Other People's PocketsHe's produced and mixed records for Public Enemy, Ice Cube, Sonic Youth and others, but Nick Sansano doesn't blow his royalty checks on fancy cars. How did this music maker build a life in expensive NYC despite the ups and downs of his field (and despite the sometimes ruthless politics of being an NYU professor)?
Check out Nick Sansano in his band, Bronze Fondue.
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There's a little like clicking or fidgeting happening. I don't know if it's.
It might have been just me visiting with my pet. I'm a fidgetter and a doodler. I'm working on it. I'm working on.
My guest today has probably been in your years before and you don't even know it. Nick Sonsano is a Bronx born music producer and engineer who is part of the New York hip hop scenes. Starting in the late eighties and early nineties, he recorded in mixed records for Public Enemy, Ice Cube, Broad Bass, and run DMC. He also produced albums for Sonic Youth, Latigre, and many others, all the while trying to figure out how to afford life in New York City. He's now a professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at Tish School of the Arts at NYU, where he teaches the next generation of music industry professionals and sometimes steers them away from taking exorbitant loans to study music. Nick shared his financial secret sauce to having a house and family in New York City on a professor's salary, I might allow, and this is other people's pockets the show where I ask people about their money. So the questions we all have about how much other people make and how their finances work can be a little bit less of a mystery. So Nick, welcome to other people's pockets.
Thank you, happy to be here so far.
Where am I reaching you, by the way? Right now, I'm in.
My office, which is located in Brooklyn at the NYU Media, Technology and Arts Building in downtown Brooklyn.
Oh cool. So I'd love to hear a bit about where you come from. And I'm wondering if you can tell me any memories about your childhood that have anything to do with money.
A lot of my memories of childhood have to do with money and the discovery of the fact that we didn't have any and having it made you have more options about where you lived and what you can do. My grandparents, for the most part, or immigrants to New York City from southern Italy, and my father grew up in the Bronx and my mother grew up in East Harlem. And I would say that for all of my childhood we were firmly lower middle class, working class type of family, and there were definite restrictions to our mobility and access to things. But of course, as a child, you don't realize that the whole world isn't that way. You know, you think that you know, our restrictions are the restrictions of those around us as well, So you're not aware of your financial status as much as you are. Then when you get a bit older into your teen years.
Is there anything specific you can remember happening that made you aware of those financial boundaries?
I think like where people lived and how they lived, and you know, seeing the homes of other people that I maybe went to high school with. I grew up in the Bronx for the most part, but by that time we had moved to northern New Jersey, like a working class, middle class suburban area that bordered on other areas that were actually that there were certainly not middle class and not working class. And so you know, having that right next door, or seeing friends who had these palatial homes or seemingly endless stream of money to do whatever, you know, that kind of say, Oh, I guess I'm a bit different.
And did anyone close to you talk to you about money?
No, not in a healthy way anyway, I think, Well, I mean, you know, it was earn as much as you can go to school or you know, it was all those very sort of broad stroke I just figure it out, yeah, you know, but not you know, never really discussions about investing or understanding taxes or understanding different types of investments, or because it just wasn't a reality. I think for most of the people around me, like they weren't really saving or investing for the most part, other than maybe the home they bought, because there wasn't that disposable income. And I think that a lot of the family just didn't have an overview as to, you know, what it is you did with money, or how you treated it, or how you used money to grow wealth or all those sorts of things. Money was not so much it was it was something you needed to survive as opposed to something you could grow.
So, starting out as a young person, can you talk about what interested you in music and what did you expect for yourself thinking about a music career.
What attracted me to music, along with just the connectivity to particular songs and recording artists, was the social nature of music. I was a terrible student of music because you would play the instrument by yourself. But once I played the instrument with others. That completely changed my desire to actually rehearse and to actually be a part of something that took a lot of preparation and work. So I think that the social aspect of music in playing in bands and working with others and having other bands on the bill with you when you play, and that seemed very liberating. It seemed like in music there was a lot of autonomy and there was a lot of you make the rules as you go as opposed to falling into a conventional university route and that kind of thing.
And when you were going to college in the.
Eighties eighties, I was in college from nineteen eighty one to nineteen eighty five.
Where did you go to school?
Berkeley College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.
Okay, so when you were in college in the eighties, what were you told about what your career path could be in the music industry.
