Ari Solotoff

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Hari Solotoff is a lawyer with the Portland firm Bernstein Schorr, who has a background in nonprofits and and the music industry. Before becoming an attorney, he was the youngest executive director of the Portland Symphony Orchestra. Thanks for coming in today.

Ari Solotoff:

Delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Now am I right in understanding that you came to Maine for the Portland Symphony Orchestra job?

Ari Solotoff:

Yeah, that's exactly right. In 2006 I interviewed and was recruited to come serve as the Symphony's next executive director and I was 26 at the time and had only been to Maine once before when I was here for music camp in Weston, Vermont when I was 10 years old at a camp called Encore Coda, which still exists and came back here to Maine, interviewed and was offered the job. Was delighted to come.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So where are you originally from?

Ari Solotoff:

I grew up in New York on Long island in Great Neck, and then When I was 15 I moved to California to Orange County. So from New York City to Surf City is what I used to say to folks. I feel I can identify with both coasts in many respects.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How does one at the age of 26 become the executive director of a major symphony orchestra?

Ari Solotoff:

Well, I became interested in music when I was about five, both My parents are music teachers, so you could say that it was pretty much destined that I was going to have some connection to the music industry. I started out on the piano and then started playing the oboe, a symphonic music instrument, when I was 10. Went on to play in a number of different youth orchestras. Which was really my community, was the orchestra and symphonic setting. It's where I made so many of my great friends and connections through through to today. When I was in college at UC Berkeley, I interned at the San Francisco Symphony in their public relations department. So I got started clipping articles about the San Francisco Symphony back before Google News existed. And so I did clip out all the stories and paste them up and turn them into press packets that we then gave to the board and to the senior administration. But I had this amazing entry point into the other side of how music gets made, and that's really the business side and the administration side. So I found out that there was another way to be involved in music, and that was orchestra management. I went through an orchestra management fellowship program. There's only one in the country that exists that trains future executive directors of orchestras. I was 22 at the time and went to the Aspen Music Festival and the Pacific Symphony in Orange County, California, the Dayton Philharmonic in Dayton, Ohio, and then the Pittsburgh Symphony. So all in one year, I saw major symphony orchestras to small orchestras to summer music festivals. And then I landed my first job as executive director of the Pensacola Symphony Orchestra in Pensacola, Florida. I was 23 at the time, and the total budget for the orchestra was $752,000 a year. I'll never forget that, because you could see every dollar come in and every dollar go out. And it was amazing. We had a staff of two and a half. And so I really learned firsthand what it takes to put on a string of in a series of concerts and to attend to an audience and to support musicians. And that really was a great start in the music industry, at least the classical music industry for me. So I grew from there. And the way to move up in this symphonic music world is to move to a different city, because the larger the city, the larger the symphony orchestra. So you sort of have more complex and interesting questions and challenges and a much larger artistic footprint based on the size of the budget. So that's how I came to it. It was a unique experience, but really came about because of that internship at the San Francisco Symphony.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Do you still play the oboe?

Ari Solotoff:

No, I don't play the oboe anymore. I've picked up the piano again. That was My original instrument, oboe's not one of those instruments that you have fun improving around on. It's so technical that if I were to pick it up today, I would probably be so frustrated with my capability that it wouldn't be much fun. But I still stay connected to music in other ways and have since learned gone back to the piano. I'm starting to get into electronic music production, which is really interesting to me. And of course I go to as many concerts as I possibly can, so.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And somewhere along the way you decided to go to law school.

Ari Solotoff:

Yeah. So back in. Well, after Portland, I went on to become the executive vice president of the Philadelphia Orchestra and went through an amazingly interesting complex bankruptcy process with that organization. We really. To sort of make a long story short, the orchestra kept operating and playing through a very complex legal process that kept the lights on. And so I had the opportunity to work with an amazing group of attorneys who I think were absolutely central to keeping this $45 million, 120 year old organization alive and restructuring and using a law to really bring new life to the organization. And so I saw the power and the incredible role that a legal skill set can play in working with a creative industry and the music industry and in that case the orchestra. But had been thinking about going back to law school for some time because it's always been on my mind as I read through artist contracts and rental agreements and media deals. You know, there's more to this story here and I want to learn more about it. And I felt like the best way to dig into that those curiosities was to go and get a law degree. And so I came back to Maine. We wanted to come back here. We love it here. We wanted to raise our family here. Right after Philadelphia, we gave birth, or my wife gave birth to our son who's now 6, and we wanted to raise William here. And at the same time this was a great place to go get a law degree at the University of Maine School of Law, knowing that this is a phenomenal legal community to root yourself in. So went back and got my law degree and then joined Bernstein Shore, where I've been able to focus on music and copyright law and intellectual property. And that's been an amazing experience of putting together this, all of these threads as we were saying that pull your interests together and allow you to serve artists and creatives in a whole new way.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I love what you're talking about because we often don't think about all the different pieces that enable music and the arts to, to exist and to thrive, really, it's not as simple as guy gets a guitar, goes to a bar, guy or girl gets a guitar, goes to a bar, plays music, people pay. It's all good. I mean, there's a lot of layers. And especially now with the widespread distribution of music in so many different forms, trying to understand what all that means and keep the artists functioning, that's a much bigger deal than it ever once was.

