The Road to Becoming A Big Shot

We had the honor of catching up with distinguished music industry veteran, Michael “Big Shot” Oronde Wright, successful Entrepreneur, CEO of Big Shot Music Group, and Owner of Next Wright Financial Services, LLC.” in the first-ever, inaugural edition of “Industry Certified: Living Legends” an exclusive interview series. In Part One of “Chances Make Champions”, a three-part interview series with Wright, Mr. Big Shot himself candidly recounts his seventeen-plus year journey. From laying the foundation to drawing up blueprints for additions, he reveals how he paved the long, winding road that now leads to the highly revered mountain top that Big Shot Music Group is firmly planted on today.  Wright opens up about what fuels his fiery perseverance and reveals how he maintains a level of discipline that few could match. In a world where many who get a taste of success grow content, “Big Shot’s appetite seemingly grows larger with every taste of it and he is expanding his palette one venture at a time.

Part One: “The Road to Becoming a Big Shot”

Nestled deep in the heart of Boston, just east of Fenway Park sits an apartment building. Perched in front of the Museum of Fine Arts Green Line T station on Huntington Avenue, Michael Oronde Wright, a self-proclaimed “hip hop-head” fondly remembers this nostalgic building. Not only as his childhood home but also as the place he first became enamored with music and the culture of hip hop in the early 1980s. It wasn’t until he relocated to Los Angeles, CA to pursue a career in acting and modeling that “Big Shot” would officially be tacked onto his name. Although ironically, not from his work in front of the camera. This turning point for the once-endearing moniker appointed to him by friends and family members was becoming more than just a nickname. It was defining who he unknowingly would become.

Where did the idea for Big Shot Music Group come from?

“I started Big Shot Music Group back in April of 2002. I was living in Florida at the time, and before I moved, I was dippin’ and dabbin’ in the entertainment business. I used to model. I’ve had a couple of national commercials, been on a few television shows and things of that nature, so that’s how I got my name “Big Shot.” My people saw me on television and would say “Oh, you’re a big shot now! So they kind of just named me that.”

“When I moved back here [Florida] I felt I needed to get back to California I was missing the entertainment business, so I went back to California I was actually producing music when I was living in Florida, I had a whole pre-production studio worth of equipment and I was teaching myself to be a producer. My intent to go back to California was to be a producer. One of my friends that I left behind there, we call him Big Dre ‘The Decepticon,’ he’s a musical genius like he could produce anything; r&b, smooth jazz, rock, you name it, and he had an artist named Playa Azian. Back then it was one of the rare few Asian rappers coming into hip hop with real rap, and he was producing him (he’s a way better producer than I am). He asked me and was like “look man I want to put this guy out for real. How much to start a label? Because you’re really good at the business side, the business aspect of the game, and I’ll be the producer.” So, I said, “Man, bet.” I gave him all of my studio equipment like “here you go, just produce. I’ll handle the business side, you just produce.” That’s how I came up with Big Shot Music Group. I just took what people were already calling me in the entertainment business. Big Shot Mike” or “Big Mike,” I just took “Big Shot Music” plus the “Group,” and that’s how I formed the label. That label was explicitly developed to handle the business of the artist that we were starting to produce.”

Why Music?

“The modeling and the acting was cool for me at one point, I even made it to the Screen Actors’ Guild. I’m actually in the Screen Actors’ Guild to this day, I guess if you get in, you get in for life and that’s a big thing amongst actors. I didn’t like the uncertainty factor. You go on all these auditions, you get a few gigs here and there but it was just too much uncertainty, and it was also too much control. Certain things, on an audition they may want you to do certain things and you’re like “na I’m not doing that, that ain’t me” I’m a hip hop head and I’m kind of like, I’m a man’s man. Being a hip hop head and being out in Hollywood you kind of clash unless you’re doing some hip hop stuff. I liked the world but I needed more control over my own destiny other than just going on auditions and leaving it up to them. I felt like cattle sometimes.”

