount of technical influence. My father was a mechanical engineer. My uncle was an engineer for RCA in television and radio. Those men were influential back then. At that time, there was something called the Heathkit company where you could teach your kids how to put circuits together. You could make a little transistor radio and such.

At the same time as being drawn to the power of music, I was also influenced by how music was made, and how it is coming out of this little box of the speaker of a radio. I also was coming through a period of time when it went from recording as capturing a live performance into the studio being an instrument itself. The greats were George Martin, and then others after that Alan Parsons, and folks who truly were able to create these recording experiences that were unheard of prior through recording techniques and advancements in technology.

That captured my attention and I knew that I wanted to be in the recording area. At that point in time, there were no recording schools per se. I went to Eastman. They had a summer clinic. This is out of high school and I thought maybe I could go to Eastman. I didn’t have the chops to go to Eastman because I was a rock and roller primarily. I had the great experience of playing everything from the three-chord garage band repertoire. That blended right into soul music.

We lived in a town near the Ohio River. The whole river town Memphis Soul and southern Muscle Shoals and all of that were influential upon us in the Cincinnati area. That gravitated into here comes the psychedelic era, and there again unearthly type sounds coming out of instruments. I was blessed to have a gumbo of styles and influences through that period of time.

I had the opportunity when my college band ended up getting a contract with a local studio in Indianapolis. That was a 16-track studio at that point in time. The management went out and shopped it. We ended up having a record contract. We were no-hit wonders at that point. It gave me the studio experience I was looking for.

The Eastman summer camp was great because they had Phil Ramone as a guest. They had another guy who was an engineer from the West Coast who had recently done a lot of pop records. These were people who were giving insights into the actual studio experience. My band having that same experience from that was good.

I didn’t study music per se. I ended up going into radio and television as my major and having music and speech as my minors so that I could understand production processes and get to know them. It’s very similar in terms of bringing resources together and creating. Shortly, after my band broke up, I was in a radio and television station for a couple of years. I happen to have an FCC license that I had gathered along the way.

The funny story is in my old little hometown, there’s a single radio station. I went there thinking I could get a job. They need you to have an FCC license to be on the air to operate. I got a big thick FCC guide and studied with my parents at the age of 16. They let me drive five hours to Chicago to the federal building and take the FCC exam. I ended up passing the exam and came back home thinking I’d walk in and see if I could get a job. They looked at me like, “Your back? We didn’t mean it. We thought we were sending you away.” At any rate, that benefited me later because I had that FCC license as my band imploded.

I was able to have an overnight job running a transmitter and that ended up prepping the morning show on the radio station and running the radio station that was the automated station. I ended up getting my own show, and then I ended up being the voice of various clients who would come in. I gravitated from the engineering side over to the production side. That gave me an opportunity with another guy who was at the station. We hit it off and we said we had to form our own company because now we’re starting to produce some things in-house for ourselves and the station was going down and even our clients who we were doing this work with. We were pushing their generosity.

At any rate, we formed a studio which also ended up being in a small to midsize market in South Bend, Indiana at Notre Dame University. It’s about a quarter million market. We ended up doing it all and I ended up drumming. I put out a business that’s drumming during the disco era. If you can’t fight them, I joined them and I started doing DJ-ing and I did all kinds of teen dances because I was at the station, so I had a little notoriety.

I ended up doing club work along with recording everything from punk bands to country bands to you name it. Anything that was in that market, gospel groups, and every kind you want to be. We’re doing jingles and things of that nature on the side. That’s where my media music background started forming. After about 5 or 6 years, I wanted to grow their business. My partner and I had some differences and I realized I had to move on. I decided that I would go towards the Chicago market. I came to an agreement with him on that company.

I went to Chicago and started. Fortunately, it was at a time period when a lot of recording technology was becoming much more affordable. Even our studio was probably several hundred thousand dollars worth of an investment to have the studio at that point in time. In the major Chicago studios, I would go in and get to know people. I started freelancing. I started building studios for others.

It was transitioning from the Chicago recording company to Universal or Paragon, the major studios that were pretty much from a million dollar type plants. Suddenly here comes the semi-professional gear, the task cams, and what have you. My background on the tech side helped me make a living. It was a fun time to be in Chicago because something called house music was starting. Through my DJ experience, I had been scouted by the Marriott Corporation back in those days.