Well, that's when I kind of realized that there is more than one path. You know, you don't have to be a music like an artist. There were infrastructure people. There were producers and engineers and arrangers and business people and songwriters, and it was definitely taught me that there was a lot more there than meets the eye. And I do remember distinctly in college discussing in some classes, some of the more senior classes, money in terms of defining what success meant to you hm.
And were these actual classes focused on the business of being in the music industry or was it just a discussion that popped up in other classes.
It was a discussion that popped up in classes about music production, you know, So it was definitely a loose part of the curriculum because it was discussed a few times, like what are your expectations in terms of how much money do you want to make? How realistic are you about the potential for earning in your chosen field? You know, those types of discussion. How much money do you need to be happy? That was discussed, And I remember actually participating in those talks because I mean, I still feel this way, and then I felt that way back then, like having too much money is a burden that you have to be ready for. And as long as I knew that I had enough to day my rent and buy the food I wanted to buy and the clothes I wanted to buy, and have enough to maintain my instruments, I was cool. I didn't have any grand aspirations of making hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year because I kind of felt afraid of it, you know, to.
Wait, who gave you the idea that having too much money is a burden and that it's something to be afraid.
I gave it. I gave myself that idea.
Did you see that in someone you knew who had too much money? Or I'm curious where that came from.
I think that it came from the fact that I always saw, I think, and I saw somebody who had a lot of money, They worked a lot, and they were beholden to beholden to something. I guess I never in my lifetime sort of experienced the entrepreneur or the independent sort of wealth maker.
You know, how did you actually get your start as a music producer?
I left school not exactly knowing how I would, you know, work in the industry, Like what kind of job I could get? And I sent out via regular mail, typewritten letters to literally hundreds of recording studios and jingle houses and production companies and just asking to become part of a staff at some sort of company that was established and churning out music and the recording of music and the creation of music, and that didn't really yield all that much opportunity a couple of things here and there. So I just started bouncing around recording studios once I moved back to New York City, thinking that if I can get a job as an assistant or like, you know, just like doing the ground work at a recording studio, I could integrate myself into the business because there'd be musicians there and producers there, and record executives and everything else. And so ultimately that led me to a place called Green Street Recording, where I could say I had my first real opportunity to prove myself and meet the people I thought that I would be meeting. So I became a staff engineer there and a staff mixer back in the day day when studios had staff people. And then that's where I began as an assistant to this gentleman. His name was Rod Way, and he was doing a lot of the early hip hop of the day in New York City, and for some reason he took me under his wing and I assisted him for a while, and then he kind of handed the reins over to me as I started to build confidence with the people that were coming to the studio, and that was primarily like the Deaf Jam crowd, the Bomb Squad, which is like Public Enemy, and all the different offshoots of what they produced and recorded. So I would say that that was what set me up to put me on the map a bit and get a bit of some professional clout. And then from there I actually was able to convince noise rock bands, which was another interest of mine. I like noisy music, like I'm not a big pop music type person, and so that's when I started to work with bands like Sonic Youth and John Spencer, Blues Explosion and other sorts of like alternative sounding music. And it was actually interesting because it was really all based on the work I had done in hip hop with Pe and Ice Cube and you know artists like that.
So at the height, like maybe your best year as a record producer, how much did you make in.
A year, maybe like a couple of one hundred thousand dollars, I think I've never exceeded that in today's money, since that really I'm talking about making the most money in a single year would have to be in the nineties, just because there were a few records that really kicked back some substantial royalties, and those were French recordings that I was working on. You'd have to do the inflation rate, but like in the nineties, to make a couple of hundred thousand dollars was not uncommon during the course of a year.
And I'm so curious about what you're saying that you very much had these frank conversations. It sounds like with your professors and other students about money and the type of money you could maybe look forward to going forward in your career. Because now you're a professor, are those conversations different now? Like are you able to tell your students now the same things that you heard back then? Or what do you tell your students now when they ask you, like, look, like, what are the financial realities going to be for me as I try to make it in the music industry?
