Successful Musicians Podcast – Episode #33: Balancing Passion and Family: Tony Parlapiano’s Journey to Success

Successful Musicians Podcast Episode 33

Interviewee: Tony Parlapiano

Interviewer: Jason Tonioli

Hey, this is Jason Tonioli. I’m a piano player that grew up believing it wasn’t possible to earn a living and support a family with music. I’ve proven that idea was wrong, and I’ve met hundreds of other people who have found success with their music. This podcast features stories of musicians who have found their own personal version of success and fulfillment in both music and life. This podcast is meant to inspire musicians and help them believe in their abilities and motivate them to share their talents with others. This is the Successful Musicians Podcast.

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Jason: Welcome to the podcast today. This is Jason, and I have a special guest with me today. His name is Tony Parlapiano. Tony, that’s Italian for speaking softly, correct?

Tony: Yeah, Italian for speaking softly, that’s right.

Jason: Awesome. Tony has been teaching piano lessons for over 20 years. He supported his family with teaching piano lessons, so that is the traditional path. Just recently about a year ago, you pretty much took a bomb and blew that whole thing up and blew the house up, almost. If you call it that house, it was your piano teaching, and you’ve got a whole new method which I think is awesome. I’m excited to have you share that story with others.

Tony: Thanks, man. I did not really understand the risk involved when I made that move. I thought I was solving a whole bunch of problems for my clients, and in turn, I created a whole bunch for myself.

Jason: Well, let’s rewind back. I think to understand where you’re at today, this is going to help a lot of musicians out there, but let’s rewind all the way back to how you got started with piano and just music in general and share a little bit about your story with us.

Tony: Sure. Well, I was a little late to the piano. I grew up in a family. I was the youngest of nine children. My siblings were all considerably older than me, but they all had played an instrument. When I was growing up, there were a lot of instruments around the house. I went through a public school band program, changing around in a few different instruments. Right in seventh grade, we had this awesome band director. If you would have asked me on the second day of seventh grade, “What would you want to do with the rest of your life? I would have pointed to the band director and said, “I want that guy’s job.” I’ve just never seen somebody so passionate on the clock at their job. From that point on, music really became the focus of my life. My brother, who’s 22 years older than I am, taught me how to play a little bass guitar and I would play in his little duo. He had a guitar duo, so I’d play with them.

Then I went to college thinking I was going to become a high school band director or something in that field. I was in a jazz improvisation class and there was no piano player in that class. It felt like a door opened and I walked through it, and I got really into the piano. From that point on, I spent the following summer desperately trying to catch up to everybody who had been playing since they were about six and convincing the head of the department that it was a good idea to let someone who just started playing piano pursue this as their career from here and out.

Jason: Nice. So, did you go in to be a piano major then? You graduated in that field?

Tony: Well, I started with music education and then when I decided that that wasn’t the path I wanted to go on, I started at a community college. When I finished there, I moved to Westfield State University and finished out what’s called A Jazz Studies Program which isn’t music education. It’s not as rigorous as a performance degree. It’s just a general music degree. I’m not even sure what I could really do with it today. I just knew from that point on I had gotten into playing with bands. I had an opportunity to start teaching not that long after I started playing piano, but again, I had that background in music. So, I knew that I just wanted to get through college and not upset my parents too much. I just wanted to complete a degree and that’s what ended up happening there.

Jason: Okay, got it. So, you finished up the degree, and then what?

Tony: Yeah, I finished up the degree. While I was in my senior year, I was working for a local mom and a pop music shop. I was selling guitars and keyboards and they opened up a new location, and I had the opportunity to be the piano teacher at that location. That’s how I built up my studio initially. I was teaching there for a few days. I had a few private students already. I was teaching like six days a week, three days at the store, and they filled up my schedule and then I had three days’ worth of travel teaching. That’s how I started initially. That became a full-time gig. Prior to that, I was working like high school jobs, working for the local sports card, comic book shop, the video game store and things like that. I really went from just your general kid jobs to right into piano teaching. This has really been the only profession that I’ve ever known.

Jason: The piano teaching is really… That was what you decided as you finished college. That’s what you wanted to be in and you got really good at that. If you were in it for 20 years, you must have been a pretty good teacher.