Mariotts had actual bars and clubs attached to them in the metro area. They had several disco clubs. I was scouted out for that and got a contract with the Marriott in Fort Wayne in South Bend locations, hopping into Chicago at times. I got to know the whole DJ pool through record pools. That led me to get to know guys who were doing these warehouse gigs raves in the early days of taking over an abandoned building and throwing a party all night.

As I got to know those guys, they started to seek me out to say, “We’re going to build a studio. We’re building a nightclub. At the same time, I started this Music for Media Publishing Company right around there. You could tell I was doing everything I could in Chicago to go from one end of town to the other with my head in the rack, building studios to getting to know the players, and having sessions to recording some blues bands. You name it. That whole role of producer-engineer was fascinating to me.

The Music for Media took off. We started syndicating our music and building a catalog. Players that we would know would say, “I have some songs. Can you publish us?” I’d say, “Sure. Give me more styles.” That’s where some of the salesmanship kicked in. You have to have the drive to be in the business. With that, you have to understand sales. I will say that sales get an ugly reputation because of the used car salesman type of huckster or somebody trying to manipulate you. There’s a great book called To Sell Is Human and along the way, I encountered a guy named Daniel Pink. It means we’re all naturally selling. We are out to move people.

That’s what the breakthrough is to get over yourself about putting your best foot forward and asserting, “I think I have something for you.” When you genuinely do that, it certainly helps. Along the way, I got recognized by manufacturers who saw what I was doing. I was an influencer back before they even called anyone an influencer. They would say, “Put our stuff in your jobs.” As I was doing that, before long, they said, “Why don’t you contract with us with specific manufacturers?”

That started to introduce me to the whole equipment distribution and marketing area. The guys who plucked me up from that had similar backgrounds where they gravitated into a role. That role started to give me not only wider regional exposure to work with people like Jerry Millan, who was building studios for REO Speedwagon and STYX, and all of the various bands of that Midwest rock and roll scene.

Before long, I’m getting to meet all the other guys who do similar things in LA, New York, and what have you. Before long, I got to New York Audio Engineering Society, hanging out at the Hilton. Across the bar, you could see Donald Fagen huddled over there with some people and all these different folks. That was a fun fun time because the record business was at its peak.

As a result, I met a guy. There was a panel discussion where a guy named Rick Derringer who was a solo artist. He was in a band called The McCoys from Indiana in my neighborhood. He played in our town before. I knew his brother even better because his brother would come out and see my band when we were traveling throughout Ohio. I’m there to see him speak and say hi.

The guy next to me is from San Francisco and he holds up a new magazine called Mix Magazine and his studio was on the cover. He said, “You have to come out and visit me,” and I did. He offered me work. I didn’t take the job at the time, but the coolest thing was that the studio manager was going to be replaced. I got to interview him where he was going and he was going further into the publishing business. I did everything to pick his brain about publishing at a higher level than the syndication that I was doing.

That gave me great insights into all of the music supervisor areas and the licensing of tracks. It also gave me insights because that particular studio had an artist. It was blowing up an artist called George Winston who was on a label called Windham Hill, which was all part of a new age movement. There was a new wave movement too.

That gave me insights into ground-level grassroots development, not unlike what was happening in Chicago with wax tracks and some of the industrial seen along with the house music scene. I was able to navigate a lot of cool places that eventually led me to hawk in my wares in LA any time I was in town for a show or I went to Vegas for the broadcast show or I would spend a day sleeping on a friend’s apartment floor for two weeks, making the rounds to Warner Brothers, Universal, you name it.

As time passed, the publishing business had its own regular recurring income. I’ve gotten it out in enough places, but I was taxed to further produce. I would do some artists’ projects and what have you, but the technical side of the business was taking off for me. That’s the general scope of how I got here. We relocated to San Francisco in 2008. It’s a school. It started out as a storefront, but now it’s the California Jazz Conservatory.

Since a lot of my background was in instrumental music to support program material and scoring. It was quizzical to me. I always used jazz players because they were very adept. You could put a chart in front of them and they could jump syles very quickly and expressive. It put me in appreciation of the jazz scene. Jazz in and of itself is a rich language of tonality, harmonization, and adventure as we all know. I started studying. I wanted to figure out what makes a standard first of all, and why are some of these songs memorable masterpieces in the American songbook.