They have shifted quite a bit, because I think that when I was at Berkeley, it was the instructor sort of giving the reality of perhaps the limitations of the music business that not everyone in it lived this very high end lifestyle. Now I think it's kind of the opposite, where I have to remind my students that you do have to make some money. There seems to be it seems to there is definitely like a backlash against capitalism with the generations of students that I deal with, and they move more towards an art first, creation first, very idealistic view of things that's wonderful, that's beautiful and liberating and really essential to make great art. But I think that the talks that I have with my students about that and some of the other members of the faculty through our curriculum is that, hey, you need to earn some money here, you know, and it's not a sin to earn money, and it's not you know, you have to be realistic about how much it costs to survive and how much. So I think that there's the conversation, but like the roles have changed, huh.
And it's so funny that that's happening in the context of NYU in New York City, which is such an expensive place to live, that you have these students who are you know, I don't know what it is that they're expecting, but you know, they're in one of the most expensive cities in the world. I think New York is one of those places where money is just so in your face. So it's interesting that you're saying that they are kind of like, I don't want to have to think about money.
Look, it's an affluent university, and it's incredibly expensive university, and it's not across the board, of course, with our students nowhere near across the board, but many of them come from affluent backgrounds, so you don't come with the stress of them exactly. Yeah. Yeah, And like you said, you're surrounded by money here. It's just you can't avoid it. You know. Everything is just so overdeveloped and expensive, and even when you work, you get overpaid often, you know, So there's a different attitude towards it. I think when you're not coming in with a sense of anxiety and fear about not having it, you kind of coming more like I was in a way, but from a different angle, which was like you kind of want.
To push it out of your life.
My sense of the industry that many of your students are trying to get into is it's really tough and there is really no guarantee of a big payday, and some of them might be taking out loans to be at NYU. And is that a good idea, And I'm just curious how open you are and what kinds of conversations you have with your students, especially the ones who might be struggling financially. I mean, it's one thing to tell them, Look, you know, you need to think about this. This is a big decision. But is there any responsibility to say, I got to tell you, like, you don't have to do this, like there's other ways to be successful.
We actually say that, you know, like very openly, and you know, the open houses and when people visit and like presentations that we may make in public. It's like, look, obviously, the department is not even twenty years old, and people have been making it quite well in the music business for a lot longer than that. You do not need to come here in order to make it. There has to be something about what we're offering that you feel really compelled to participate in. But it's not like if you don't come to our department, you're not going to be successful in the music business. And you know, we're very clear about that. And we also are very lenient about people taking leaves of absence to do some professional work or to or if you know, if they're having financial issues. We're very lenient about, oh, we'll take a couple of semesters off then come back and we can appeal for some financial aid and things like that. So it's a very open discussion that at times is quite awkward, but essential when your school costs as much as NYU does, and when you're working with students who don't know, and a lot of families who don't know, you have to tell them. You know, it's only right, and we do so as a department. I think that there's a lot of value to saying why a very expensive university like this, Like if it's not so important to you, if something we do here is that compelling to you, like I'm sure you'll do well in another undergraduate program that perhaps a state school that would cost a fraction of what it costs to go to NYU. I just want to be real about everything having to do with a life in the arts, your financial stability, your emotional stability, and this whole idea of it's a long term business and you have to find way to survive both spiritually and financially for the long run, not just a couple of years when you're young and pretty and everything comes to you easy because you're young and pretty, but like, how do you sustain this for fifty some odd years? So, yeah, it's discussed. It's no longer sort of this taboo thing where we ignore the fact that it costs, you know, an arm and a leg to come here, and it could change the course of people's lives, in their families, lives, so it has to be discussed. We'd be irresponsible to not discuss it.
How much money do you make now?
Well, just because I don't want to say exactly because the NYU will probably get angry at me because then every other teacher is going to say, how come I don't make that? But is that?
Is that like in your contractor is that just a known kind of dynamic in academia.
It's a dynamic in academia. That's changing, however, because now we are obliged not to post our salaries. But when you have like a want ad for a new.
Right everything, Yes, so let's say like the want the want ad for your job, what what does it have on it?
