Musician, or Businessman?

The music industry is changing fast, that's certainly no secret. From cassette to mp3, the magazine to the desktop, people from all sides of the industry have had to adapt fast. As such, there's a feeling amongst some that musicians have no right to complain if they've failed to catch up with the times. Max Easton writes of the flaw in that design.

In 2010, if you want your music to be heard, then music is a business. That's why they call it the music business. Otherwise they'd just call you someone with talent trying to create something. If that was the case, then no one would be paying for it, no one would be profiting from it, and there'd be thousands of passionate people out of jobs in public relations and media. We live in an age where you need a combination of a few thousand 16 year old myspace fans handing out flyers and an active PR company working for your benefit to get on radio, in record stores and into listener's ears. But most of all, if you're a musician, you need to desperately want to make it and throw house and home into self-promotion. You need to put down your guitar and notebook, take up a small business management course at TAFE, buy a suit, tie a half-windsor and go door knocking. You need to become a machine, or at the very least, a slave to the machine. THAT's how you become a musician in 2010...or at least, that's how some people are saying you should be.

Recently, I've been having discussions with a few people about the role of the music media. These themes were touched upon in a blog by Phil Tripp over at In Music & Media, that you can read here. Their arguments circled loosely around the idea that for musicians to be successful, they should be concerned with self-promotion; that no pity should be given to an extremely talented musician who lies undiscovered if they're not capable of, or too lazy to, get themselves out there. Phil Tripp loosely framed an undiscovered musician as someone "who believe[s] they are entitled to success because they simply inhabit the industry, managing to eke their way in; that they deserve to be recognised and rewarded because they believe they have talent; that they are owed a living because they are in a creative content business...[believing that] success is their birthright." After painting that picture of the musician, he describes the business; "fortunately, we have a new level of professional music managers who are shrewd, well educated and have greater access to the tools needed [to promote a musician to new audiences]."

I'm not here to defend the subjects of that article,  but I think it raises some very interesting points. Is it vitally important that the role of musician run hand-in-hand with the role of businessman? Should someone who applies themselves to music have a right to complain that they're not getting their dues because they haven't whored their own name? Phil Tripp doesn't seem to think so and he's not the only one. But do we really want a music industry where it's not the talent of the musicians or the genius of the songwriter's getting themselves known, but the shrewdness of their managers? Do we really want the music industry to celebrate 'shrewdness' as a quality? And do we really want to read a barrage of rhetorical questions?

I think it's very easy to palm off struggling musicians as cheap, lazy heaps of aimlessness that can't be fucked doing a journalism degree to earn the right to be critical. Sure, maybe there are a group of musicians who are just flat out too lazy to force their music upon other people. But why should they? And why should that mean that they be forced to turn their primary vocation into something secondary behind working a bar and then working to sell their music? The point has been raised that PR companies are cheap, abundant and effective...that musicians should get on board with an agency if they take themselves seriously. There's no doubt that a good PR agency does wonders...a large portion of the news stories we post on Soulshine come from the emails these same companies send through to us..but that highlights my point rather than weakens it. An interesting article will go online about John Butler or Angus & Julia Stone because they've got a big enough push behind them to get the news into someone's inbox...but what happened to that little band we've never heard of (and probably never will) touring relentlessly up and down the East Coast trying to get some sort of recognition? Did they too fade into obscurity because they were too busy thinking that success was their birthright?

This argument brings us further and further away from the reason everyone first listens to music. It was always about that hook you heard in your early teens that made you plead with your mum to get you an album even though it had a language warning on the front of it. Only the most twisted heap of shit child would have decided to get into music in order to become a band manager who relentlessly pushes an artist until they're so well known that people like them by default. Are the top ten artists on the charts right now more deserving than some of the acts releasing raved about albums to the ears only of small media outlets? Of course they are. They've got shrewd management.

I'm not here to be critical of anyone who thinks this way of music. I think it's a very valid, very accurate assessment of today's industry whether I, you or anyone not selling enough albums to affix a steady income like it or not. I just have a dream that we'll one day live in an industry where an artist was judged not by the colour of their manager, but by the content of their music.