Still with me? Still want to be a rock musician? Actually, this won’t be so bad-remember a couple of columns back when I promised to talk about “publishing: a way for you to make money”? Well, I digressed and got all philosophical on you last month, but, finally, here it is. You may have heard your grandparents talk about the days when the whole family would gather around the radio at night-which is strange enough in itself-but did you ever wonder what people did before that? They made music. That’s right, in the years leading up to the popularization of the phonograph in the 1890’s and the radio in the 1920’s, many people played instruments purely to have something to do-unless you were a concert violinist or played piano in a saloon or something, playing was considered to be more of a hobby than an artistic skill. Almost every city block had its own little string-and-jug band, everybody who could afford it had a piano in the parlor, and people would have little “music parties” where they’d get together to sing the popular songs of the day. The publishing business retains its name from these times: songwriters sold their tunes […]