Inside the Music Career: Passion, Hustle, and How to Make It Work

Just because I needed you didn't give you reason to take up the last one I dream.
So if you're playing one of our songs on Spotify, we'll get 0.0002% of a penny for each play.
Of a penny?
Of a penny.
Hi! Welcome back to How Much Can I Make?
I'm Arabuzeri, a journalist who always wanna know what people do for a living and how much they can make.
The song you just heard is called Soundproof.
It was written and performed by Elizabeth Zif.
She is a member of the group Betty.
They've been around for a while.
And she's our guest today to tell us what it takes to be a working musician.
Elizabeth, thank you so much for giving us your time.
Hello Mirave.
I'm so happy to be here.
So let's start by telling us what made you pursue music to begin with.
I started very, very young.
In my family, we always sang all the time.
I thought everybody sang until I went to school.
And uh I was singing in school everywhere, and everybody thought I was insane.
So I didn't stop singing.
I just realized that not everybody sings.
And this is little.
I'm talking like second grade, third grade.
And I used to come home from school and write songs and swing my legs from my bunk bed and just make up songs.
I mean, I didn't really consider it writing music.
I just made songs up.
Like you make stories up when you're little.
You know, you make stories up.
So it's like today I went to school and somebody ran into me in the toilet, you know, just little songs.
I never remembered them.
They didn't rhyme, I didn't, you know, write it down.
But then I started doing poetry when I was in high school and things like that.
But I never really equated poetry with songwriting.
It takes me a lot longer to write a song than I think most people because I've I have a gig economy sort of life.
So, you know, I produce, I have my own studio, I'm an engineer, but I'm also one-third of the band Betty.
And we've been together, it's a pop band, we've been together for 39 years, and we've traveled, we're arts envoys, so we've played all over the world, and it's that's taken up, I would say, 90% of my musical life.
So at what stage did you decide to make it your profession?
I lived in Virginia and I escaped as soon as I could.
Um I I left high school and I went to live on a kibbutz, which is a communal farm in Israel at the time, and I was a socialist and I I wanted to see if it worked.
So I went to live on a kibbutz, and after about a year, I really found myself there, and I found myself through song, and people really recognized that I could really sing and that I I was a performer.
And so at the end of the my time there, we put on a play, and I played Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and we did it all in Hebrew, and I sang somewhere with a rainbow a cappella by myself, and I'm I'm 17 at the time, and I realized the power that I had because it changed everything for all the people on the computers that asked me to stay, and people just looked at me differently because I had that spark.
I had that spark that people want to see.
That moment was a seminal moment in my life when I realized I can actually make people happy with this.
My voice touches people.
That was the motivation to touch people.
Yeah.
They understood me when they heard me sing.
It was different, it was a very different feeling.
And so I came home back to Virginia, and then my sister and I, Amy, we decided that we were gonna start a band.
Amy played the cello, and she always sang too.
I didn't really play anything, but I was very rhythmic.
I could play a lot of uh rhythmic instruments, and I had a really good concept of music.
I could hear something and then sing it.
So she was working with somebody who had who was a guitar player, and then we started an all-girl band.
We put an ad on the radio.
This is 1981.
And Alison, who's the third person in Betty, and my best friend, and an incredible bass player and singer and songwriter, she answered the ad.
She was the second person.
She came over to my parents' house, and we just, it was that moment, that magic moment when you meet somebody that you've known your whole life, even though you're just meeting them, and we just became instant friends.
It's nothing I ever planned.
I never said, I'm gonna be a musician, I'm gonna play music, I'm gonna be an engineer, I'm gonna be a writer, I'm gonna be.
I never planned any of that.
I really didn't think I was gonna live past 24, honestly.
You know, I thought, okay, I'll have a good couple years and then I'm out.
And so it really snowballed.
It was just, I followed it.
I didn't pursue it.
It's not that the music industry was easy, especially for women, especially in the 80s.
It was just something that worked because the three of us were magic.
We sang together in harmony, and that's something that's primal.
When you're singing a cappella to people in harmony, people respond in a way that is very primal.
