The Artist’s Identity Crisis
Periodically, I ask myself, “Why am I doing this?” The money is leaving the music industry. And yet there are still memes and ideas and conventions that people espouse. Yet those conventions were all created under a specific pretense. That pretense is that you’re doing it because you want to become known and recognized for the art you create and that, through that fame and recognition, you can make enough money to support yourself and live.
So people will tell you to quit your day job and people will say, “Do you want to do this full time?” and people will encourage you to pursue a course that is no longer current or modern or viable.
For some people it’s viable I suppose. For Grizzly Bear or Animal Collective there is the possibility that you can license your songs to film or television, sell out some big venues and make a nice middle class living making music.
But the fact remains that money has left the music industry. There is less of it these days than there used to be. In the old days, there were record deals. There were pots of cash and, even though there were plenty of strings, those pots of cash were waiting for a specific group of artists. And not even artists that were just the very very top. There was a class of investment that was occurring in the music industry and that investment followed a specific set of guidelines.
Those guidelines still exist of course but the payoff has been reduced to nothing or as near nothing as is prudent.
So, for example, the guidelines say that:
a) you should tour and play often to build up a grassroots following
b) you should record often
c) you should network and schmooze and line up your ducks with your lawyer and your manager and your agent and your coterie of assistants and helpers
d) you should invest in merch and schwag and while touring you should sell merch to people as a means of supporting your touring which you recognized was unprofitable
And if you do all of those things, there was a chance, albeit small, that at the end of a rainbow, after years of hard work, there was a middle class lifestyle. There was an apartment where you could comfortably pay rent every month. There was health insurance. There was enough money maybe even to raise a family. The promise of the “middling” class, as it were. The artisans and the tradesmen that formed the foundation of the original middle class development in the United States back in the 18th Century.
But now, the risk/reward on all that has shifted, as if it could, even more precariously to the right. That’s what happens when the pie gets smaller. There is simply less to go around.
So the question becomes, “Ok what next?”
And the problem is that you have still have the same chorus of voices proclaiming the old rules. Sometimes they’re proclaiming the old rules because they don’t know any better. Sometimes they’re proclaiming the old rules because they have a vested interest in sucking the last bits of money out of the system before it collapses completely. Sometimes they’re proclaiming the old rules because they believe in the mythology of the starving artist and want to believe that the artists they love are broken tragic figures that can suffer for the rest of our collective compromised choices.
Who knows?
But the point is that, in this day and age, those old methods simply work far less often than they used to. And, like much with the Internet age, artists are forced to confront, to reckon with a stubborn and obstinate reality that refuses to bend itself to our own preconceptions.
So, if the odds of me becoming rich and famous from making music are greatly diminished in this day and age, and were never that big to begin with, what is the point of why I’m doing this? If it’s simply to create art, is there a need to play live and perform in front of audiences? How does that accelerate the progression or further the goal of creating art? And if it’s because you still need narrative moments to create a compelling story because there’s still an opportunity to become known. Well, then how many shows and how much art is necessary to create that opening in the public consciousness?
And do we need albums? Or is it really just songs that people grativate towards? Moments in songs even. Not even the full song. Just a fragment of it.
And what does it mean to be a musician in this case? Are we all simply hobbyists? Is there a grander calling? Is it more honorable to forsake the creature comforts of a self-sustaining lifestyle? Must you be willing to give everything up for the myth of the artist in order to get the acclaim and the attention you require? And if so, isn’t something wrong with it if that acclaim and attention can’t pay you back in any real way? Can’t put food in your mouth or help you avoid a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle?
What is the point? I guess we’re all figuring it out as we go.
March 16th, 2010 at 11:56 am
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