I can tell you exactly because for the first year position, like we're searching for a production instructor right now, and we have an ad going out. We're a search, a full search going on, and the and the starting salary is ninety thousand dollars for fall and spring semester work. So that would be your full time faculty member who does things like admissions and academic advising and works on committees and things like that. The starting salary for that in our department is ninety thousand dollars. I've been here for almost twenty years and I'm the associate chair and the head of the production curriculum. So on top of my salary as a teacher, I get paid a stipend to be for each leadership role. So in any given year, I would be happy to say that I make like one hundred and fifty to I never make two hundred thousand dollars here, but somewhere in that area for my role at NYU. I also have other income from royalties which are drying up, to be quite honest, several thousand dollars every six months as opposed to tens of thousands of dollars every six months. But they still come, believe it or not, recordings from even like as far back as the late nineties, they'll they'll kick in. I don't know, twenty five hundred dollars every six months, you know, which is like, I'll take it. I mean, I can instead it back. It's not changing my life, but you know, it dribbles in. And one thing that I did early on, in recognizing that the income was just so variable being a music independent, that I started investing in real estate. I saw a few producers that I was working with as a young younger kid. I put together that many of them actually didn't invest all their money in things like recording studios and fancy cars and things like that, but actually in real estate, owning apartments or owning a building where they lived in one of the apartments and rented out the others. There was a pattern I noticed in a lot of music people who had this sort of very regular income pitted up against this very erratic income. And early on I got myself involved in real estate, and I still am to this day, and I do have a steady income based on my real estate investments.
I was noticing that on your LinkedIn profile you have a real estate company, and I wanted to ask you about that. What do you own and like, how many buildings do you own?
I'll give you the two minute story. I owned an apartment building in Brooklyn up until about two years ago. It was six apartments and it was not a high end building, but it was a rent stabilized building. In New York City, we have rent stabilization laws. It wasn't rent controlled, it was stabilized, meaning that the rents were, you know, for a one bedroom apartment maybe anywhere from twelve hundred to seventeen hundred dollars a month. And unfortunately, we experienced a fire in my home. We own our home here in New York City. We own a brownstone, my wife and I and we had a fire that was pretty devastating.
I'm sorry.
I had to rebuild our whole home. So we wound up selling our building in Brooklyn and you know, reinvesting that money in a more modest home that we rent out up in like a vacation area in the Catskills. And commercial property that is a sort of a passive investment in commercial property. And actually in Louisiana.
Oh, in Louisiana is.
Kashudasada.
Yeah, whyhata Louisiana.
Because there was an opportunity where, you know, if you don't want to take the profits from the capital gains of selling like a real estate investment, like a building. I reinvested it into ten thirty one exchange to another property and then was able to refinance that property, allowing me to pull out money to rebuild my home. So it was more advantageous for me to actually sell the building put it into a more stable investment which would allow me to pull out more money loan to value money. So that's what I did. And I invested in a plot of commercial land that was that has been leased by different companies, and I think the current renting company is the Dollar General Corporation.
That's a big company in presence in Louisiana. Yeah. I used to live in Treeport as a reporter, so that's not too far from Coshatas. So wait but wait, I STI don't understand, like of all places, I mean, you could have invested in commercial real estate theoretically anywhere.
I was just looking for the best sort of return as possible, like what was based on the money I had. Yeah, and with those ten thirty one exchanges for those commercial properties, it's really a numbers game because I don't have to do anything there. You know, the corporation that rents the space, they take care of the maintenance, they take care of the taxes, they take care of everything. You are essentially leasing them the land, so you don't have to be there, so.
You're not really like a traditional landlord. Yeah.
No, No, I don't have any involvement other than I speak with the you know, some corporate office every now and again to make sure the insurance and the rent is which they cover, but just to make sure that that's all being renewed and everything else and the you know, that the taxes are being paid. So I'm really talking to a corporate entity as opposed to going in and visiting the shop and shaking.
Yeah. Do you know the term cre bro? No, I don't commercial real estate bro. It's like there's there's this whole really annoying scene on Twitter, like real estate Twitter and commercial real estate bros for like, oh yeah, my latest deal was this, blah blah blah. I just I was just thinking about that. I don't know anything about commercial real estate. But but you're you're like a little tiny bit of a cire bro, just a little bit.
Yeah, I guess I am. I guess I Always you seem to know what you're.
Talking about you talked earlier about growing up, you say yourself as maybe lower middle class, working class. What socioeconomic class do you consider yourself a part of.
Now, that's interesting. Certain parts of the world, I'd be very rich. In other parts of the world, I would be middle class. In certain states of the United States, I'd be very rich. In New York City, I am definitely a middle class. So I grapple with that question. As you could see, it's like it's just so relative to to what you're around and where you.
Are, what's your net worth?