Did you write all those songs at the time or were you doing cover?
No, no, no.
We wrote, we did a couple of covers here and there, but we wrote the songs and we started out being, you know, we didn't have we didn't have any restrictions put on us.
So if we wanted to do a song with cello and vocals, we did.
If we wanted to do a song, I started playing the keyboard because I had to, and I started to learn sequencing and all that stuff because in the 80s, if you wanted to do stuff, you could use a drum machine.
Right.
You didn't have to have a full band.
That was really sort of the beginnings of electronic music in that way.
Not in classical, but in in pop music.
From there, we just kept going.
And then you were on HBO, you had something on HBO, correct?
What was it exactly?
Well, that's what that's what brought us to New York, actually, from DC, because we s we were from DC.
We went up to New York to open for Jonathan Richmond, and the people from HBO came down to see him because they were starting a children's television show with the people that did Sesame Street in conjunction with them.
And at the time, HBO was doing mostly porn stuff, you know, like soft porn.
Yeah, I remember.
Literally, really.
Oh no, that's what they were doing.
So they had to offset it.
So they brought in children's television workshop to do a children's television show.
But it was very, very queer, very outside, in the in the vein of Pee-wee Herman, but not as brilliant.
Right in that way that adults would watch it, they would smoke pot and watch it.
Like the guy from it was the drummer from Pearl Jam was a fan.
We met him in an elevator one time and he said, Oh my god, you guys are betty.
I saw you on encyclopedia.
And people still do that.
They still say, Oh, I saw you encyclopedia.
But it was a great opportunity.
The HBO came down, they saw us, they said, We want you to audition for the show.
So we came up from DC and we'd written a song quickly for it, and we got the part.
And it was very fast.
We had to write 25 songs that would describe in detail uh not in detail, but describe for children the description of the song.
So they gave us a word like like heat, and we'd had to write a song about what it was to tell kids.
And it was really fun, but it was really hard.
Uh we did Were you well paid for this job?
Yes.
We did 25 songs in we wrote the songs, we recorded them, I think in three or four days, and then we were on video.
Then we filmed them.
Uh the whole process was two weeks long, so you can imagine.
Wow.
But it was really, really fun.
It was really creative and great, and it just gave us this taste of recording that was very different than what we had done before.
So, what would you call yourself?
A songwriter, a composer, a performer?
What would you call yourself?
A Jill of all trades.
I would call myself a musician, really, because even though I don't read music and I never have, I've been a composer on a television show.
I've composed for film, I've composed for other things.
I have my own studio.
I really consider myself a a producer, a composer, and a musician.
Even though I really, you know, when people sit around and they jam, they're like, do one, four, five, or whatever, you know, the musicians.
I'm always like, What?
And I'm looking at their fingers.
But I can sing.
I can really sing.
And if I have to, I'll play the guitar to write a song, or I'll write it on the keyboard.
But what's fun for me is to take a beat, because usually I write when I'm walking.
Oh.
Because I write to a beat.
I've always heard rhythm in my in my head.
Uh, maybe it's the heartbeat or whatever it is.
So I've written most of my songs when I'm either riding my bike or I'm walking, or that's pretty much it.
Okay, so walk me through the process.
You ride your bike in New York City, you have a song in your head, then you come home and you rush up and you start uh writing it or the recording it.
Well, I start writing it.
Or are you writing lyrics first also?
Or um I usually write lyrics and music together.
If I if I write the song and I bring it to Betty, it changes and we arrange it together, or we complete it together, or it changes because they they want to do this and this.
If I write it for myself, it's different.
If I'm composing, but that's usually just music, music, and I'll use vocal for you know as an instrument as opposed to a lyric.
I know you wrote the theme song for the L-world.
How did this come about?
My uncle, Uncle Lloyd, who was a big deal in the magazine industry, he was friends with Eileen Chaiken, and he had told her about us for a very long time.
So I went out to California and I met up with her and I said, Listen, here's our record.
It was after the first season.
Okay.
I said, put it put put our music on your on the show, on the L word, because I really liked it.
I thought it was really great.