Tony: Well, you know what happened? I was working at that local mom and pop music shop. I decided I wanted to start teaching and I started pursuing that more full-time. The shop got bought out by a bigger company and I was approached by them to become a store manager at one point. They were like, “We’d love to have you as a store manager. The previous owner said you were great.” At the time, I was like, “Oh, man, do I really want to buy a bunch of quarter zip sweaters and come in every day and talk band instruments and sell music?” At the time, it seemed like it was a good offer because I was still in school and it was a decent salary, but I was really into teaching, and I was starting to build my client base. At that time, I went with what felt like a riskier option, but it turns out I felt way more secure with being self-employed and having all of these clients knowing that I might lose a couple of clients, but I can gain a couple more, but I don’t have one person in control of whether I have an income or not.

That’s how it happened. I was faced with the choice and once again, I just went with what felt right at the time. I just loved teaching so much. Like I said, I knew I wanted to do that from the first day in seventh grade. I just didn’t know it was going to be a piano teacher. I thought I was going to be a band director. As soon as I started playing piano, I just fell in love with it. And that’s it. The next 20 years have been working with students. A lot of those students that I worked with, they were with me for at least 10 years. I had incredible retention. Almost every student that started with me before the age of 10 continued at least until the day they graduated high school and since 2011, I’ve been teaching online. Since 2011, a lot of those students when they graduate high school, they continue their lessons online. I’ve been teaching online way before that whole pandemic thing.

Jason: I guess how many students or how many hours a week were you spending teaching? That’s a lot of lessons in order to pay the bills and support my family.

Tony: I think at the peak I had 52 appointments on the calendar each week. It was a mix of half hour appointments, 45 minutes appointments. I was teaching students from Seattle Washington to Sydney Australia, so I’m working with a 17-hour time zone space, and I’ve got a very accommodating personality. So, my schedule is a little all over the place.

Jason: It makes things harder when you have kids or family, right?

Tony: 100%.

Jason: Wow. You did that for about 20 years and just recently, you had some ideas come in. Talk a little bit about how you got to the point where you decided, “Hey, I’m not going to teach lessons anymore in the same way.”

Tony: Sure. Well, I will say that the 20-year trajectory there, I started off teaching at that store and then I was doing some travel teaching and that became my main gig – the travel teaching. I was working with a lot of affluent families, and I was able to charge a premium for that service. I know a lot of people who do travel teaching, they’re like, “Oh, we’ll charge it like $5 or whatever for gas.”, and I was like, “No, no, no, no, no. This is an incredible service that you’re providing, and people are so happy to pay you double to triple what the average rate is just so they don’t have to leave their house.” I was able to make a pretty good living with travel teaching and I really enjoyed that because I love driving. I love being in my car and I just had great clients. 

It was really in 2020 when I went online. That’s when the traveling went away, and I had all this availability in my schedule. I also had all this experience with teaching online because I’d been doing it since 2011. Some of the local community music schools dropped the ball. A lot of people were inexperienced with teaching online, so that’s how my schedule got filled up to 52 people. It was fine during that time period because everybody was home, nobody was really canceling lessons, nobody had sports, just piano. I had people asking, “Can we take two piano lessons a week?” Just because they had nothing else really going on. 

Then last year when Spring Sports came in and everything was opening back up, I started just getting a ton of text messages from parents needing to reschedule, “Oh, we have a conflict. I’m like, “This is not fun.” I just want to teach music. I feel like I’m going through all of these efforts to just get an appointment on the calendar or to reschedule things. Then it was my own fault because of my accommodating personality. I made it seem very easy. Oh, yeah, no problem. I’ll meet with you then. Change the time, no worries. I was never very strict with my policy once I was doing online lessons. With travel teaching, yes, that was strict. You got an appointment. If you can’t make it, oh, well, we’ll see you next week because I’m only in your area once a week.

When I went online, everything went relaxed. It served me well because that last quarter or the first quarter of last year was the best quarter I’d ever had. Then I could feel the turn a little bit, and I felt the change in the economy, and I felt the inflation and I was like, “Hey, I just went out with my kids and with some friends. It was like the night was on me.” 