I also wanted to get into the level of harmonic structures so that I could write more of my own music rather than for others. That’s what I ended up doing now. About four years ago, I started my own individual. I have two other artists that I work with in terms of collaborative work, but this project in particular probably had dozens of people, primarily about 5 or 6 key collaborators, which is something that I want to encourage.

Part of having a collaboration is the synergy that comes out of the greater sum of the parts versus the individuals that are contributing. It’s very kinetic. It’s an energy flow that you can bounce off of each other. You all know that you are contributing to making something shine. I’m fairly big on collaboration. In part, I was also in the technology area. It wasn’t long before I was doing things for broadcast applications. I’m doing things for film studios and what have you. It was not long before I was in the area of general communications.

I was in the San Francisco area. I came upon this company called Zoom and they happened to be in the early stage of computer-based video conferencing. I recognize them for what they were at one point in time to show you how diverse my portfolio got. I did a lot of consulting and design assistance for distance learning networks and education. Here I am doing this mixed bag. The cool thing was I had this portfolio, but I also had a lot of freedom and flexibility to work on this, work on that, and multitask in some ways.

Balancing Multiple Income Streams

I’m very big on multiple streams of income. You’ve done that throughout your experience. How do you balance that? I think that’s where musicians struggle because if you’re doing too many things, sometimes you can’t put the focus in on the thing that you need to focus on. Whether it’s your own artistic career because you have all these things going on. Yet, you probably need that to make the income that you need from music.

Most definitely. A lot of folks end up teaching and performing or other hybrids. There are the areas of working in a box office at a theater or working for a promoter. Back in the day, I worked for our own booking agent. He would have been members coming in and covering the phones or picking up the phone and booking your band. They didn’t know that they were talking to me, the guy who’s in the band that I’m promoting, or one of the bands that I knew.

How do you do it? You have to have a set of interests that complement each other. As I said, for the people that I worked for, I was a hired gun in almost all situations up to the point where finally, the company that I was with and a partner that understood everything that I had in my wheelhouse, they accepted me. He says, “You’re the creative guy. You make things happen from the marketing standpoint and the creativity of contacts and events we would do and collaborations.”

I think you need to have no more than a couple of major irons in the fire. Even though I mentioned all those things, they were all happening at different stages. You have to still afford yourself the time to step back from music. It became my meditation time almost. The writing and getting away from other activities helped me keep my wits together. You have to look pretty seriously at the realization of your potential, and what areas of interest are viable offers.

Put together an irresistible offer. Consider your audience's profile, their pain points, and what you can say that resonates with them. Share on X

You want to put together something of an irresistible offer. What is that? Even for making music, you have to consider your audience’s profile, but you also have to look at what their pain points are. What is it that you can speak to that they go, “This artist is saying something.” Understanding your audience is an important area of looking at their interests, passions, desires, and aspirations. What is it that they love that you have a commonality with? These are transferable skills.

No matter what else you’re doing, you’re building up your own personal presence and brand. What is it that you are always ready to offer in a helpful way? I could speak to perhaps some failing of artists in terms of experience design. While I was in all of this area, I met a fellow by the name of Joe Pine. I was doing some consulting work for a 30-something guy. I had a company and I was doing some of his market development. The pandemic said in and there wasn’t going to be any broadcast show convention. There wasn’t the National Association of Broadcasters. It wasn’t going to be the non-broadcast info com show where you have everything from guys who do disco nightclubs to corporate work.

We thought we would do a Zoom-based full-day conference and workshops. I was telling them, “This is a different experience. We ought to get this guy who wrote this book called The Experience Economy. It was a pivotal book in the area of marketing in around 2000 because it went from typical selling at people to involving people. I bring this up from the standpoint of racing your consciousness as a musician in terms of creating an experience with your tribe or with your set of folks that come out to see you.

Experience design has become something that is probably most prevalent in its initial stages with the Apple Store. People didn’t go to the Apple Store to be sold. They went there to be immersed in talking to other users, having hands-on experience, going to the genius bar, having associates float around and guide them on why one versus another device might work for them, and all that sort of thing. It ended up being like a temple of technology. There was so much reverence going for it.

It only instilled what was already there in the Apple brand that they originally. They went after creatives intentionally, and they also went after teachers. They decided to go after two market segments. This guy I was working with came back to say a week later in our planning, “I got Joe Pine. He’s going to join us.” He thinks it’s going to be great. I go, “Okay.” SI got to know Joe firsthand and got to understand his principles of creating an experience.