And she said, Well, you know, I love you guys.
She came to see us in Chicago and a couple of the other times, and then Showtime wanted to have a a theme song.
So they asked four different bands to submit.
Oh.
So we submitted, and then they used it.
And you know, it caused a lot of controversy.
A lot.
Why?
Because it had the F-word in it.
Oh, please.
No, it was the first time there was ever a theme song in the history of television that had an F word in it.
Oh, really?
Yes.
Leave it too many.
I but you know, it worked.
It worked with the lyric, it worked with the song, and it it really, it's definitely a part of there's a lot of sex in the L-word.
Right.
You know?
So it it just we never even thought about it.
We just put it in.
And oh my god, it was a big deal.
TV Guides said it was the worst.
We're very proud of this.
It's like the worst theme song ever written.
And and we celebrated that because we thought, oh, you listen, if you're not gonna be the best, be the worst.
And um, it's so interesting because what is it, 15 years later, and everywhere we go, people are singing along.
I know, they cheer, they scream for that song, they want it.
We have to play it every time, every time we play live.
And I get it, it's a touchstone for a lot of people in their life.
It meant a lot to them.
And it was recognized, it's a very recognizable song.
You can sing along to it.
They don't have there's not a lot of theme songs with lyrics or tunes like that anymore.
People don't do that, they don't take the time to write a minute-long theme song, and people don't have the the capacity for that either.
Right.
So you have ding donk ding dong, and the show starts.
Right.
Does it happen to you that you have a creative block?
You know, I've been so honestly so focused on traveling and playing and sound checking and writing and doing all this other stuff and recording that I haven't had time for writer's block.
You know?
But honestly, I feel like I haven't really scratched the surface of what's in me as a musician and a writer.
I really feel like, gee, I hope I don't croak, you know, before I before I get some of this stuff out.
Because it's really hard to be a musician in America.
You don't get subsidized.
How do you make a living as a as a musician?
Well, it's much harder now because of Spotify and things like that.
Even though your music can get out there easier when it is played, first of all, people don't buy music.
They don't buy it, they didn't grow up.
They download it.
Or they play it on a streaming service that they pay for$9 or whatever they pay for a month.
That money doesn't go to us.
It goes to the streaming service.
So if you're playing one of our songs on Spotify, we'll get 0.0002% of a penny for each play.
Of a penny?
Of a penny.
It's nothing.
And people don't realize that.
Yet Spotify's getting a lot of money.
So is Apple Music.
And even if you buy it, what are we getting?
30 cents to the dollar?
Uh yeah, 30 cents to the dollar or something.
So it's very difficult to make money.
The the only way that you make money is to play live, and it's hard because people don't go out as much as they used to, especially after COVID.
And to have your music synced.
That's really how you make money.
To have your music used in a film or in um a television show, in a play.
How much can you make if you give it to a television show?
It depends on who you are, and it depends on the show.
You know, it used to be much more.
But what would be the range?
Let's say you totally unknown to a very known.
What's important here, Mirab, and this is important for people to understand, you need to maintain and retain your publishing.
Because what people are paying for is they're paying for the publishing.
They're paying for the rights for the song.
So when somebody wants to buy your publishing, you really have to think hard about it.
Because what are you what are you getting for your publishing?
How much money are you getting for the for these songs that you've blood, sweat, and tears, right?
But there is publishing and there's writer, right?
It splits into two, no?
It depends on on what's happening in the in the sync license.
So we write the song.
So we get paid for it.
You get paid for the writing if it's used.
Okay.
But if you own the publishing, that's really you have to write the song.
So if you don't write the song, you don't make the money.
You get a little bit of money for, you know, playing it.
But that's why so many bands break up over that.
You know, that's one of the things.
That was a huge thing in Queens.
Give me an example.
For example, the B-52s.
Okay.
They they write songs together.
Right.
They've decided a long time ago, and I think that's why they're still together, that everybody gets the same amount of money from publishing.
They split it very smart.
It's just it's a smart, fair way, and it it keeps a lot of the resentment out of the band.
We've not done that.
But you're still together.