At the end of the night, I was like, “Man, I almost spent $300 to entertain my family and some friends for something that probably would have been 150 bucks a few years ago.” So, I was like, I didn’t want to go back to tightening my policy. I’ll raise my rates again. It’s like, over and over for 20 years, that’s how I’ve always dealt with inflation and things like that. It’s just okay, I guess I’ll raise my rates a little bit. I was tired of that so that’s when I came up with this new model, which, as I mentioned, I thought was going to be solving a lot of problems because rather than having individual private lessons and meeting with people individually, I created a schedule of live classes. The idea was to charge people one fee, and for that fee, they could attend as many live classes as they wished. It would be very easy to reschedule themselves like, “Hey, you got a soccer game on Thursday? Don’t worry about it. I have classes on Friday. Just come Friday. You don’t have to even tell me about it. Just here’s the schedule. Come when you can think.” That’s how that idea was born because I was just tired of not seeing sunsets with my kids. I just wanted to go from having all these individual private lessons to a schedule of opportunities and just say, “Okay, everybody’s welcome.” Of course, it was set up with levels and tiers and things like that. The vision was very clear in my mind at the time, but it also wasn’t really visible to my clients. I didn’t have a website up there where they could see the vision and I think I confused a lot of them in the process.

Jason: Interesting. As you switched over to that model, my guess is you had a lot of these people that were used to the one-on-one, and the new model wasn’t necessarily tailoring to that. They probably weren’t your ideal client anymore at all then, right?

Tony: That’s part of it, yeah. They definitely were used to their one-on-one time and being in a class with other students. Some of them were very shy to talk. I love this idea of community and bringing people together and sharing learning experiences and doing things together. I was pairing this at the time with the whole online community. In addition to the live classes, we had this online community where they could talk, and we could have recorded classes for them to check out. It was definitely a big shift. My intention was never to entirely replace private lessons but to give them this as my half of the circle. This is the education that I think everybody needs. If you want, you can still schedule a private lesson, but you probably won’t need one every single week so that they could supplement with private lessons for their own individual interests and projects, incorporating those in the group program. That was the idea that I had when I first started it.

Jason: My guess is where you came from that jazz background, you were probably more into the lead sheets and chords unlike the traditional when you’re six years old, you start learning to read classical music. My guess is your approach is probably very different from your very traditional regimented approach. You got to play Beethoven and you got to follow this path.

Tony: That’s why it works because when I tell people about this, they’re like, “How do you make that work? You have students at all different levels.” When you have a truly creative approach… It’s hard to say that now because everybody takes that word. Everybody thinks everything that they’re doing is super creative, but this is really original. I tell people, 14:36 “If you haven’t heard it from me, you haven’t heard it before. This is a unique presentation, but there’s nothing strange or weird here. These are all observations I’ve made over the last 20 years. It’s such an organic process. If you’ve ever met a musician who is self-taught and they’re just incredible at what they do and they can just play music, it’s as easy to play as it is to listen to. They hear it, they can play it. A lot of those musicians will tell you, I don’t read music and I don’t understand theory and all that. It’s not that they don’t understand it. They just don’t understand the standard language, or they don’t read the standard notation. They don’t have all the proper vocabulary, but they’ve all learned through listening. That’s how it happens.” 

If you talk to them, they have a very detailed way of how they find the sounds that they’re looking for on the instrument. What I do is I try to preserve that organic process, but at the same time put it into a structure where they could thrive in any environment. I have a background in jazz. I have a little bit of tradition and I have friends that I talk with all the time. I also am very focused on this pop rock style of music, which requires a different framework. The way that chords and things behave in pop styles of music is very different from how they behave in classical or in jazz. I’m able to move between those three different types of frameworks. It’s very creative and improvisation. That’s a huge focus of what we do. The other one is learning by listening. 

When you hear something on the radio, you know what it is. You don’t need a chord chart. That’s what a lot of people think. They say, “Well, well, let’s go get a chord chart.” I’m like, “That’s like looking up the answers in the back of the book. You’ve just lost the discovery process. That’s a cool skill to have and you want it, but it’s still interference.” It’s not that much different than decoding sheet music. It’s a little bit because you’re actually accessing your mind and your brain, and you have to know stuff to be able to do it but at the same time, it can be somewhat, I don’t want to say ‘limiting’, but if you’re not doing the creativity and improvisation and really approaching the piano through exploration and discovery and making your own connections, it’s hard to find your own sound.

Jason: Right. Well, I came up with that classical route where you played sheet music. I had the opportunity to help out one time with the jazz band and I had to have that sheet music if I’m going to play this thing. If you tried to take that away from me, I was lost. I mean, it will just be a complete shutdown. It was partly because I felt like I couldn’t do it without the music because I didn’t know it was even possible. Nobody had ever explained to me what a fake book was or record sheets. YouTube didn’t really exist to even get the colored notes to find your way. I tell my kids, I’m like, “Yeah, we use those.” Even in high school, nobody had cell phones. It was right as I was graduating when cell phones came around. Good times, but definitely there’s some faster ways and easier paths that I could have gone down with my music that would have made… I’d be a much better musician had I known about those tools and believed that I could go without a beat in front of me.