Ari Solotoff:

I think it's profoundly changing as we speak. Literally, the role that a musician, a graphic designer, a photographer, a writer can play not only locally, but on a national and an international level because of the capabilities that he exist from a technological perspective, it's extraordinary. And so when you put that together, if you focus on the creativity, the fact that a musician is really their central and primary goal is to make great music, or a photographer to take great photography. The question is, what's the infrastructure that needs to be behind them so that they can do what they do best, but also earn a living while doing so and hopefully have an impact on their audience, on their community? Why would you go through that process if you weren't able to share your music or your art with your community and with your audience? So the question is, how do you build that infrastructure in a way that's going to not only sustain you now, but also help provide monetary compensation down the road when it comes time to either licensing your your work or entering into different types of arrangements that allow as many people as possible to see and hear your work. And so today, particularly with music, the fact that you can release your music from Portland, Maine and have it heard around the world is extraordinary. Whether it's through SoundCloud or through Spotify or Apple Music, the distribution capabilities are incredible. So once you've recognized that, it really changes the paradigm from what used to be really a label on top and really puts the artist on top and says, okay, who do you want on your team? Well, a lawyer is just one part of that team. There's a manager there. You might have a publicist, you might have a booking agent, you might have a marketing and priority component to it. And so, you know, every conversation that I have with an existing or a potential client in the creative space is who's on your team. And it starts there. And from there we can really think through the strategy. I mean, I think of a musician as a startup. You know, you really are. You're building a business, you're building a brand, you're building a distribution mechanism. You're taking your product and using you want to get it out to as many people as possible. So looking at it as a business is what excites me about the work. And I think for me, particularly in today's world, the possibilities are endless. In that respect,

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I imagine it would be very helpful to have background yourself as a musician, because I think there are different ways of thinking that often occur in different areas. So if you are familiar with a musician's way of thinking, and not all musicians are exactly the same, but there may be some patterns that you're familiar with, then maybe you can help interpret things in a way that makes more sense.

Ari Solotoff:

I think every project starts with a vision. What are you hoping you accomplish artistically? And then from there we can back into, well, what are the pieces you want to put in place? Who is this going to be delivered to as your audience? How do you hope that this is actually going to generate income for you? But it really starts with what are you trying to do artistically? And that definitely comes from understanding having, you know, played an instrument, having sat within an orchestra hall and thought through what it is to attract an audience to something that you're doing creatively. And so, yeah, absolutely. I love that part of it. It's the fun part is the going to the concerts and seeing the end product or seeing somebody's work on the wall as a photographer or writing in print. You know, that creative output is what we're working towards, and I definitely identify with it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's an interesting time to be creative because there are so many ways that we can be creative and immediately put our work out there. What I have noticed is that sometimes it's easy to believe that because it's easy to. To put the work out there. It's easy to be creative in the first place. I mean, I write for the magazines and it's a lot of work. I mean, to put 1600 words on a page or pages, it's an incredible amount of time spent, amount of creative energy. I think it's similar for musicians. I mean, what comes out is maybe a 15 second on the beginning or the end of a radio show that actually took some effort. But because it's so easy to have something put up on Instagram, Facebook, Soundcloud, sometimes we are discounting that in a way that maybe we didn't before. Would you agree?

Ari Solotoff:

