The duo Soft Palms — Julia Kugel and Scott Montoya — were in the process of creating their latest album In Echo (out today via Everloving Records), a collection of fuzzy garage rock tracks, when they started to have revealing conversations with other musicians. In the last year, musicians – especially independent artists – have been struggling to make a living with the rising cost of touring and the production of everything from the music itself to merch. So, the couple decided to write down everything they knew from decades of experience as working musicians and put it into a book.
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“We are trying to help educate people on how to be self-reliant,” says Montoya of the aptly titled How to Be Self-Reliant in the Music Business. “You can do this. It doesn’t have to be so nebulous.”
The book, released as both an audio and a physical book, covers practical advice about the music business, the lifestyle, etiquette, touring, recording, music royalties and more. Kugel and Montoya know a 100-page book can’t cover the entire music industry, but it condenses a lot of complicated information from their years working at labels, owning a studio, signing multiple contracts, doing live sound, handling social media and performing in many bands — including Southern California rock band The Growlers and punk trio The Coathangers.
“We know how to do it all. We do it. We’ve been doing it. I’ve talked to people that have been doing it as long as we have and they’ve said, ‘I wish I paid more attention,’” says Montoya. “We’ve been deep diving a lot into royalties, metadata, SEO. Those are super graspable concepts and they are things that would otherwise cost thousands of dollars for someone to do.”
The couple tries to mentor up-and-coming artists on these issues while they’re traveling on tour, but even their own musician friends who have been in the business for years have blind spots in the DIY music business. “They’re genius people,” says Kugel of their friends whose music they help register with performing rights organizations, “and then as soon as you put a spreadsheet in front of them, they freak out. So, it has helped talking to our peers and explaining to them.”
Soft Palms sat down to chat with Billboard about the duo’s new book, and why they decided to release it alongside their second full-length album In Echo.
The royalties chapter – in both physical and audio – of your book is free. Why was it important to make that chapter widely available?
Montoya: Our goal is to help people and to help our friends get their money. The book, we’re selling it — but at the same time, the most important chapter is the royalties chapter. Because it is money just sitting there. You’re not getting your money.
Kugel: It’s a gift. We spent so much time figuring this stuff our and here you go. Just follow these steps. It’s a pain in the butt to get your catalog together, but here’s a template for how to do it. It’s a really important thing to give away.
Montoya: We’re like royalty missionaries now. We figured it out. Now we have to help people with it. We couldn’t figure it out after 20 years.
Kugel: If you know all the nuances, it’s simple. It’s not very intuitive. That’s why we’re setting up workshops. We’re gonna go on tour and try to do workshops in every city that we play. It’s easy if you start as you’re starting.
In the book, you two cover a lot of aspects of the business: how to make your own merch, booking shows, contracts, managers, agents, publicists, mental health support, streaming, etc. An interesting chapter that isn’t covered a lot is touring etiquette.
Kugel: [Our musician friends are] really excited about green room etiquette — because everyone has a nightmare story of taking bands on tour and they are really nice people, but they did this and this and we’re never working with them again.
Montoya: There’s nowhere to [read about] like, “Hey, maybe you should leave people alone before they play.” A lot of [young musicians] destroy their careers before they get started because they suck to tour with.
Kugel: They burn bridges. We’ve all burned bridges by not understanding. There are standard things that we don’t get taught as musicians — like, “be on time.” That’s a basic thing that everyone else in the world understands expect for musicians.
Your new album In Echo is out today. How do you feel it differs from your 2020 self-titled Soft Palms debut?
Kugel: It has a bit more energy where the other ones were really chill. The other record was made in 2019 and a lot has happened since then. The last one, I was like, “I want to give the world a mental hug” and this one I was like, “What the f—k is really going on”?
You both come to this project from other bands. How do you work and create as a duo?
Kugel: I went from being [in] a three piece to a two-piece. This one, we wrote the whole thing together. The last one, we were figuring it out. Figuring out what we sounded like together after being in other projects. We played a bunch of shows and I honed it in.
In Echo tackles themes of surveillance, over-stimulation, over-saturation and how you’re coping with the current political climate, while your book is a very measured approach to today’s condition. Was that a purposeful juxtaposition?
Kugel: The book is a reaction to that because it is taking action. It is doing something physical in response to madness. Making the record is explaining through poetry.
Montoya: The book is to give people power and get their autonomy. By not knowing how to do things, you’re becoming helpless. That’s not going to get any better. You should understand how to change this energy to do something positive with it.
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