I mean, that's a miracle.
We don't know why.
But you have to maintain the publishing if you can.
Otherwise, you know, it's good to get a bigger publisher because they'll get you licensed.
So it's this whole catch 22.
If you get a bigger publisher, because you have to have one, if you have songs that are huge, then they're going to be used.
So if you are already making money in the music industry, like everywhere else, you make more money.
If you're not making any money in the music industry, it's harder to make money.
So you rely on patrons, you rely on people to support you.
Somebody writes a song and it become for a TV show or for uh whatever, and it becomes a hit.
How much money can is is in there for a lot of money.
When you say a lot.
If you write the song.
The thing about it is television shows, they don't let you keep the publishing.
Oh, wow.
So they must pay you a lot up front, no?
Depends on who you are.
If you have a big name and you have a lot of people behind you, a good lawyer and a great manager and stuff like that.
Say like Mick Jagger writes a song for a TV show.
He's gonna he's gonna retain his copyright because he's too big.
They want him too much.
Right.
We retained our copyright on our songs, which is a miracle, for encyclopedia.
And that's because we had an incredible lawyer, Nancy Rose.
And we still do.
What about the L world?
Did you keep them around?
No, they wouldn't they would not allow you.
Shut up.
They own it.
Yeah, they own it.
But they that's most that's most things.
Oh you know, they they own it.
And when you're the composer, the company who makes the show owns owns the music.
So they own it, but when you perform it, do you have to get a permission from them to perform your own song?
You pay them a little bit.
You pay them to perform your own song?
Yeah.
Wow, unbelievable.
Wow.
But I mean that's the thing about rights, and that's if you go back in history and music history and you see what happened to people of color who had written these songs, and they were s just robbed blind because you not even people of color, but people who, you know, like in the Appalachian Mountains and they wrote these songs, and the people would come in and they would sign away their rights.
And so they would never get the publishing.
And sometimes they wouldn't get the the credit for writing the song.
I mean, Big Maba Thornton, she wrote Hound Dog.
Right.
And then Alvis Presley actually gave her the credit for that.
Yeah, he was a fair person.
He was a fair person, but most people didn't.
So that's the history.
Honestly, that's the history of music in America, and that's where music really we're has really flourished.
And also they had the Brill Building and people like that that were they came in, they wrote hit songs, and the company owned it, right?
I mean, that's how Carol King started.
Carol King started writing like that, and it's different now.
It's always been difficult to make money in music unless you hit a bag.
But it's that's like acting.
You know, so many people want to be an actor, and there's very few working actors that make a a really good living.
Yeah, that's very true.
But it's a it's a love.
You do it because you love it.
You have no choice, basically.
I mean, you really don't.
You don't have a choice.
Like, I don't know what else I would have done, honestly.
What what would I have done?
Who the hell else?
The the unfortunate thing is that the business people that buy the songs, they know that you're gonna write it anyway, whether you make money or not.
They're they know that they're gonna yeah, you're gonna sell it to them because you want it to be heard.
Yes.
So And because you can't help it but to write songs.
Well, I know that because I was buying songs when I was a producer on the L word.
I bought songs from people.
Um, but at that time we paid a lot more than they pay now.
What did you pay for a song?
Depends on who wrote it, depends on who it is.
Usually three to five grand.
But you remember we use twenty-two songs per episode.
Wow.
And you bought it outright.
In perpetuity?
Yeah, you have to.
That's more with the three to five thousand dollars a song.
I mean, sometimes it was more.
Sometimes it was more, sometimes it was less.
But it was an opportunity for people to be heard.
And especially then, because I I was using a lot of people who had never been heard before.
What's the hardest part of being a songwriter or a singer because you're both?
There's no hard part of being a singer.
You know, you you have to hone your craft, but the hardest part of being a songwriter is your ego.
Whoa, what do you mean?
It means that you wrestle with your ego, you know.
Uh the ego guides the artist.
And that's sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad.
And so your ego is saying, This is the best song that's ever been written in the world.
It can never get better.
Don't touch it.
And sometimes you're right, but most of the time you're not.