“But I was really into music, I always have been. I’ve been a hip- hop head since 1981. I grew up in the whole culture since a kid and I just loved the music business from that so when I had the opportunity to produce this artist Playa Azian and have a producer that was second to none, and all I had to do was do the business; I figured that was my calling and I established this. One of the promises I made to myself is I will never quit once I start this — because at that time I was in my early 30’s so I knew I had to stick with something. As a matter of fact I was actually 30 years old, I had just turned 30 and I was like “this is what I’m going to do, and I’m going to stick with it no matter how hard it gets, and this is going to be my life, and I stuck with it.”

You service not only radio, but promotions, distribution,and public relations under the Big Shot Music Group umbrella, how did each of those divisions come about?

“Playa Azian helped establish Big Shot Music because we put much effort into him and how I got my promotions started is I used to book our venues. I used to book them out myself, we would promote the venues ourselves, invite people, and we would perform in front of our own audience. That’s how I was building our fan base back then. Also, if we had a single, I would promote the single to the mix shows myself.  Back in those days you were able to go to the station website, and you could find out who the Mix Show Director is, and the Program Director and all that and it would have their email address on the website right there, so I didn’t know it at first, but that’s how I was getting into the radio promotion game. I would email these people and be like “hey check out the single I want to see if I can get the mix show play give us the mix show list and I’ll service all the mix show DJ’s and we’ll give them radio drops.” Back then, it was effortless to do that, and now it’s almost impossible to do. It was an open door back then and not too many people were doing it, but that helped me get into the radio promotion game which I’m still in today, which is 17 years later.”

“All that came about when working for Playa Azian because I had to do all that. I was new to the game at the time, but I was a hustler. I knew that I didn’t have exactly the finances to be paying everybody and even if I did, I didn’t know who I was paying so I just kind of did all that on my own so I kind of just learned the game that way. Like I said the radio game, emailing the stations. PR work I used to book the venues plus I met people in Hollywood they used to invite us to events and we would go to these events where there might be a few celebrities, Radiohead, anything that would help us in our market to introduce ourselves. We would do stuff like that and it was good because there was one this one event that we attended and Mya was there, it was like a Mya birthday bash or whatever. I met one of my first mentors there, his name was Jerome Moss. He’s since passed away now, but he became a mentor of mine and I didn’t know that he was an old school head in the hip hop music business so that propelled me a lot as well and that was my first introduction to meeting real people in this business; the real gatekeepers of the business. He was the first person that I met that introduced me to some of these people which helped me carry on Big Shot to the next level. So, that’s where my PR background comes from.”

When did you start to realize the business was evolving into something bigger?

“Other individuals and artists saw how I was promoting my artist P.A., [Playa Azian] and they kind of wanted me to do the same for them. I actually managed a couple of artists because they saw how I was promoting Playa Azian, booking him on shows — since he’s Asian, I used to tour the whole import car scene thing and he’d be on stage, we’re just starting off and he’s performing in front of almost seven hundred to a thousand people. Also, during my PR work as far as getting out there, another person I met- In LA [Los Angeles] we have this club down there LA called the Century Club; real known club, a lot of rappers go there, matter of fact Dr. Dre mentioned it in one of his songs when he says “I’m at the Century Club, with my team strong” I think it’s the Next Episode. Well, I met the owner of the Century Club and he had an Asian party night and he gave us free access to perform in front of his Asian night club whenever we wanted to as long as we promoted it right we had our own line and everything, and that was very unusual because I don’t think anybody else ever did that because Century Club was a big huge thing, big club. I met the owner at one of the events that I went to, he liked us, and he gave us a shot. We would invite artists to come out to some of our events and other people, they would see all this and that’s when people started saying “Hey what can you do for me on radio? What could you do for me on the show side? What can you do for me here? What can you do for me there?” started asking what I could do for them. That’s when I was like “you know what, I’ve kind of have a PR business here so I niched that out of Big Shot, out of the distribution/label business.”

Has there ever been a time that things got really hard and you considered quitting or giving up?

