@PaulR said:
I can tell you, like I've been trying to tell you here for years, you forget all your musical dreams if you're looking to write music for films and tv.
Well, of course, here I can disagree with you, because it's simply not my experience.
You just have to know what you're up against, and like any other business arrangement, get yourself leverage, and be clear what your real goals are. The first thing I did when entering the business, was make sure I didn't have to be a whore. Having to take any job just to pay bills was going to kill my love for music, and force me to work with tons of people in tons of ways I wouldn't want to. So the first thing I did was submit pieces to the music library companies - 3M, Muzak, etc. - writing this godawful "hold music." Except I could crank out 8 tunes a weekend, record them at my friend's house for a modest cost with a couple great players, and it was great exercise. I had a 92% acceptance rate, and after a couple years of just loading up the libraries, to this day those tunes remain my staple ASCAP royalty base that I live on.
Once that desperate pressure is off, you can be more selective about what you do, and you take that into meetings with you. Believe me, people can smell desperation, and they can tell when you're about the money - or when you have to be, by necessity. At first, in Hollywood, people don't quite know what to do with you when you can't just be bought. But with that security at your back, you have more leverage to make it about the work, and about what you want to do. Of course, what you want to do is make the producer's film, or the director's film, the best film it can possibly be. And when you mean that, and when it's obviously not just a sell line because you're actually about the money, they tend to believe it's true. And true, non-qualified passion is attractive to everyone.
Agents are about the money. Hell, most people are about the money. But the people you really want to work with, who care about the art, are out there, and they like people of the same flavor. You make some business decisions, so you can make artistic decisions. But they're aren't mutually exclusive.
Like most things, the wisdom lies in the balance.
_Mike