Tony: Well, a lot of teachers don’t have that skill themselves, so it’s hard for them to pass it on. That’s the unfortunate outcome for somebody who only accesses music from the outside. If they always rely on something external, they need instructions to be able to produce music. You have to approach it from the inside out. I understand. It’s sad to me because I see it’s unique a little bit to piano lessons. I see people who study guitar who have taken six months, a year’s worth of guitar lessons, and 20 years later they’re like, “Hey, man, I play a little guitar.” They know their chords. They can sit down and jam, look at a little chord sheet, and they remember those shapes and how to play. 

I think a lot of it has to do with the way that those lessons are generally the structure of those lessons. Usually, you’re sat across from your teacher. You’re both holding an instrument. You’re playing together at the same time. A lot of times you’re not entirely focused on a book. You don’t have your head buried in a map the whole time. With piano, I’ve just seen so many adults who say, “Well, I used to play piano. Well, why did you used to play piano? Well, I played for a long time, but guess what? The day they take piano lessons for 10 years and the day they stop taking lessons is the day they stop playing piano.”

Sad. It’s really sad because it doesn’t take that long. 19:48 “It’s just a different approach that needs to be included. Not replace, I’m not talking about replacing sheet music. I think the standard notation exists for a very good reason but when I show up to a rehearsal with all my friends, we all show up with our song books. If you look at all of our notes, we all have our own way of writing down what we need to know to play the songs. We’re going into the studio, we all have our own notes. What does that mean? You got to talk to each other to figure it out. That’s why standard notation exists. If you learn standard notation or a way to standardize a chord chart or a chord symbol, well now, if we all agree to that standard, then we can convert our crazy little notes and charts into something that everyone can understand. Understand that when I’m saying this, although my focus is on creativity, improvisation, learning by listening, understanding, reading is also very important to me, but I approach it through writing. We’re going to learn how to write. If you can learn how to write, you’ll know how to read.”

Jason: Interesting. I’m sure you have several stories of people that have been successful. As you’ve done this for 20 plus years now, and now you’re offering these group lessons where people can pop in anytime, they’re live, so it’s still the same, but you’ve got other people in there. What would you say is the biggest difference and feedback that you get from students that are attending, are they saying that they’re learning faster? Do they appreciate being able to hear different people and learn from their mistakes? With the structure you’re doing, what would you say is working and not working, maybe?

Tony: I really think all of it’s working now. There were a lot of things that were not working that have been fixed. I’m going to look back on this first year and have a good story about it. That first year was a circus. It was filled with learning experiences, but there’s nobody out there that’s doing a program like this. I really only had the opportunity to learn from my own mistakes. Still learning and improving but the good news is that the conversations have changed where students used to say, “I’m confused, I don’t get it.” Now people are like, “I can’t believe how much opportunity I have here at such an accessible rate.”, which is exactly what I wanted when I created this. 

I see teachers around there bragging about how much they can charge for a private lesson. I charge $200. To me, I was just like, that’s cool but I really wanted to go the other direction. I wanted people to be like, I can’t believe how much I can offer somebody at such an accessible rate and to be able to serve a lot of people. What I see is we have people using the program very differently. Some people really love our live classes. We have 50 live classes and no joke, people attend 10 to 14 classes every week. It’s like they are immersed in a college experience. It’s like going to a new country. They’re just immersing themselves in this language and they’re just seeing the benefits from it and so you can’t not get a whole lot better by putting in that much effort. 

We have other people in the program that go… They hardly ever come to our live classes. They work off all our recorded content. We have a lot of recorded material, and they work through those. We have about at least five classes that get recorded every week. Then there’s a lot of conversations happening on Discord. 

The big thing where people are seeing the most progress is in how I really tell them what’s helped me the most because I’m not a person who spent my whole life spending hours a day in a practice room. I don’t sit around playing things in all 12 keys and practicing what other people tell me to do. The whole point of learning by listening is that you can be learning all the time whenever you’re listening to music. The improvements don’t only occur when you’re sitting at your instrument, when you’re trying to read sheet music, or when you’re physically doing exercises on the piano. It happens all the time when you’re listening and making connections. I go for a walk, I listen to a song, I come home, and I play it because I’ve been listening to it, and I play every day. It’s not a lot, but I play every day and I record myself every day. That’s what I encourage my students to do. Everyone on our server has a private locker where they can submit recordings. We try to get them excited about the idea of producing what I call A Campfire-Inspired Recording every day. Campfire is the way we introduce creativity and improvisation. We have a title called a Campfire Challenge that we put them through. The whole idea is that they produce daily recordings. You make the instrument part of the rhythm of your life. It’s not something that you just go to occasionally. It’s like you make the time, you carve the time out to do it. When they do that daily, they immediately see the benefits.