So that's a difficult one too, because it's like, on paper, I kind of feel as though, oh, I have several million dollars, you know, just sitting there, But in reality, I have a lot of a lot of it is leveraged. So it's a very it's it's a difficult question for me to answer. But I guess if we liquidated everything, we'd walk away with several million dollars, you know, three or four million dollars. But then to what end?
You know, it's still good to have it, I mean, it's not. No, I believe me.
I'm very fortunate and I am. I'm so happy to you know, have that, And.
If a young person came to you and looked at your career and looked at the awards you have in the wall and everything you've done, and they said, Okay, I want to have Nick Sansano's career. Is that replicable?
Yeah, it's totally replicable. We have students or alums who haven't gone well past what I've ever earned in music and Grammy Awards and all that kind of stuff which I never got to. So it's totally still doable. And there's still money out there. You know, how it's spent and how it funnels through and who it funnels to. That's all changed, but the prospect of success still exists. And I would never say that you can't do it anymore. You just can't do it the way I did it because economically speaking, it's different. Structurally speaking, it's different. You have to be much more entrepreneurial. Whereas many of us of my generation we were not really entrepreneurial in terms of entering the music business. We looked for staff positions, we looked for established constructs to become a part of. Where now I believe it's much more entrepreneurial, where you kind of have to make your own opportunities. There aren't these structures that are willing to hire you or pay an adequate salary or invest in your ideas. It's a startup, the startup of you finding ways to raise money, finding ways to survive, finding ways to work your way through the system. There's no one traditional route anymore. It's very entrepreneurial. It's very self defined for each individual.
You know, before this interview, we were we were talking about Aretha Franklin. Enjoy was sharing that you all had talked about her in class and kind of the arc of her career and the journey of it and the fact that there's ups and downs and you can make it and you cannot make it, and your career can like emerge later in life. And I'm wondering, is there any artists that you've worked with that is a good example to look at the arc of someone's career and what that can look like.
In the music industry, yeah, I mean, the modern day music industry is a bit of a mess, to be quite honest. It's very lopsided towards like the top few percent. So the model has changed. But take a look at one of the older bands that I worked with, which is Sonic youth Like for four albums. Before I worked with them, they were in a downtown underground noise band that lives in the Lower east Side. Before it was cool to live in the Lower east Side. Now it's super cool to live in but then it was like, you know, why are you living in the Forwer east Side. It's kind of an abandoned neighborhood. So they're a band too toils for years and years and years, and even in making an album like daydream Nation, which was one of the albums I made with them, This is the record that really didn't make a lot of money but put them in a good place for the future. It set them up to get a major label deal and have autonomy within that deal to then make records that were more commercially accepted. But they did have to go through years and years and years of this I wouldn't say failure, but just a devotion to what they wanted to do well. It wasn't very lucrative. So that model still exists where people will work in a bit of a vacuum for years and years and years and then climb out of that into a more mainstream you know, commercially viable space. Later on, when I worked with j D. Sampson and Kathleen and Johanna in the band called Latigra, they were very sort of pragmatic about maintaining their independence but making money and surviving, and they found the great balance of like holding on to their integrity but not starving.
Which business is more ruthless, music or academia.
At its worst. I would have to say academia. There's a great learning curve in academia. You got to know which battles to fight, because some of them is just no matter how right you are, you will never win. I think that you would think that in the music business there'd be a tremendous amount of ego driving everything, But you know what, in academia, I think it's even worse. There's a need to be recognized as intelligent and intellectual influential that can only be satisfied through recognition because academia is not really the place where you go to earn money. So in the music business you have these egos, and you have this drive, and you have this sort of showmanship. But over time, I think it mellows because by making money or being successful or influencing a style of music or genre of music. You've made your mark and you can be a little bit comfortable about having made your contribution. And I don't see that in academia. I see in academia like this constant need to one up the people around you and to stay relevant.
Nick, thank you so much for talking to me. This has been so fun.
It's been my pleasure. Thank you for asking.
Other People's Pockets is written and hosted by Me May Allow. It's produced by me along with Joy Sandford and Dan Galucci. Production help from Angela vain. Our Executive producers are me along with Jane Marie and Dan Galucci. Special thanks to Noisy Music. Other People's Pockets is a co production of Pushkin Industries A Little Everywhere. If you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content and ad free listening across our network for four ninety nine a month. Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. You can sign up for Pushkin newsletters at Pushkin dot fm.
