Franky Benítez

With the Michael Jackson news feeding on a minute-by-minute basis, unless you can truly live under a rock, the world has seen a very interesting and fascinating story unwind on an extreme 24/7 level. As with any major story, whether we agree with the coverage or not, we can draw many lessons from it.

The v5 Group is a enterntainment packager for artists.

As a music entertainment packager, The v5 Group (part of the v5, LLC family), has watched with much interest the post-mortem (no pun intended) about artistic and financial control of the Jackson music empire, which is estimated in the billions. So, since the music business is crazy and irrational (that is a topic for another day, since the history of music marketing and distribution is amazing, so much ego, so much control), we are not surprised to see Joe Jackson (still alive?) and Al Sharpton (stop for a second and digest the fact that Sharpton is front and center here) are already trying to proclaim ownership of the MJ library.

Now, of course, we are not privy to MJ’s agreements and ownership details, but what we find relevant here is something we tell to all our artists: ALWAYS BE YOUR OWN CEO. That is, technology today has allowed a recording artist to achieve the very desirable goal of owning his/her own content.

For example, take the case of Fernando Varela, the Puerto Rican Pavarotti. Fernando has 10 years of music business experience (he has booked acts such as Dionne Warwick) and is the President of The v5 Group as well as FernandoVarela.com, which is a registered DBA (Doing Business As) part of v5, LLC.

What does this mean? In the end, Fernando is the final decision-maker on everything he does artistically, musically, and commercially. Because of this, we have pushed the social media plan for him and the results have been outstanding: A #1 Song on ITunes without a major record label. Stop to think about that for a minute, and it is all because of Twitter Love and Facebook, and a whole lotta of work. We are extremely proud of how social media has propelled Fernando Varela to stardom.

Are you an artist looking for help? A independent label that needs social media help? Feel free to connect with us here or follow us on Twitter. We can help you become a true CEO of your music, your content, and your money. Own you art and own your career. We can help.