Call me a jaded cynic...
I’ve been rather hoping everyone in the DIY musician community would see the light soon and the whole thing would just “go away”.
Hasn’t the medium taken over from the message? Isn’t an artist lauded now as “a success” when their previously unknown tune becomes the soundtrack to the latest small-car TV commercial? Remember when artists didn’t want their music to be used to sell cars? Don’t they seem to write songs now with little else in mind? Number One album? No, incidental music on a Netflix series please!
Surely, for the 99% of us who are NOT that handful of actually, globally successful, big-budget musicians (nor ever will be) when our chances of selling a thousand CD albums for $10 each, to a thousand dedicated and engaged fans, evaporated (when was that... 15 years ago? iTunes launch?) the entire game was up; it’s just taken 15 years for everyone to notice. Views, likes, streams, comments - just a teaspoon of sugar in the teacup of life: a short-term serotonin hit and some long-term damage. Cut it out and feel better about yourself.
The musical department of social media is like a fight at the town butcher for the last chicken in the window. “Look at me! I won!” Yes you did, Well done! Now what exactly what did you win...?
After 30-plus years of “serious” effort, I’m at a stage in life where my songwriting, playing, recording and production have never been more accomplished; I turn out the sort of catchy (but sophisticated!) guitar pop I could only dream of creating back when I’d pay $200 every few months, for a day in a 16-track studio.
David Byrne (in his book “How Music Works”) asks, if you truly make music just for the sake of making music, then why “release” anything at all and tells the tale of a deceased chap whose home was found to contain shelves of cassette albums he’d quietly recorded and told no-one about. I’m convinced I only keep releasing songs now to see if I can make a pal of mine from those studio days raise an eyebrow at a hook, or force an involuntary chuckle at a well-crafted couplet.
I, we all, have near-instant, gate-keeper-less, global distribution of the kind I used to dream about every time I got embroiled in yet another six-month-long fall into the rabbit hole of “major-label interest”.
My iPhone makes better pop videos than several thousand dollars’ worth of camera crew and video editing suite-time did in the 1990s and gives me the same direct access to the hearts and minds of a billion potential “fans” that back then, a global record company’s yearly marketing spend wouldn’t come close to achieving.
So what’s the result?
Nothing. Nothing happens. Nobody listens, watches, reads, reacts. Nobody cares, nothing matters any more.
U2 release a new album. Nobody notices. U2 don’t release a new album. Nobody minds.
Social media for musicians is over, because far more importantly, The Music Business for musicians, (the 99%), is over. The music business we can all see, the Big One, over there, we are not in. Yet the little independent one, in which we used to thrive, has now vanished. All that’s left is a social media-generated echo of a Big Bang that happened long ago, like a photocopy of a photocopy that bears no resemblance to the quality and value of the original.
Any flurry of interest an artist creates via their iPhone is about as useful or valid a spectacle as dropping a handful of one-dollar bills in a crowded shopping mall; as time-consuming and pointless as trying to fish out a dime that’s rolled into the fluff under the vending machine. Oh, and there’s a hundred others there chasing the same dime!
You could say, “’Twas always thus!”
In the ‘90s (or ‘80s, or ‘70s) did the bass player in your favourite band ever really make enough money to live off, let-alone buy the Rolls Royce and the mansion in the country? No of course not. They just about scraped their rent together for the two or three years they remained musically active then when the second single from the second album failed to chart, their game was up. And like us today, it will have taken them a few years to realise it, to put down their bass and go and get a job in IT or radio jingle production.
Ultimately, it’s more of a “game” now than it ever was; the stakes are so low that anybody (and seemingly everybody) can (and does!) have a go, like some free-to-enter lottery where the prize is... a ticket for next week’s lottery (no doubt with a burger-outlet’s advertisement printed on the back.) Spotify recently confirmed they upload 60,000 songs every DAY!
So. Why not stop "playing the game"? Delete the apps, stop logging in and Just Make Music. Yes, put it out, tell your friends if you must, but then go and make some more, better than the last.
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