Creating Immersive Experiences For Your Audience

He’s now working on a book and it’s been a lot of fun because I’m inside of his substack group. He’s writing the book on substack, a living document with people feeding back thoughts about it. It’s a very highly collaborative experience. The thing that applies to that is understanding and having empathy for your audience, but also involving them. They’re not just coming to sit and watch you play. They’re there to have their interest aroused. They’re there to challenge them a little bit.

We’re entering an age of immersive technologies with the Van Gogh show and these other things. There are a lot of people looking at how music is going to come into that arena. You can do it on smaller scales, for instance. With that said, a lot of what you’ve shown people because you have an entrepreneur within your banner is the multi-discipline that it takes nowadays. It’s a shame in a way. You can still make it on music mastery. That dedicated, don’t water things down. Don’t get too diverse in your side hustles.

One of the things he got into it for was to be in awe. Some people are so awesome in their musicality and their artistry that comes across. I’m not talking about having gimmicks when I talk about experience. I’m just talking about a mindset of inclusion, a mindset of doing some things that are beyond the music experience itself and giving the music a context. I happen to have a project. It’s called As I Recall Forever. It was built around me looking at these dots in my life, connecting those dots, and seeing what worked there.

I go, “These are like my forever moments,” and so we have forever innately deep within our human psyche. From that, I went, “Why are these particular people that I met, conditions I was brought into, and things I encountered indelibly etched on my soul?” You start to figure that there’s something higher power at work, which is also part of the creative process as well. For me, there’s a real spiritual side to everything that I encountered.

Some of that can be the basis or a kernel if you will from a programming standpoint, that key operating set, or your operating system. It can be the thing that gets you through doubts and fears and what have you. Being in that flow state of place where so often you hear people artists of all kinds, but people say, “This song wrote itself?” Yes, because you put yourself into that openness and you allowed it to take you there. You were guided in that process.

Don't ruin your personal life by ignoring your loved ones. They're also part of your network. Share on X

I think that’s an important area of personal development that goes along with your artistry. I haven’t quite exactly answered your question about the balance of this. I had a guy who came to work with me. He was talking to an associate from Nashville, a counterpart. He tells me, “I would be careful because you guys are workaholics. It takes a little obsession, yet you also don’t want to ruin your personal life by ignoring the ones you love, friends, and family because they’re the network that you also use besides the collaboration network that you have. The more people you collaborate with means you have more people with something at stake in your project development.

The Importance Of Relationships In The Music Industry

One thing I gathered from your story is the dots. A lot of them relate to people that you met along the way, relationships that you made, and turns that happened in your career that you wouldn’t have expected because you met this person or you went to this place and got a sense of these people and what they were doing. Maybe you could speak real quick about that. How can you be open to all those new relationships while knowing when to say yes and when to say no?

Curiosity is a major asset to building new relationships because people can tell when you have their interests at heart. Share on X

Curiosity is a major asset because people will be able to see that you have their interests at heart and that you’re asking lots of questions. I would say questions are the answer to almost every one of those encounters because you have to know what somebody is about. You have to know how you have similar complementary sometimes experiences, or how you have contrasting ones where you can go, “I didn’t realize this or that,” and I’ve grown by knowing somebody.

You have to look at blessings that are coming right to you and figure out how to separate the wheat from the shaft. In other words, you’re going to meet a lot of semi-hucksters, a lot of BS, or it’s an ego business. I’ll say one of them is Max Bennett who’s a bass player. Max played bass on a song called Fever. He also was in a band called Tom Scott & the LA Express. I’m giving you dated references. Forgive me, this is before probably many people were born listening to this.

Regardless, he was a major dude in some respects. He played on Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats. He was a session guy who had an array of things. I’m trying to remember the connection. I contacted him and I said, “I license music and I like what you’re doing. Do you have anybody who represents you?” He was from Nebraska. Here I am, a guy coming from the Midwest. He took me like a big brother. I said, “I’ll do my best,” and he said, “We’re trying to put something together that we hope to get released in Japan,” because Japan is big in jazz. I said, “I’ll help you underwrite the project so that I could have the publishing.” That was the beginning of a relationship that had me stay in his Santa Clara house up on the hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

I’m trying to think of an example of here I am now with a guy who Snoop Dogg had take one of his songs and it was the foundation of one of his raps. We made some money together but more importantly, he had an affinity for me. After a while, I shook my head like, “Why?” This happened with another person I knew. I said, “Why are we working together?” He goes, “You’re real. You’re from the Midwest. What you see is what you get.”