And then you wake up the next day and you listen to it, or I mean, that's why you leave something overnight on the mixing board because you come back the next day because everybody's like, Yeah, this is great, man.
You come back the next day and you're like, Oh my god, this is crap.
This is unbelievable crap.
It sounds terrible.
Do you think raw talent is enough to break into the music business?
No.
Oh.
What does it take?
It takes perseverance for one.
You have to know that you might not make a lot of money, and you're not doing it for the money.
You're doing it because you can't do anything else.
That's what an artist has to go through.
And you have to make that decision.
Is it worth it?
Because it's a big decision.
And sometimes the decision is made for you, and sometimes it's not.
It really is being at the right place at the right time.
Right, and a lot of luck, like everything else.
And a lot of luck, and a lot of people have a lot of talent and haven't made a lot of money, but they've had a good life.
So, but what would be a good way for somebody to sit at home, write write a song, maybe put some video to it, and and and do what?
And send it to somebody, or what would be a way to do it.
As a songwriter, as a songwriter.
Breaking in as a songwriter, I would say go to Nashville.
Why Nashville?
They think it's country music, no?
Well, that's where a lot of songwriting comes from.
LA and and Nashville.
And they they have those songwriting buildings, you know, where people write songs and other people perform them.
I think that's more country music than it is pop music.
But there's honestly, there's like ten people that write pop the pop hits.
Wow.
It's it's it's a group of people who make a lot, a lot of money.
Because they're writing for the big artists and they make a lot of money, and they're really talented, unbelievably talented, and write good songs and know and they know how to write a hit song, which is formulaic.
But it's always been that way, you know?
So, what is the problem to learn the formula and write it?
It's right place, right time, right moment, right lyric, right vibe.
There's some songs that are in the moment, and then there's some songs that will live forever.
Yeah, I know.
How do you balance creative integrity with commercialism?
Something that will sell and will that people will listen to.
Meanwhile, you want to write a song that is from your heart.
I think when you write a good song from your heart and it's received in the right way, you don't have to separate integrity from success.
You know, there's look at the Beatles.
Their songs were incredible and they were unbelievably successful.
But that was a different time also.
You know, there could be a Beatle today that is writing in this basement and will never sell a song.
Exactly.
And I think like if somebody like the the group Queen were around today, there's no way that Bohemian Rhapsody would have been played on the radio.
Why do you say that?
Well, first of all, it's too long.
It's insane.
It's too long.
If there's no formula to it.
I mean, maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe it would have cut through because it's just an incredible piece of music.
Incredible.
But there's, you know, Queen's first album, Liars, I think seven minutes long.
The first cut on the first album.
That's that album made me want to do music.
Wow.
The first time I heard it, I sat up and I thought, who the hell is this?
And wow, this is this has changed my life.
Wow.
Yeah.
My si my older sister played it for me.
And um hearing that, and also their albums are really diverse.
It's not one sound through the album.
You know, the different people that were in it, all of the different guys that were in the band, they all wrote m wrote songs.
So and they all sounded very different.
And I thought that was for me, that was an awakening.
You didn't have to it It didn't all have to be the same singer.
It didn't all have to sound the same.
You could do something that was different and it would cut through and people would respond to it.
But what keeps you going all those years?
I think the joy.
The joy of it, the travel, the people that you meet, the people you affect, the people you're affected by, the music itself.
You traveled to India, right?
To perform in India?
Yeah.
We traveled to India.
We've been we've been all over the world, honestly.
We're an independent band.
You know, we don't have a manager, we don't have anything.
And we've done all these amazing, wonderful things.
I think that it is the joy because it's not for the money.
Right.
And I know that this podcast is about how to make more money, but you gotta know that in music it's it's not the money.
It's not the money.
It's it's the it's the life.
Because you meet so many wonderful people, you have this great community.
I worked in the in the television industry for about five years, and it was hard because that community does not exist there.
It really doesn't.
It's very cutthroat.
There's a lot of money involved.
But the community of music, you know, when you're sitting there with a musician, you can get raunchy and say laugh about stuff and know that okay, this sound person destroyed my hearing.