“When we first started we had four shows and that’s where I really learned about janky promoters. So we have four shows, our first two shows are absolutely horrible this promoter saw us at some event, he wanted to book us he thought that we’d be great for his events, he had some events coming up. He said he’d promote it on the radio and uh, yeah I heard it on the radio…at about 3-4 AM in the morning (laughs). When we did our first show, we literally had ten people in the audience, and they were old, just like an older crowd; so that was a bust. Then, the same promoter he said “man I’m sorry about that”, he wanted to do this other show he promised that it would be way better, he was doing this, this and that so we gave him another chance; went and did that one and I’d say we had about fifteen people in the audience. Then, we had another offer to do a show and it was this one establishment and it was an Asian crowd. We did that show and it was packed out, but we thought because it was an Asian crowd, we had an Asian artist and he could rap and we had dope beats that we would be a hit at that club. Well, we ended up getting booed, and it seemed like nobody really cared. We were like “what? Booed? Our music was hot so I think there was some sort of some other stuff going on in there, especially out there in California, maybe a street element, I don’t know. Then we did one more show and we performed in front of a club and once again the reaction was kind of just weak. I remember, we were all in the parking lot after that show and we were just sitting there. We were like, “man, I don’t know if this is going to work.” We were like, “I don’t know man, I think we’re just not producing music that people want to hear.” And I remember we were saying this, but we had one more show and it was in San Diego. We were really contemplating whether or not we were going to go down to San Diego to do this show. We were gonna give up, right then and there. Then we were like “man well, le got this show, let’s just go ahead and go down to San Diego and knock it out man, whatever.” and we all agreed so we went down to San Diego, we had a DJ for the first time, we brought our DJ down, his introduction to us was our first time ever using a DJ. We set up in San Diego, it was an outdoor event and there was a gang of people. I remember because we had a party rap style, and a lot of the style being played on this particular stage was a lot of gangster rap and we were like, “we’re not gangster rappers” the element was just raw. We thought “na, people are not going to feel us man, we’re done.” We went ahead and did the show anyway, and I remember we were on stage and the Gap Band was on the stage next to us and they went on at the same time. They were playing all that funk music which caters to that environment and we like “no one is going to care about what we’re doing over here, they’re all going to go over to the Gap Band stage, we’re done.” But I tell you, we were on stage and that environment loved us, it was crazy because we were totally not what they were used to. We wasn’t gangster rap, we wasn’t funk, it was none of that. We was party rapping (we sounded like The Clipse, actually). We shut the streets down. I mean we shut it down. In front of thousands of people. I mean we had people dancing in the streets, the hardest people in the world were throwing their hands up, it was crazy and we left that area on fire. I swear to God from then on, we just took off from there. I don’t think we had a wack show after that. All our shows after that were totally like the bomb so I don’t know what happened but we ran with that experience and I always tell people this, man I was four shows away from quitting Big Shot. That was the turning point. I’m telling you, if that show didn’t go well, I would have quit. We all would have quit. If that show did not go as it did, we all would have quit and Big Shot wouldn’t be around today. There is no way we could have had another bad show after those four that we had, there is no way. We would have done something else.”

Looking back at that moment in your career, what advice would you give to someone today who is early in their career facing a similar struggle, and considering giving up?

“I would say– and I know everybody has heard this plenty of times it’s probably like cliche but I would say keep going because they say that people who quit are just one more show, one more this or one more that away from success. You should always go, I mean if you believe in yourself, then always push. You have to push through the tough times because you could be almost there. That’s kind of crazy because we would have given up and we didn’t know that we were really right there; this show was going to be the turning point. Not that show had anything to do with our success moving forward, but just mentally, we needed that. We needed to rock a crowd, we needed to see a crowd that loved us, that liked our music and what we were doing. We had to see that, mentally, and we weren’t getting that at those other four or five shows so we needed that. If we didn’t go to that show, because we didn’t plan on going to that show, we were like “man we ain’t going,” but then we decided to go. But if we didn’t go to that show, we would have never known that response was going to be waiting for us if we did that. That taught me that you have to push through the tough times because you just never know what’s on the other side of those tough times.”

 In Part Two of “Chances Make Champions: Michael “Big Shot” Oronde Wright shares more can’t-miss advice to up-and-coming artists and entrepreneurs, why he doesn’t spend a dime on advertising and how inspired the movie “Straight Outta Compton”. Subscribe to Industry Certified to stay up=to-date on what’s trending in the business of music.