Building a career one brick at a time; tearing it down
Building a music career is like e building a house, one brick at a time.
We can view each gig as an opportunity to find a brick:
Some bricks are bigger than others. If you play a little coffee house gig, and one new fan is made, that’s an important brick! If you get on a radio show, you might have the chance to pick up more bricks in one time.
Not all bricks are made of the same substance. Some gigs lead to fans that will follow the creative journey for the rest of our career. Other gigs lead to casual fans.
Some bricks are concrete, a fan that doesn’t miss your concert; other fans might like the music, but they’re grazing. Getting added to a Spotify playlist or being on a TV show contest might lead to a lot of these casual fans.
Usually, we talk about building an audience–we focus on growth–but what about actions that tear the bricks down?
Failing to follow through on a Kickstarter campaign is one way to lose a few bricks; a bigger way is to rip your fans off; or saying some rash, dumb stuff in an interview; being disrespectful at a concert and being two hours late to the stage…
However, being an artist is messy; art is at first criticized for challenging the themes of culture, and then later applauded for its challenge.
It’s important to remember that making art that isn’t predictable, that isn’t safe, may feel like you are losing a few bricks along the way. Dylan picked up the electric guitar in 1966 and snubbed the folk audience; now we applaud him for it. Billy Corgan challenged the alternative rock audience with electronic influences on Adore, and now electronic influences are mainstream radio.
You just never know, which is why the most important brick is the art itself.
If you make something, be thankful
If you make art, be thankful.
Some art is more popular than other art; but the opportunity to make art is the same creative process, the same joyful feeling.
Joy, luck, dedication, and yes, hard work–the ingredients to successful creation; but making art isn’t only those things; it’s liberty, chance, and freedom.
If you make art, be thankful you have the privilege to do so. (And thank you for sharing you art, too. It’s a privilege for the audience.)
Great read from the Trichordist: “What’s Good for Adele Sucks for Everyone Else”
However, windowing still feels like trying to control something we can’t control; a return to piracy.
I’m wondering how many music fanatics, and even casual music listeners, partook in one these actions:
1. borrowed friends CDs to rip them to your harddrive
2. visited the library to check out CDs to rip them to your hard drive
3. traded external hard drives full of music with friends and copy them
4. downloaded music from an illegal pirate site (like Napster, Limewire, Pirate Bay)
5. used software to transfer and download a song off Youtube into a .wav or .mp3 version
From 2000-2011, some music fans did all of them. Most of us did at least one or two of these actions to grow our music collections between 2005-2011.
Am I wrong to assume most of us don’t do any of these actions anymore?
Once Spotify became available in America, all of this time storing, downloading, cataloguing music wasn’t worth it for me.
The fact is streaming didn’t make sales diminish. The nature of the song no longer being connected to the physical product (a CD) started the inevitable decline years ago.
Streaming replaces actions 1-5.
Adele is having record sales this week and holiday season. One reason she’s able to do this is because she’s the biggest, most talented artist in the world right now; and another reason is because most of the other music available is on streaming sites.
Look at it this way: If most of the music heavy consumers don’t do actions 1-5 because of streaming, they aren’t going to do 1-5 for one or two albums a year
But if every major label artist tries to window, what would happen? A return to 1-5, not record sales across the board, at least not for long.
The Internet doesn’t disappear because you window your record.
Rdio’s bankrupcty reminds artists that they need to diversify
Rdio is going through bankruptcy.
Rdio is a streaming platform like Spotify or Apple Music. It had roughly 100,000 paying subscribers, and most of it’s success was in France. Entertainment Weekly rated it the best music platform in 2013. In the end, Rdio couldn’t competed.
While I’m undiscovered artist, I still noticed few 100 spins accumulating through Rdio each year. Not much, but every royalty check included a bit of Rdio spins.
Until 2015.
I haven’t received a payout from Rdio through my distributor all year. I’m not worried about the pennies, but here’s a thought:
As I review my accounting, I wonder how many artists also haven’t seen any payouts from Rdio this year? Some might have accumulated more meaningful numbers. Some of those payments would have been a songwriter’s rent, grocery bill, or at least a cup of coffee for the day.
Consumers are moving more quickly to streaming than buying, but artists are trusting in companies that offer those our music to stream to stay in business. Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, Tidal, Youtube Red–this is one big experiment. An inevitable part of doing business is occasionally you don’t get paid what you earned, for varying circumstances.
More and more artists are independently putting out their music, more and more are becoming mini-businesses, which face the ups and downs of business.
Be prepared.
Artists need own their art (and their careers), which means diversifying incomes. The music industry changes every four years, often with little warning. If you put your eggs in few baskets, you are only as stable as your worst client.
On Saturday, 16 inches of snow made parts of Michigan an instant winter wonderland. We had a great stretch of a warm November. Mother Nature made us pay for it.
Across the state, musicians had gig cancellations, me included.
Lots of touring acts braved the brutal weather (because that’s what we do!) and most likely faced poor turnouts. (No one’s fault!)
We are constantly reminded that we cannot control the weather; and we can’t control the weather of a lot of aspects of the music industry:
Rdio is going bankruptcy, Facebook requires us to boast posts, Apple installs ad-blockers on OS…the weather changes! We can only control if we will keep working, developing our art, and sharing it.