Yeah, there's a. There. There's something of a value gap between the amount of time and work that goes into producing something that is artistically exciting, musically exciting, and then just something that anybody can produce in an Amateur setting. And so how do you distinguish between those? And I think it really is in the process and the being deliberate in really digging into the details of your craft. And you notice it, you can see it when a musician or a photographer or a writer has really gotten to the. The bottom of that particular creative question that inspired them in the first place. I love reading stories. I love watching how musicians do their work. There was a great article in the New York Times a couple weeks ago about the life of an indie artist and how are they succeeding today. And what you realize is that there's an incredible amount of patience involved in this process, that you might take weeks and weeks or months to put together an album, but just because you finished the album doesn't mean it's done. There's so much more activity, mixing, mastering that goes into that finished product before it's actually then released. And so I think there's a definite relationship between the amount of discipline and dedication that you put into really refining your musical craft and the depth and the quality of the output on the other end. And so, yeah, I couldn't agree more that it seems so easy and yet there's so much behind the scenes that goes into it. There's a great book that I read about a year ago called the Song Machine by John Seabrook. And it really unpacked all of what goes into what we now know of as the pop music industry today. And you realize how many writers, how many producers, how many different people are part of the process of hearing what we now think of as top 40 music today. Not all of it's necessarily great, but you see sort of the work behind it, and you realize, oh, my gosh, this is something that is worthwhile, it's of merit, and it has value. And if you put those three things together, I think that's something that musicians have a lot to be proud of.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I'm glad you've put a word, a phrase around it, the value gap, because I think that, I mean, that really defines a lot of what people struggle with. And I think about. I think it's probably still an issue now, but at one time it was a significant issue where music was being downloaded essentially illegally, and people were treating it as if it was essentially common property that they didn't have to pay for. And the idea that somebody would put so much work into something like a song that somebody else wouldn't even pay 99 cents for $1.29 or whatever it is now is kind of astounding. When I think about It.

Ari Solotoff:

That was a remarkable moment in. In music history. At the same time that Napster was prevalent, the recorded music industry had something like 735 million physical sales in the US and that was the zenith, if you will, of physical sales. Here we are, it's 18 years later. That was 2000. In the same week that Spotify announced that they were going public, Russ Solomon, who was. Was the founder of Tower Records, passed away. If you put those two things together and then on the same evening, Rita Marino gets up on the Oscar awards and talks about the universal language of music and what that means, you sort of see, oh my gosh, this is an incredible time in the music industry because suddenly people are seeing the value of paying for music. And so Spotify now has 70 million paid subscribers. That's a drop in the bucket of what could be paid for. But the other side of this is that we as a community have, I think, a responsibility to acknowledge that when musicians come into our venues, they should be compensated fairly for. For that work. And how do we value that? Well, we value that by looking at the fee structure and by thinking about, okay, like, look at all the people who came into your venue as a result of this musical act. If you're using music in your venue, are you paying for that music just like you would pay for any other resource? So I think, I think this is an interesting time. Because streaming is so prevalent, it is a capacity to compensate musicians more fairly, but there's still a gap there. It takes 252 streams to earn $1 of income. That's 252,000 streams to earn $1,000. So that's an incredible amount of work that needs to go into generating that kind of income. Which means that there's a lot more, I think, benefit to looking at live performance, touring, merchandise. You sort of see these other mechanisms by which musicians are branding themselves and earning an income. And I think that's part of the picture. The other part of the picture is really musicians as ambassadors for social causes. I think this is a particularly important time for us to look to music and musicians as a way to translate what's happening in the world. And we see that every time that there's a significant world event. We look to music as a form of helping us to understand what's happening.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Are there lessons from music that can be used in, say, the world of literature, writing, journalism, or the world of photography? Because as you're talking about supporting musicians and their livelihoods, I'm thinking about the number of times that I Go on to the New York Times Times website and read an article that clearly somebody put a lot of effort behind and somebody paid to have written. And I get so many views and then, you know, I have to subscribe. But I don't think we've quite figured it out. Or I think about the number of times somebody talks to one of our Maine Magazine photographers and is like, well, can you just give me those photos that you took and I'm going to use them on my website. And there was payment for that. There's effort and energy behind that.

Ari Solotoff:

Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But it still feels like we're in a place where not everybody recognizes that that's actually important to support.

Ari Solotoff:

Well, there's definitely steps that I think a writer and a photographer and a musician can take to protect their work, which I see that as like, the very first step. It's almost like, you know, if you build a house, you're not going to just let anybody in your house like you. You've taken a lot of time to design it and construct it. And so you want to take the steps that are necessary to protect that asset, that your photography or writing, that's an asset. We can't see it, we can't feel it, but it is very much a creative asset. And so the very first steps of. And I see all too often great work happening, and it's never registered with the copyright office, which is just like the easiest first step one can take to protect their work and to ensure that there will be value. Because it's that much easier when somebody, Right. Clicks on a photograph and downloads it and puts it up on another website or on their blog to say, no, I've actually taken steps to value my work and you should, too. So I think that's a common issue that we see a of lot. A lot for creatives is building copyright protection into their workflow. As you know, yes, you've taken all those steps to create your work. Well, just add one more. It's a $35 filing fee with a copyright office. And that really is. It's absolutely central to protecting your work. And I can see the difference between those artists who have been diligent about those things steps, the degree to which they're able to monetize their work, and the degree to which that ultimately becomes a pension from that for them, because they've taken those steps early on in their careers.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Intellectual property is a relatively young aspect of the legal field, and it seems like it's one that you really had to kind of hit the ground Running to keep up with. What are some of the current issues that are being dealt with within this area?

