Music Entrepreneur Walt Ribeiro on the Music Industry

Walt Ribeiro is a musical entrepreneur who is the founder of Fororchestra.com, a company dedicated to releasing orchestral arrangements of pop songs. His works have been recently featured on BBC Radio 1 and have seen tremendous popularity on the internet with his arrangement of Rebecca Black’s Friday. The video can be accessed here and many of his other arrangements are available through itunes. I was fortunate enough to talk to him about his work and his thoughts on the music business in 2011.

Mark: Tell me about your background in music and what got you interested in arranging pop songs for orchestra.

I started out as a jazz performance major on the guitar at the The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, but what got me interested in writing music was when I injured my hand and was unable to play for some time. I shifted my focus to music composition and really liked it. I then also got into more classical compositions and the orchestra. When I graduated from college I released an album of my self-composed orchestra pieces [This album can be purchased on cdbaby and is called I.I]. This piece was a failure so I then had the idea of arranging pieces for the orchestra– pieces that people like to hear, your everyday pop hits. This has been a great success and a lot of people are discovering these arrangements through youtube such as the arrangement I did for Rebecca Black’s Friday.

Mark: Tell me about your time as a guitar teacher or youtube – how did you use this platform as a business model or was it for fun?

When I graduated from college, there was something called ustream and youtube. No one had thought of making videos to teach music, so I thought it would be fun to do that and provide a weekly lesson to people teaching them basics of music theory and guitar. There was a huge response to my music lessons and that is when I became a youtube partner. As a youtube partner you get some of the revenue that youtube gets from the ads it runs on your video pages, so this is the business part of the music lessons. It started off as a fun project though.

Mark: Why did you stop making guitar lesson videos?

I could keep on doing guitar music lesson videos, but I realized I was spending so much time on editing video and less on the musical aspect of things. I didn’t want to continue doing something that was so time consuming in area that is not in line with my primary interests which comes down to the music. Therefore, I changed my direction and decided I would focus on writing music, something I was not able to do with the music lesson videos. I started Fororchestra.com my new company and have been arranging pop music into an orchestral format ever since.

Mark: Why orchestra format specifically as opposed to other formats that have more jazz influence since you have jazz training?

I could easily be arranging for big band and you could have Gaga’s Poker Face big band style. I just chose to arrange in an orchestral style, because that is the style that is most attractive to me at this point.

Mark: This is a burning question of mine. Are your tracks of real orchestra musicians or synths? I cannot tell.

All of my tracks are synths. The reason you can’t tell is because they are very realistic.

Mark: Yes I agree. I was very impressed.

It really took a lot of work to engineer and find the right instrument samples to get the sound I have right now. I had to go through a lot of music libraries finding the perfect sounds. I also constantly listen to my own music over and over so that I always find little flaws in the sound and tweak them so that the synths sound more realistic.

Mark: I think you have a major advantage in using extremely realistic synth sounds given the material you are working with. You have some syncopate, percussive lines that are common to pop music but are often hard to achieve in a real orchestra setting. Here you get the best of both worlds. You can create these percussive lines and at the same time have the lyrical, smooth sounds of an orchestra at the same time.

I totally agree with you. A lot of diehard classical traditionalists have criticized me for this– that this is not a fair representation of the orchestra. I disagree, as long as it works in the context of the music I am working with and as long as people enjoy it and I am able to create the necessary excitement in the music, I think this is a good way to go about performing my orchestral arrangements. It is not the real orchestra sound but it has its pros as you mentioned compared to a real orchestra.

Mark: How do you choose a song you feel is suitable for orchestration?

It really depends. Sometimes I go by audience feedback, sometimes I do what I think is interesting but it does not take off on the internet. For example, Rebecca Black’s Friday was an obvious choice since it had a huge presence on youtube. Maybe it can be a good song if we take out the horrible lyrics to what people term the worst song of the decade.

We then talked more generally about his thoughts on the music industry
Mark: What is the future of the music industry?

I think the future of the music industry does not lie with the big record companies. Now people can put stuff up on the internet and easily get noticed. You have services like Pandora and youtube that people use that will really play a big part in the future of music. It is also interesting to see that a lot of music nowadays is being given out for free and the revenue comes in from other places. Obviously I cannot do that with my music, because they are arrangements of pop songs. I have to pay royalties to the people who originally wrote the songs for every track I distribute to people, so I would be making losses if I were to give away the music for free.

Mark: What is the influence of social media like twitter and youtube?

I think services like twitter and youtube are very important in the future of music. In the old business model before these large scale digital outlets that distribute music in new ways, you had artists who had millions of fans. In the new music business model, you don’t get a million fans but you get a 1000 diehard family members who will support you to the end. So in the old you have many people who will be shallow fans (of course some will be more diehard than others) as opposed to a smaller group of more intense followers and friends.

Mark: Tell me your thoughts on services like Grooveshark and Spotify?

These essentially serve as digital radio services. Grooveshark– gamechanger, spotify– gamechanger. We are in a time now where there is a huge shift in how the music industry works. Grooveshark and Spotify are essentially allowing people to listen to music for free. This sort of exposure that Grooveshark and Spotify allows is very valuable. You have the tradeoff of increased exposure versus less exposure due to money constraints being a factor of what music people will buy. I think exposure is much more important these days.

Mark: One last question, what are you listening to right now?

I am listening to a French band called Justice. A lot of drum n bass tracks. I am digging the more European electronic stuff.

I have to say though, what takes up most of my listening time are my own tracks. I like to listen to them when I am on the subway and this way, I can always be monitoring what needs to improved and constantly tweaking the sound or the arrangement itself. This is why I have a really realistic sounding orchestra because I have spent so much time listening to each and every sound many times over.