"No Victims Allowed"

Vocal Contest Submission By Dawn Ingianni and Camille Barbone

“No Victims Allowed”

One night, as I was driving home from a performance in Manhattan, it seemed like every license plate I passed glowed a soft, golden color. I remembered thinking , “did I eat or drink something that could have cause this halo effect? But it seemed that only certain license plates glowed, and the rest of the night was the same 24 that most musicians, who don’t heed the examples of those that came before, were experiencing. Life as a performer is a grind, but it is “our grind,” and it we love it. Performers are creatures of habit.

The next morning, I thought about the drive home and I decided to write down a few of the license numbers that I remembered as glowing. I took out my old, worn, black mole skin notebook, where I record all my deep connections and heavy thoughts, along with poems, song ideas and numbers that had or might have significant meaning to me. I started recording this type info into my black notebook in my first decade of sobriety. The book had a special type of energy to it. It felt alive and connected to the events of my life. It was hard to ignore, even for a non-believer like me Some numbers appeared regularly, at various times and places in my life. I believe that the book communicated the importance of certain numbers to me by their very presence and appearance in my life. I just didn’t know why. They would dance on the pages. I would write them down in different order, just for fun, in the same way that I would play with words and phrases when I composed a song. The book had something. I was just not willing to call it magic. When the pandemic hit, all my self-indulgent obsessions stopped. The world was shifting in a very big way. I realized that life, from that point forward, was going to be a mixed bag, with equal doses of good and bad for everyone. Live performance and gigging were no longer an option, no matter who you knew or who owed you what. Live performance was dead in the water without any way to resuscitate it.

Some of us were in denial and thought things would bounce back quickly. For a few months, we struggled to stay afloat with the money we had but it didn’t take long to spend it with your survival is in the balance. We had to sell our equipment to eat and pay rent. Many had to leave Manhattan, leave the music center we knew and loved.Leave the clubs that helped us connect with fans and perfect our work. You have to hit it hard in the music business. You have to shake the trees, look for opportunities and keep grinding. But after a while, it just gets too hard, and you slowly start to think about giving up the dream. I am a survivor; I have been for years. I have scrapped by and was starting to see a bit of progress. But this was situation was different. I didn’t know if my career or my artistic drive could survive Covid. I knew that music, that Art always survives. It had gotten through wars, economic downturns, riots and pandemics. I knew that Art would eventually resurface but what I didn’t know was if I could resurface too.

By September, we all started to pay more attention to the music business online and how digital service providers had become the new, evil people that took our music and didn’t pay for it. The record labels had been replaced by YouTube and Spotify and we were victims yet again. We realized that we must have been doing a pretty lousy job with our careers if we always wound up being the victim. Things had to change. But we had no choice, we had to cave and make friends with the devil and the rest of the DSP streaming sites. We had become “content.” We had to downshift to online performances, Zoom meetings, new ways to see friends and have relationships. We had the Internet and the security of my 6-story classic Manhattanwalk up apartment on West 30th Street as command central. There were 5 apartments per floor, and the tenants had evolved into a genuine “Manhattan family,” similar to when a naturally occurring community develops in the wild. Most of us were in the entertainment business. It’s what kept the building and the vibe so cool. The hallways were full of ideas, new music, drama and life in NYC. Some would call it a creative hive. We grew up in this place. It hurt a lot to see my neighbors go and it was torture to have to help some of them move away because of this damn virus. We cried behind our masks as we saw each other for the first time in months, but only to say goodbye and stay in touch.

As I write this, only three of us remain in our building and we decided it was time to start thinking like professional musicians and figure out how to survive in the new world of Covid. We had nothing else to do. Music finally turned into our day job as Covid moved in on every molecule of air we breathed. We couldn’t see it, but we knew it was there as it trapped us in a scary game of Marco Polo.

We needed to do something to soothe our nerves, to make us feel like we had some control over our lives. We started obsessing on all the online music sites,looking up our songs, taking note of our social media followers, visits, streams and downloads. We decided to clean up the mess that was, up to this point in time, our online music careers. We were a mess, our apartments were a mess, our brains a mess and Manhattan was, for the second time in our lives and not since 9/11, an emotional mess. We began to get into the digital music scene. We start looking for information about coding our music and found out that some songwriters were actually earning money on the Web. Living like coders, in the dark for days, wired on coffee, we slowly grasped what we had to do. We mastered ISRC codes, audio finger printing nomenclature, copyrights, image rights, neighboring rights sync licenses, streaming figures, black box royalties on and on…… It was like learning a foreign language!

So, I pulled out my black notebook and started to fill it up with new songs. Songs about life. Songs about loss and change. Titles, lyrics and those annoying codes that proved I owned the songs I wrote. Our new approach to music was all great and fun, but it still was not putting money in our pockets and going home to Mom or Dad was not an option. To us, it signified “DEFEAT.” Eviction letters, while in the midst of Covid, came and went, and we fought them every step of the way. The unspoken rule of our building was that “we would never give up. But we were desperate, and we had to find a way to survive. We had listened to a podcast on music royalties and revenue. It featured this dude who talked about his new royalty company. He said that he could help us earn money from our music online, that he could match up composers with their songs on any missing royalties that had been sent to the “Black Box” because they didn’t have those damn codes attached. So, we decided to roll the dice and we decided to send him a few songs.Believing in the power of my notebook, I attached a few of the glowing license plate numbers I saw on my last drive from the Apple to a couple of my songs. I wanted to shake things up a bit. A couple of weeks went by and nothing happened, we didn’t see a dime or hear from the royalty company. My belief about music on the Internet was confirmed. Nothing happens to music on the Internet unless you are freaking Beyonce or boy wonder Sean Mendez. It was for “name” artists only.

But I was convinced that my notebook had power and the messages it kept sending me all these years, were pushing me towards something important. I had used my special numbers, connected them to my songs and turned them over to this guy Joshua, and his new company, Royalty Genius. I found out that this dude had come up with algorithms that matched songs with their writers so that they could get paid. Another two weeks passed and then email from Royalty Genius arrived. Joshua had matched my codes to songs stuck in the Black Box, a place where unclaimed songs and their royalties hung out until their owners were found, which never happened until Royalty Genius came along. My songs wanted out and my notebook, with my strange list of numbers heard their plea and had the power to free them. One song had racked up an astronomical $20,000 in royalties during the two years it spent unclaimed in the Black Box, alone without me, the composer.

When we received our first payment we ate like kings and queens. We paid all our bills, especially the Internet bill, and we were grateful that all our student loans were now on hold indefinitely, a rare gift from cruel Covid. We were very excited to ship our oldest neighbor the cat that she had to leave behind when she left the City.

The kitty got a first-class ticket to sunny Florida. We even had enough money to rent a car to take our youngest neighbor’s dog to his new home in Pennsylvania. Royalty Genius became our very own money machine. The entire experience told me to listen to inner messages, that are coming at you all the time. You must pay attention and take action. You must move a muscle to change a thought or outcome. This world is not for spectators and although my music was now paying some of my bills, I realized that more needs to be done. Sometimes we hold the key to the prison we make for ourselves in our hands….. or is the key to it in my little black notebook.