I don’t think you need to be assertive most certainly. I think of Susie Savita Jones at Warner Bros. I told her after a while with the things she was giving me, “Should I move out here?” She goes, “No, I’ll keep giving you work. Don’t. You won’t be able to raise a family.” Even when I went to Chicago, I met a guy and he said, “Why do you want to be in this snake pit?” This is downtown Michigan Avenue, where all of the major production areas were for the ad agency world. I didn’t know any better. I just kept at it.

I love that the first thing that you said was that you’re curious. That’s my experience with being a podcaster too. I met so many people doing this. Some people, we super hit it off and we continue our relationship for years. I have people in this industry I’ve known now for ten years, when I started back in 2014 or even before that with online radio, and you just click. You got to be open to it and you never know where that’s going to take you.

There are people who I’m doing stuff with now that I never knew ten years ago when we had our first conversation that would happen. I agree. Being curious, being open, being yourself, and being assertive is also very important. I’m glad you mentioned that. I want to make sure that people can contact you because you have such a breadth of experience. Maybe you can help artists try to see where their next pivot is, or where they could be open to expanding their career a little bit, especially if they’re artists who are trying to figure out how to finance their career. How can they connect with you online?

Connect With Bill

My current project is AsIRecallForever.com. That is a musical podcast. As I said, I’d put together as many as 25 songs over three years. I was figuring out what am I doing. I finally realized there was no format for long-form music. Concept albums, if you will, are what it ended up being. There are streaming programs People watch on Netflix, binge watch even, and there are podcasts. I decided to make a podcast musical out of it.

 

That tries to give you music context. That also ties into the experience development that I was talking about. To give your music context means to put something together thematically. It could be with a cause and other things. It’s a way of taking what you have and bottling it. That’s what I’m doing behind this project, taking a different spin because let’s face it, recorded music revenue opportunities are shamefully fractions of what they used to be when we had physical media.

I also grew up in that area and was blessed to have that. It’s a big changing time with implementing social media, strategies, and all that other stuff that you carry. The name of the group I put together because it wasn’t a solo project after long. I’m dealing with all the people I knew throughout my career. I’m calling people up and bringing them in and therefore, getting to know others one after another. I have a lot of great mid-level type folks on my stuff.

A guy who once I had it all done, I was doing all of the singing and I went, “I don’t want to do all those scratch tracks. I’m going to get some other singers involved.”I thought of a guy that I know. He knows me that we never worked together and I know people he’s worked with. I called one. I said, “What do you think?” He would think of this song, singing it for me. He said, “Go show him,” and I did. He writes back to say, “This is masterful stuff.” I go, “Does that mean you’re in.”

Tim Davis is the guy and he was the music director for the program Glee. He said, “Bill, not only do I see you adding other singers to have a diverse set of folks in this production.” I’ll go back to Alan Parsons Project where he would put together players and singers. There have been other attempts with things like this. At any rate, he said, “I’ll do all the casting. I have a whole set of people that I think you should bring into this.” He helped me do that.

That’s awesome. Tell me again the URL that they can go to for that.

They can go to AsIRecallForever.com. You can also go to The Next Humanity which is the name of the collaborative group. I want to give it its own identity, and then the parent company is Sig Music, which is probably the quickest thing to remember.

Go check that, guys. I love that he’s using the podcast medium for a long-play album. It is true. That used to be the coolest thing that you could listen to, and now streaming has changed the game. I love the idea of it being a podcast. I’m going to have to check that out. Bill, it’s been so great for you to share all of your knowledge and experience with us. Thank you so much.

I salute what you’re doing because it’s good to have information and it’s good to have folks who have some tested means of survival.

That’s what we try to provide here. Thank you so much for all of your expertise today.

It’s good to be here.

 

Important Links

• Bill Mullin on LinkedIn
• Significant Media & Music
• As I Recall Forever
• The Next Humanity
• The Music Career You Don’t Have Yet on Amazon
• To Sell Is Human
• The Experience Economy on Amazon

 

 

About Bill Mullin

From Rock & Roll drumming, to Recording studio engineering, to music collaborative producer, Bill’s career has evolved overtime to bring audiences the best of music!