Ari Solotoff:

Well, I think one of the primary questions in music has been the issue of sampling and how do I acknowledge and reference somebody else's work as a musician without copying their work? And I think that's still being sorted out. I think we've learned a lot more, and musicians have learned a lot more about how to work with each other when it comes to using each other's work. And the licensing industry has changed dramatically. It's still in flux. It's still very difficult to find the rights holder when you're trying to use or engage with somebody else's work. There's not a universal platform for identifying the rights holders, so we still have a ways to go. Blockchain technology is going to be a big piece of how that evolves in the future where it will be possible for a rights holder to allow for a licensee to use their work. And every one of those different transactions will be registered in the universal blockchain. That is, we're literally at the nascent stage of that right now. And it's going to be fascinating to see how that changes. Changes in years to come. But I think IP as a whole has come a long way. You know, whether it be copyright protection or trademark protection, we really rely on source identification, which is what trademark protection is, and copyright to serve as the basis. I mean, every major movie production, every major commercial release of an. Of an album relies heavily on the ability to obtain copyright protection in that work. And so I think our job is to help lower the barriers to protecting your work and to make it easy and then to make it possible for there to be as many licenses and thoughtful tracking of that information based on who you're collaborating with. Because this is a world of collaboration. And so that's where creative, particularly musicians, I think, are so engaged with each other's work, we need to make that process really easy. So, yeah, it's an exciting time. You can kind of see the threads of this happening around the world and in ways in which media and technology are really converging right now in how we work with artists to support their work.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What do you think? What do you think the most important thing that you could say to an emerging musician is when it comes to any of the things that we're talking about, because I know that a lot of musicians, well, all musicians I've ever spoken to, have put a tremendous amount of effort into learning their craft. So that's the part of part one and now they meet you. What's the thing that you say do this first? You talked about copywriting. What else do they have to be thinking about?

Ari Solotoff:

Well, first and foremost, I'd say view yourself as the CEO of your own company and you are a business, you are a startup. And, and so as the CEO of Musician Company X, one of the very first questions that you ask yourself is, well, who do I want on my team? And you do that whether you're a startup business. I think the same is exactly true for a musician who's on your team and being really deliberate. I think all too often questions come from outside. Somebody might get a label offer from a label they've never heard of before. And it's so exciting that this label has shown an interest in you. And yet I think the very first question is, well, do I want them on my team? Is that the marketing, distribution channel that I want to work with? And so I would turn the question around and really say, how can you be deliberate about who do you want on your team? Because I think that's the most important question a musician or a creative, a photographer or writer can ask themselves in who they collaborate with and who they work with. And then from there, is there a process for really thinking through in the symphonic music world? We used to plan our seasons two and three years out. And so what's your plan for what your artistic output is going to be not just two months from now or six months from now, but a year from now or two years from now? Because the really exciting projects that are going to come about are going to come about because you've been working on them for some time. Then the legal piece and the business piece comes into play because then we really have something to bolster and to support because you have a strong vision for where you want to go artistically. And then we can put in place the systems, which is really where I feel I play the biggest role for helping to protect and monetize an artist's work.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Having talked about the circuitous root of your professional career, I know that it would have been impossible for you as a 22 year old to look forward and say, this is, this is where I'm going to be. I'm going to be an attorney with Bernstein Shur, specializing in this particular aspect of intellectual property. What would you say to people who are at that 22 year old stage? Who are they like music, but they've got some other interests. How does one even know which direction to go in to get the kind of experience they need to decide what their life is going to look like.

Ari Solotoff:

Well, I think so much in involves having an open heart and paying attention to the cues that life is throwing you in a way. I mean, you have certain interests that are either because of your upbringing or because of the people that you've interacted with in life. And you carry those interests forward. For me, that's always been music. It's led me in different directions. Even though the output may have been different, the central theme has been the same. And so I've held onto that as closely as I can. But I've also been open to this question of what am I missing? What more can I learn? Who's doing good work that I'm really drawn to? I've come across some amazing people along the way, mentors who helped me to see that something else was possible. And so being open to who those people are who resonate with you as an individual. What values do they carry? How do they handle themselves? How do they collaborate with others? I think it's the power's in the question and less so in the answer. And so following that question along is certainly what's led me to where I am today. I never would have predicted that growing up on Long Island I would end up in Portland, Maine as a music and IP attorney.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I love that answer. That's a great answer. I've been speaking with Ari Solotov, who is a lawyer with the Portland firm Bernstein Shore, who has a background in nonprofits and the music industry. It's really been great to have this conversation with you and keep up the good work.

Ari Solotoff:

Thank you. This has been really fun.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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