When they know that they can share it with others and I’m out there sharing my recordings on the server, I think they’re all benefiting in different ways in their own ways. They’re all finding their way to utilize the program. It’s very flexible because it’s one price and they get all those live classes, they get the online community, and they get the live classes. They can choose how they want to extract the value. 

Jason: Yeah! If you could rewind the clock back, let’s say 20 years and you could be in front of a class, let’s say you were there and you got other kids there, especially other people who are thinking, “Maybe I want to do music, maybe I don’t.” They may have had parents that said, “Hey, you can’t make a living with music, so you need to go be an attorney or a doctor or whatever.” What advice would you have for that group in that room?

Tony: It’s a great question. The good news is, at least for myself, I don’t have any regrets about the path that I’ve taken, but I probably would have liked the advice that you were offering me before we started this call, which you were telling me about some great books and things that have served you really well. I wish I guess I had taken a little bit more interest in optimizing my business. I really love every part of the path that has brought me to where I am. It’s been challenging because as a musician, you often lead a very complicated life. It’s very challenging to make your living doing just one thing. A lot of musicians will do it. They’ll play, they’ll teach a little. There’s a lot of different ways musicians make money. For me, teaching has always been at least 80 % of it. I’ll say that I wish I had gotten a little bit more education around business and how to set up things to just streamline that because I feel like I could have had a lot more time with my children if I had done that, if I had been better at setting boundaries.

In the end, I count it all joy because I’m really here. Even now, where this last year has been very challenging, it’s really put a lot of things into perspective for me. I used to think about success as well. “Did I earn more income this month than I earned last month?” When I got to that point last year where the first quarter was the best quarter I’d ever had, the income felt good, but I don’t want to work this hard to get it. I guess I’m glad I learned that lesson now. I wish I’d learned it at least 10 years earlier because that’s when my children were born. I feel like I missed out on opportunities to spend time with them. I don’t know that there’s been any real total blunders where I’m like, “Man, I really screwed that up.”

Jason: You talked about measuring success. The name of the podcast is Successful Musician and I find it fascinating how that definition is different almost for every single person. I’m just curious, when you hear a successful musician, what does that mean to you?

Tony: It is, you can make a living doing what you love and on your own terms, not feeling that your clients own you. I know a lot of people in this profession feel like they’re scared to lose a client. They will accommodate way beyond what is reasonable. They will work seven days a week. They’ll try to take on 70 students. They’ll compromise everything just to avoid having to have a nine to five job. There’s that joke of, as an entrepreneur, you get to pick any 16 hours a day that you want to work or whatever. 

For me, I’m on the eternal quest for balance, and I just want to be able to support my family doing what I love. The most important part for me is being there for my children and that’s really what this whole venture has been. It taught me. Now I’m okay because now I’ve solved all of the things that were troubling me before. The only thing left I have to figure out is the income portion. I’ve got the structure built in and I’ve been up for the challenge, the learning experience. 

In March, we signed up for the on 10 new students. Signed on another one just before this call. It’s nice to see the wheels in motion and it’s coming ahead. I think now that I’m talking through this a little bit 31:04 understanding the risk, you might not always see it at the beginning, but if you have a really great idea or something and you’re just worried about how your clients are going to respond to it. Over my 20 years in teaching, there’s probably been three or four different decisions that I’ve had to make, changes that I’ve made where I’ve lost nights of sleep thinking about it, worrying like, “Oh, if I do this, I’m going to lose half my clients”. The funny thing was this was the only move that I ever made that I didn’t think that that was going to happen. Every other one that I worried about was fine, really fine. You want to raise your rates? Cool. Cancelation policy? Fine. Nobody cared about any of that stuff. Then here I was, I was like, “Oh, everybody’s going to love this.” Then I realized, “No, they missed their private lessons with Tony.“

Talk with others, learn. But I don’t know. For me, right now, I’m determined. 32:04 I define success as I get to see sunsets with my kids and I’m still doing what I love and I’m seeing momentum. Every month there’s traction. There are people signing on, things headed in the right direction and through some of your helpful advice before, hopefully going to be accelerating that pretty soon.