And you can laugh about those.
And the moments where you don't get paid or somebody, you know, runs off with your paycheck, or just what?
Oh, that's happened to us.
Happened to us in Portu in uh Portugal.
We we were brought over for a huge music festival, and uh the people that promoted it and produced it took off and didn't pay anybody.
Wow.
It's happened more than once.
It happens a lot.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
You'd be surprised.
How do you handle criticism?
Difficultly.
Again, the ego, right?
Um, so somebody criticizes you or your music, it's really hard because it's your soul.
Right.
They're talking about your soul, they're talking about who you are as a human because this is your artwork, and it is hard.
It's really hard, and I think musicians take it much harder than actors or dancers or people like that because they're used to working with a director.
It's just it's really difficult to to be criticized for your artwork.
Yeah, you know, it really is.
It stinks, it hurts.
Right.
Yeah.
If you could collaborate with any musician, living or dead, who would that be?
Um, there's so many of them.
There's so many people that I admire and I love the work like Billy Holiday or Shaka Khan or Queen, Freddie Mercury.
I I would have actually loved to have collaborated with Freddie Mercury.
Really?
I just thought he was such a genius.
He was a genius.
I love collaboration.
A lot of people in any arts, they're not team players.
Right.
Inflated egos, that's why.
If you could give your younger self an advice, what would that be?
Don't smoke cigarettes.
It fucks with your voice and it gave me cancer.
Yeah.
You know, I I answered that question today, which is weird, for Forbes magazine, because we did it, they're doing an article about our new album, Eat.
And um I really thought about it.
And if I could tell my younger self something, my younger self would say, Fuck you, and would not listen.
You know, there's no way that anybody could have told me, given me advice, told me what to do, and that I would have listened.
Because I really had to find my own way.
And I think that that's important as a young artist.
Find your own way.
Okay, my last question, and that's about AI.
Okay.
AI could easily write a song, right?
It it's already writing songs.
That's a total threat to your to your income, to your livelihood, no?
Not to mine, honey.
I mean, listen, it's coming.
There's no stopping it.
And the music industry has taken so many hits already, not the industry, but the artists.
So many hits, starting with Napster, honestly.
If anybody doesn't know what that is, that was the first free music on it.
Free music, yeah.
The mistake there was that the recording industry of America tried to stop it as opposed to understanding that there was no way to stop this giant tsunami wave.
So let's work with it.
Let's see what we can do.
Instead of trying to hold on to, we're gonna charge$18 for the CD, no matter what.
Right.
We're not gonna lower it, we're not gonna give more money to the artist.
We're gonna give a dollar to the artist, we're gonna keep$17 for ourselves.
So why wouldn't you take the music that's free?
Right.
You know, why wouldn't you?
AI is another way.
I think that's gonna be difficult, but I I don't know how how it's gonna affect the industry.
It's already writing songs?
That's what I heard.
Like f score for film, that's easily they can do that, right?
I don't know.
I mean, do you have to have a soul and a heart to write music?
That's the question.
I think a lot of the music now that's out there is formulaic and it's not soul and heart.
So I think you will be able to ha to write songs like that that are instantaneous and pe and formulaic and people will get I I'll dance to it.
You know what I mean?
But I think the real heart songs, the real songs that you know, like Bonnie Rate.
If you have a song that is a beautiful song that's written from the heart, I don't think that it's gonna compare to AI.
I could be wrong.
I mean, I did see The Matrix, so we're very close to that already.
You know, I mean, did no one see The Matrix?
Are and we're still working on AI.
Come on, you guys.
I mean, really.
Um, I don't know what's gonna happen with artificial intelligence.
I uh and and the in the arts.
Do you use it in your music?
No.
No, no, I I've never used it in writing and anything.
I can't imagine doing that.
I mean, I like to collaborate, but if it's gonna be a robot, she better be really pretty.
You know?
Maybe then I'll maybe then I'll collaborate.
So on that positive note, I'll tell you I say thank you very much.
Learned a lot.
Some my pleasure, Mirave.
Yeah.
Turn it off.
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