OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder is no stranger to the difficult process of making it in the music business. The singer/songwriter/musician/producer recently blogged about his personal journey in the industry and shared many of the obstacles he’s faced along with the tricks he’s pulled along the way. Check out what Ryan Tedder has to say about making it in the biz on his Myspace blog after the jump.
Check out what Ryan has to say about his journey in the biz via his Myspace blog.
“I’ve been playing music all my life (since 3), and was self taught on the 4 primary instruments…I was OBSESSED with music in every form, but didn’t know how to crack into it. I started skipping classes at university my freshman year to write songs, then my junior year I decided I was actually gonna go for it, so I figured I’d get as close as possible to where music was actually recorded and created. I would call the complaint hotline phone #’s on the websites of record labels, when the ‘complaint department’ would answer I would say ‘I’m sorry, I must have been mis-connected to you, I was being connected to the human resources department. They would then reconnect me to the actual human resources department (who’s #’s weren’t ever listed) and I would tell the receptionist I was returning a call from the head of the department, 5 seconds later I’m talking w/ the head of the hiring department of whatever record label I happed to have called, and would simply say ‘Hi, I’m Ryan Tedder, I’ve been talking with your department about working for FREE for you guys this summer as an intern, do you have a space for me?’ I called London, LA, New York and Nashville. Eventually Dreamworks (Universal music) hired me (for free) to come work in their Nashville publishing department.
I spent the summer of 2000 filing ALL the songs written by all their signed writers- so I listened to probably 30 songs a day, Meanwhile I was writing songs in my spare time, after 2 months there my boss asked me why I was ‘really’ there, I told her, and she listened to 3 of my songs. She immediately offered me a publishing deal. Later that week I auditioned for a singer-songwriter competition to be held on MTV in new york. I won the Nashville round of the audition singing and playing an original piece. 2 weeks later I was on MTV competing against 4 other hopefuls…I ended up winning that on live TV and won a record deal. Long story short I went from that exciting moment to absolutely ‘nothing’ 9 months later. The deal fell thru, and I ended up back in Nashville broke and starting from scratch…
Over the next 3 years I wrote my ass off with every writer I could, started a band, ended up in various production deals with Timbaland (who had seen me on that MTV show), and other business men… Eventually landing a deal with OneRepublic (formed in 2003) on Columbia Records. We made an album which they shelved, then dropped us in 2006. After getting dropped we became the #1 unsigned act on MySpace… Which is to this day THE reason we are still together. The MySpace buzz got every label after us (we had Apologize and Stop and Stare posted on our page for 3 years before they came out!!!). Polydor signed us, Apologize came out, and the rest is history.”
Don’t forget that OneRepublic’s Waking Up album is now available and I must say…it freakin’ rocks my ears off.
Thanks Jamie
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