A couple of music industry questions (for the pros)

Hi folks,
I’m hoping that maybe some folks that are making a living in the music industry could answer a couple specific questions. I am a professional musician who has been making my living 100% in the (live music) industry for the last 10 years-and I’ve been a musician for 28 years. I have several projects under different names, and I’m really interested in a few quite different styles of music-ranging from traditional world music, to ambient modular synth music, to psytrance and progressive trance. So while I have extensive experience in gigging, touring, etc-I am quite new to the industry of electronic music production. I know hundreds of musicians, but I don’t personally know anyone that is making a living in the electronic dance music world, so I need to learn the ropes. Here are my questions:

  1. How do you navigate the industry if you are in to a few different styles of music? From what I can tell, record labels are very genre specific, and even fans have expectations that a producer makes one style of music. There are a few exceptions: Aphex Twin does lot’s of different styles, and then on the flip side Jon Gooch has Feed Me and Spor that are different styles. So what are your thoughts on different approaches if you are wanting to produce different styles of music?

  2. If you were to guess-how many hours do you spend when working on a track? This may sound like a silly question, but I’m genuinely curious. I find my production process to be 90% just sitting down and doing the work and 10% creativity. But I find that it takes me three or four weeks to finish a track because of other constraints-rehearsals, gigs, etc. I’d love to hear how much time the real pros actually take to finish a track from start to finish and how many hours a day they work on songs. I find that I get pretty fried after about 4 hours of working on one song and I need to move on to other things.

I’m excited to hear your thoughts!