The challenge of raising a rock star
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Kent and wife, Jennifer, have encouraged Harry to pursue his dream. But until it happens, he's attending community college, where he's studying sound engineering.

"An education is important and not just for the degree," Kent says. "There's a real learning aspect to just being in a college environment, so we're encouraging him to go on with college. If that doesn't happen, if he gets sidetracked by the opportunities in the music business, so be it. We're not going to deny him that."

Music for moderns
Peter Spellman, for one, believes your kid can be a star. As director of career development for Berklee College of Music in Boston, he spends his days helping budding musicians become better business people.

The good news is, thanks to the Internet and affordable recording technologies, the balance of power has shifted toward the musician and away from the recording industry. The bad news is, as a result, there's more competition than ever.

"I see a shift from the 'music' business to the 'musician' business," says Spellman. "We may not see a lot of millionaire artists in this new picture, but we'll be seeing more and more middle-class musicians making a sufficient living while still having full ownership rights to their creations."

Harry's timing, it turns out, is pretty good: The so-called "echo boomers" are just entering their 20s, prime clubbing age, and they're going to want to dance, dance, dance. Clubs, especially in college towns, remain the incubator for breakout bands, although live performance is by no means the only route to stardom these days.

"Today there are many artists who are creating success without doing any live performing at all," says Spellman. "Dance and electronica are huge, and they don't require any live performance whatsoever, just good production values, good mixing and arrangements, good desktop tools and connection to the distribution channels."

Longevity in the music business today is a question of hats, says Spellman: The more you can don, the better your chances of survival. As a drummer, songwriter and self-taught recording engineer, Harry is on the right track. Other musical hats that can increase your income stream include arranger, sound designer, scorer, music editor, jingle producer, educator, even music therapist. Corporations are increasingly developing their own proprietary music divisions as well, where Dilbert, strangely, is meeting Mick Jagger.

Spellman says the future for many original artists will lie outside the traditional music industry in niche markets, where the artist handles more of the tasks of promotion and distribution but keeps more of the profits as well. He says that by abandoning artist development in their rush to profits, the major record companies have overlooked the reason they were invented in the first place.