Jonathan Roye
Complaint 303643 Details

In January of 2013, I entered an agreement to record three song demos with a young, seemingly cool guy named Jonathan Roye. He was pretty new to Nashville at the time and seemed flexible and had some decent reference recordings and had been involved in some good projects. None of which really impressed me, but I knew he could handle the work.
(Or so I thought!)

I needed three song demos to submit for a publisher workshop where I would have had the chance to pitch my songs to six top Nashville publishers. So after some negotiation, on January 2nd, 2013, we came to an agreement to do three songs for $400.00. Via email he said and I quote:

"Could you do 3 tunes for 400.00 flat?

Drums / bass / guitar / vox / programming (keys) -mix / master, blah blah?

Let me know - I'm def willing to work with you.
-Jon

I agreed and we began on January 7th. I paid him by check, up front, in full. It wasn't a studio, but everyone and their brother has a digital home studio in Nashville -myself included, although my computer was down at the time, hence having to farm the demos out.

We did half a day of guitars/basses etc. on Monday, January 7th, then another half day of tracking the next day. He even played a guitar solo for me and was in general, cool to hang with. We lunched and things were friendly. He seemed to get the drum programming down fast, although I had let him know the grooves he laid would need some adjustment etc. no big deal. We did the vocals on the three songs the Friday evening of that same week. One of my co-writers did the singing. The next day, he had a friend of his do some harmonies and I paid her directly in cash.

After that, I actually never saw him in person again. Not a big concern. It's a social media world, right?

If I can back up a second, part of the agreement we made in person, during the last tracking session, was that since he had a project coming up, he'd provide me w/usable but unfinished prints of the tracks in time to submit for the workshop -the deadline was January 13th -and then he would allow for some time after getting feedback from the publishers for me and my co-writers to make any minor adjustments before the final mix and master. All of this of course on the pretense that these mixes and masters were just demo quality stuff. But good enough to stand up on Music Row and...complete! He did say however, that the temporary mixes would definitely be good enough for the publishers. "I'll get you something you can work with and you'll be proud of" he said.

The harmony vox were done Saturday morning of the 12th and he said "yeah man, I'll get right on these." He got them to me alright. About an hour from the deadline. And they weren't happening rough mixes. They were ROUGH, rough mixes.

I ended up not getting one of the coveted spots in the workshop because my songs didn't have that professional edge. We're talking about the top publishers on Music Row and even if you just bring in a guitar/vocal, it had better be super clean to get their attention. Many of my colleagues and even the person that organized the workshop commented skeptically on the recordings. The organizer specifically said "The quality of your songs is really good, but I have people who've really put a lot into their demos that would lose respect for me if I put you in one of those seats because everyone in the room will be able to hear. I just can't. Please get the recording quality to match that of the songwriting and I'll make sure you get a seat next workshop". So there you have that part. I still participated but without the pitching opportunity and was able to hear first hand what she meant. Everyone had wonderful, NASHVILLE class recordings. I am friends with many of them and sure, some spent more than I did, some did them themselves at home and others spent way too much. That's always going to be the case.

So at the end of January I let Jonathan know via email that I'd be taking some time to work on strengthening certain aspects of the songs before sending my final mix notes. At no time was there ever any mention there was a deadline to finalize the songs. Of course there wasn't -he's an engineer trying to get established and had plenty of bigger fish to fry than my little project.

Things can be a bit slow getting three different co-writers on the three separate songs together at different times to make slight improvements -stuff that would have amounted to no-brainer, quick edits. In February, starting the 8th, I ended up really sick with a random staph infection and was laid out for the entire rest of that month. Was scary. I emailed Jonathan to let him know and at first he didn't reply which was fine because I knew he was busy. When he did, he said not a problem, just send me your mix notes when you're ready whenever is fine. Having been in his position many times before, I knew that he would be finishing mine in between other bitter projects. I expected that and had no problem with that. Approximately March 15th, I sent him the mix notes for one of the songs, which included very minor adjustments, no hard changes. I didn't get any reply to this email

Fast forward a few months in to the beginning of summer, all the while having emailed on occasion to touch basis. "hey could you finish this song? we have an artist pitch opportunity." I asked via text. "Email me the mix notes" he said again. I already had, but obliged and re-sent them. Never a reply. Text him a month to the day later (I have 100% of our text and email convos on record, luckily, the only verbal, face to face agreement we made in person at his studio was that there'd be ample time to adjust the songs before finalizing etc.) and still nothing. Now we're already in August. He didn't reply until I sent him a long, frustrated yet still professional text. I didn't swear, I didn't come off super agro, I just said I felt he was ignoring me etc. Still, it was like pulling teeth to get a straight answer as to when we could wrap things up.

