Ouroboros

Being a musician, or trying to be, can be a stressful and laborious endeavor. In the business of bands, change is bad. New members, replacements, fill-ins... these things are all wildly unpredictable variables in what is already a very fragile and unstable situation.

Unless you've been playing together for years, you never feel supremely confident when you step on stage. Once you start playing, you're in a chain gang with these guys, and there's always that looming possibility that you're gonna trip, or somebody else is gonna trip, and you're all gonna come crashing down.

And when you inevitably do, from time to time, that single event, in that one song, even for just the briefest moment, makes all the work leading up to that performance seem futile.

Well, if anyone's watching, that is. See, there's another, even worse possibility. No one is paying attention. And if there's anyone in the bar, and they're not listening... well that's your fault. As an entertainer, it's you're job to fucking entertain. And if you can't do that... well what are you doing in this business, anyway?

There's a simple fix, of course... bring your own people. Bring people that you know want to hear you play; people that are coming out specifically to hear you play... then you're guaranteed more than just a crowd. Now you've got: An Audience.

Ah, but that's the rub isn't it? How do you get An Audience? Hoooo boy, it's tough. When nobody knows who you are, when nobody's ever heard of you or seen you, boy it's like pulling teeth to get people to come out. Friends, family, co-workers, acquaintances... these people are all sick of you asking them to come out to your show. Even if you're good. Even if you're really good. See, people want to go to where other people are. You know how everyone claims to find people to be annoying? To hate crowds? Bullshit. People want to go out to be where other people are. They're drawn to things that they can see other people enjoying. You've got to have An Audience, to get An Audience.

Impossible, you say? A paradoxical circle with no beginning or end, you say? Welcome to "trying to be a musician!" So what do you do?

Anything you can. You have to learn to get people's attention, anyway you can. You need to reach a whole shit-ton of people, just to capture the attention of a few. It's a numbers game, and the odds are severely stacked, and not in your favor.

But, it's no one's fault but our own... us wannabe musicians, we choose this roller coaster ride... we accept the pressure, the fear, the labor, the disappointment, along with relatively infrequent triumph and fleeting success...

Is it all worth it in the end? I'll let you know.

The inevitable decline of music as a commodity, and why that could be awesome.

It's hard to classify music nowadays as sellable goods. We used to take that distinction for granted, when music was only procurable in a specific physical format, like CDs, cassettes, and vinyl. More often than not these days, music is regarded less as something you can hold in your hands, and more as streams of ones and zeroes that your computer, mp3 player or cell phone pumps out through tiny speakers right into your head.

Music in this form is analogous to air... it seems to just be all around us. I can listen to the same file through a headset from my phone that I just played through my home stereo via my laptop. And I don't have to carry anything with me to do that... my music seems to be in all my devices all at once. More directly, my music is everywhere I am, without me having to think much about it.

And because of that intangibleness, I think our attitude toward music is gradually shifting. No longer do I see it as something I need to make a deposit in a cash register to obtain... even though, (especially to me, being a musician) music intrinsically has value in my mind, somehow it just feels free. It's just so accessible. Any song I can think of I can probably find streaming somewhere for free on the internet, or watch (and listen) to the video on youtube. With all that legitimately free listening to be had, who's still actually paying for it?

And, with music sales, even digital ones, starting to get a little depressing... musicians, record execs, A&R people, and pretty much everyone in the music industry in general seems scared shitless of the future. A future that's inheriting from a present where anybody with a computer a little know how and an idea can make a record; where distributing that record worldwide is as easy as picking a username and password. Where more and more people are turning to subscription based services and internet piracy to get their audio fix. In this world, a monstrous, bloated and once powerful record label is brought down much closer to the lightweight independent.

Now, why does that matter? Well, a bunch of reasons, not the least exciting of which is that the reign of corporate produced bubble gum bullshit pop, while far from over and done, has just been shot in the balls.

See, a lot of popular music for the last ten or so (um... maybe more like 30) years has been about churning out some mass produced sing-a-long, rap-a-long horseshit that appeals to the absolute lowest common denominator. And while once and a while, a visionary band or artist might somehow, against all odds, achieve some mainstream success, the landscape is dominated by 808's and shoot-me-in-the-face rap/rock/dance/pop/punk silliness. And the reason that has been the case, is that music has been analyzed and studied and boiled down to what's most profitable. And that, in turn, has been standardized, mass produced, mass marketed and in general meticulously engineered to be attractive to... dum dum dummmm... the consumer.

Because that's what people are to the boards of big corporations. Consumers. They produce, we consume. And so clearly, they want to make the thing that the greatest number of people are likely to be coerced into consuming. Corporate pop is the twinkie of the music world. It's cheap, it's easy, it's always the same and it will always sell.

But if record labels and corporate america can't find a way to adequately shovel that manure down people's throats, then it opens up doors for actual music to leak into peoples lives. The ubiquitousness of music makes it hard to control. And if you can't control it, you can't sell it. And if you can't sell it, then there's less motivation to make so much of it, at least if your main motivation for making it in the first place is to turn a profit.

So let's theorize. If music becomes too hard to control, and therefore sell, it would be less attractive to mass produce. That would conceivably open the door for people who make music for reasons other than profit to actually be heard. People who make music because, say, they love it. And the easier it is for people who love making music to be heard, the more legitimately good music will be out there for people to hear. In theory.

As music continues to morph more and more into a service, rather than goods - where you pay not for a specific album or track or file, but for access to a stream or station or library like pandora or last.fm or muzic, or any of the other million streaming services out there - the control of companies who make the records over which records get heard is quickly dwindling. What that means is that, potentially, someday soon, on whatever it is that passes for radio in the future, you could be just as likely to hear Lady Gaga as Diane Birch.

And that's a good thing.