Daddy B. Nice’s replies to your letters

May 1, 2022

RE: How NOT To Market Southern Soul

Greetings Daddy B. Nice,

I confess to venting a little here as I watch the standard and the quality of this genre going downhill before it has had a chance to rise. It is quite unnerving. There is a huge disconnect between artists and their careers, the main one being they are totally absent of the business of music. I attempted to show some that their mentality of Me, Me, Me, Mine, Mine, Mine and I, I, I will not benefit them in an industry in which 25-to-40 immediate jobs are generated around one successful song. If it only benefits that one artist, who in the other 39 remaining jobs would be interested in that particular artist’s career?

I talk to artists all the time and they want me to consult them with benefits (free), but I do advise them to hire at least 3 people out of the 10 who can help elevate them, which would be a promoter, publicist and social media person. Here in Atlanta, they play the bait and switch game by announcing a southern soul night at a local club. After the audience pays their $10, the DJ only takes everybody to the cemetery without playing a new southern soul song all night. Completely bogus.

Here’s what they don’t know and why it is difficult both in the independent and major market. Southern Soul, by an unscientific survey with Nielsen, caters to north of a $50 Billion demographic. This audience between 25-years and 70-years old has that much expendable capital. It is also the genre that our (mostly black) community owns to create jobs, vertical business and vertically linked business.

The larger (mostly white) companies know this is a multi-billion genre we own and of course, in their usual model, they have not figured out how to take control, thus will not promote it in such a way that it becomes as powerful (as I predict) the British Invasion of the Beatles. The other side is, without the cooperation of our own DJs and artists working together for the cultural fear of each other, it also keeps it from flourishing.

These artists keep begging and asking for free stuff on a continual basis. They will not pay a dime towards anything they cannot hold in their hands. They beg people to play, share, help promote, put them on shows of all sorts, interview and give them highlight and visibility without the slightest regard that this is an industry in which a converged amount of professionals have careers in doing exactly what they want to do. However, they keep coming up with the sob stories and want these professional to help them promote an intangible product. The professionals, in turn, will let them know the type of budgets that will accommodate their need, but these artists cannot conceive that promotions are the intangible force that elevates their intangible product. They just cannot seem to put the two together.

They do believe in paying for studio costs. Anything past that is out of the picture. Let’s face this. This is an industry with a real infrastructure (however fragile) and real people to make this whole southern soul genre viable and profitable. However, without everyone participating in the up to 40 jobs that a hit song can produce, the genre remains immobile and not very valuable to mainstream media, which is everyone’s wish to penetrate. All of these self-serving patterns and me, me, me and I, I I mindsets have to change. In my humble opinion, this is what is holding southern soul down and keeping it from its full potential.

Jerry King

Entertainment Atlanta

Read Daddy B. Nice’s “X-Man Parker: How NOT To Market