All I got from that text exchange was more lip service, more "really slammed, we'll definitely get it wrapped up". And another month goes buy and another artist pitch opportunity goes by. That one, had her A&R person had the finished demo, very strongly likely would have cut the song. The second verse had been improved since the initial recording and their A&R guy needed to hear it on a demo before letting the artist record it for her record. Now it's near the end of September. Now I'm getting pissed off. I had another chance to do something with just ONE of the songs, but needed to have another vocal done on it. And I got nothing but ignored. By the next text exchange, I'd had a conversation about my frustrating experience, with one of my good friends who is a lawyer. He said he highly recommend I sue him. But before doing so, see if you can get him to just agree to finish the work. Write him or email him first. If he doesn't answer, sue him. I went ahead an sent him both an email and a text. Of course didn't respond the day I sent it so the next day, I text him that my lawyer friend said I should take him to court, but that I really didn't want it to come to that. Not that it was really about money, that it was about him learning a hard lesson not to do this to someone else again. That it's not okay to take on so many clients that he can't come through and complete mine -someone who had paid him upfront, regardless of how much or how little. Guess what? He wrote back. He said something like "we started your project a year ago for $300 measly dollars, I thought it was finished." Wow, he doesn't even remember when we started or for how much I paid him. That just proved my point right there. He had so much other, more important work, that he didn't want to dicker with my little small beans project, and he already had my money.

Well, he gave me more gibberish and excuses and then of course vanished again. A month later, now second week of October, I told him if he didn't either get my songs done or just GIVE me the damn files and I'll finish elsewhere, that I was going to take him to court. I gave him 24 hours to respond in the text. He wrote back, yeah, It'll have to be later tonight but I'll dropbox you the files." No interest in or mention whatsoever of actually finishing the work. Well guess what this time? He took another three weeks to send me the files -we're talking October 28th. And THEN he didn't even send me the complete sessions. I went to another friend's home studio with the same exact version of Pro Tools we'd tracked them on and half of the files weren't there, including all of the drum programming (zero of it was there) and many of the keeper takes from the sessions. Gone. I text him that it wasn't there and he said he would check it and get back later that afternoon. That was the last I heard from him. I went to even another friend's studio 10 days later with the same recording setup, to double check. As suspected, only half the files were there. I attempted to contact him only to find out I was blocked from both calling and texting him. Then I found out other people were looking for him with same results. He'd changed his number or had been using a Google Voice number all along and disconnected it or something. So I let it go by because it was the holidays. Noticed he'd unfriended and blocked me on FB too. That's when I Googled to see if ANY one had a similar experience with this loser and was not surprised at all when I saw not one, not two but three other complaints on this sight alone. I haven't even gotten past page one of the search engine results!

Jonathan, if you ever see this, you know who this is. Buddy, you don't have to answer to me. You're going to have much bigger, much worse problems than ripping me off and docking me around and costing me multiple professional opportunities. You are going to have to deal with Karma and real world consequences of being a CON ARTIST. I will merely SCRUB your name everywhere I go when the subject of recording comes up or someone having a bad experience or someone looking for somewhere to do demos. Every chance I get, I'm going to scrub you all over this little town. You are also at some point in this life, have to take those Beer Bottle Bottoms of Bifocals you wear off and LOOK yourself in the mirror. Have you forgotten where you came from? I can't imagine you parents would be proud. Siblings? Grandparents? Because guess what buddy, the world can Google you and find out what a SCHEISTER you are. And I hope they all do. Your family back home in Texas are going to get a copy of this, too. I've already located their whereabouts. If I see you around town, I'm not the violent type. But please, if you don't want to be further publicly embarrassed, turn the other way. And if I even THINK you are retaliating by saying anything negative of me in any manner, you'll suffer even more public and "professional" consequences. Because as talented as you may be at somethings, you are definitely not a PRO and you are definitely missing a HUGE piece of the puzzle if you think you can just get by turning a few knobs and acting like a big shot, when you can't even follow through with a simple three song demo project that my nephew could have done better on an M-Box.