Jason: It’s interesting as I talk to dozens and dozens of people about what this success is, I think sometimes in our minds we think, “Okay, I’m going to set that goal.” When you achieve that goal, a lot of times you hit it and you’re like, “Yes, I did it.” Maybe you last all of five to 10 minutes, and then now what? Honestly, I think what a lot of us are actually probably… All of us should shoot for how you find that fulfillment and taking time to watch, enjoy the sunset with your kids, those things that actually matter most versus maybe a plaque or something that’s on the wall. It feels really good when you get it, but the fulfillment doesn’t come from that medal or award or trophy that you win. I think one of the things that I’ve seen over and over again, bubble to the surface is, when you can reach a point where you’re serving others, that’s where a lot of the fulfillment tends to come. You talked about the money goal. I think that the more you can serve and give, it’ll give you that fulfillment.

Just like you were saying, it wasn’t really for the money. It was cool that you had your best month ever, but it was more about helping more and more people where you were finding that happiness and fulfillment from. I think in watching that growth and contribution seem to be one of the only paths I’ve seen, at least in my career and my life, in order to really get to that fulfillment level is, a lot of times you’ve got to go through something really difficult where you grow. Like you’re talking about, it was uncomfortable but in doing that super uncomfortable thing, the growth that you had was 100 times more than had you just continued on what you’ve been doing for the last 20 years. You were having some success and fulfillment, but the growth that you’ve had over the last year, I bet you feel like you’ve grown more in one year than maybe in the last 20 with all of the things you’ve had, right?

Tony: 100%. I’ll also say, as you were saying that I think for many teachers, one of the best forms of currency is appreciation. I didn’t really feel like I had that a year ago when I was teaching individual private lessons. Now in a program that requires students to be a bit self-directed, led by their interests, and they really understand the intention behind what I’m doing. Every day, I get notes of appreciation. That for me, I think for any teacher, just seeing their progress, hearing them be proud of what they’re doing, that’s going to snowball. It’s just going to keep getting better and better.

Jason: If you look at just the teaching profession, whether it’s piano or even just a teacher in school, I think a lot of what motivates the teacher in most of these individuals is they want to make a contribution. They want to give back. I think they find that fulfillment in contributing. I think it’ll suck the life out of you if you don’t feel appreciated. I think that’s one of the biggest reasons. One, salaries obviously need to be good, but I don’t think the money is why any teacher went into their profession. They wanted to contribute to society or make a change for the better because probably somebody did that for them. 

If you think about it, that growth and contribution, when you grow, a good human being always wants to give back, serve and contribute. That’s really the path to that fulfillment on this journey. We think we’re on this journey to make enough money to pay for the house and the kids, and all that, but it doesn’t really matter unless you can feel that. The success is in the fulfillment. It’s very rare, though, that I think that framework or roadmap sometimes hits us when we’re in our 20s and 30s. I think a lot of times you get to be that old wise sage up on the hill before you look back and you’re like, “Huh, that’s what it was.”

Hopefully, if you’re some 20 something person sitting in a class like you and I both were years ago, hopefully this fast track for those individuals to take the challenge to grow and not be afraid to take that risk and grow yourself because that’s the fast track to being really happy and fulfilled, I think.

Tony: I can’t improve on that, man. You said it.

Jason: Anyway, I know we’re out of time here Tony, but if people want to check out what you’re doing, I’ve looked at your site, it keeps changing in a great way. If they’re interested in learning more about what’s your system you’re doing or want to even take lessons or whatever, where should they go to find that? 

Tony: Yes. The website is popmatics.com. We’re making a few improvements, but it’s pretty well dialed in. We’re making a few improvements over the next few days, but everything’s there that you need to see and ways to contact us. So popmatics.com, that’s the place. 

Jason: Awesome. We’ll have that link in the show notes as well. If you’re listening to this podcast, it’ll be easy to come back and scroll down and you’ll be able to find that link as well. Tony, thank you so much. We need to absolutely do this again. This was a really fun interview. I appreciate you. I’ve learned a lot in just hearing your story and I always learn a lot about myself and talking with great people. Thank you! 

Tony: Likewise, man. Thank you so much for having me. 

Finding success and fulfillment in the music industry is possible. Looking forward to seeing you in our next episode.