Like There’s Nothing Else In The World

Can we stop pretending like everything isn’t hard right now for musicians?:

Content is over saturated, from streaming to socials, even when you get good numbers converting that into meaningful connections is hard as platforms want to keep usurers scrolling.

Creating content that’s engages with an audience in a way that creates the connections you want, and doesn’t just serve the algo is hard

Touring is on its knees. Venues are closing like never before, ticketing companies and agencies are buying up remaining venues and driving up merch cuts.

Touring costs are soaring.

Vinyl is expensive to make, store and ship and the waiting times are crazy. Not to mention manufactures going under and labels loosing their deposits and stock.

Mailing lists can be great once you get going but conversion rates are 20% at best.. and creators are often are being driven to offer creator services as their trade.

Music discovery is dependant on platforms and algorithms and have lost the personal touch.

Streaming subscriptions are stalling and platforms could be moving to pay to upload and further creator monetisation.

Radio stations that have any incentive to play new music are going out of business.

The platformisation of the creative industries and our whole lives is leading to misaligned incentives and no one building for sustainability. Just reaching the next round or driving share price.

All the tools we use including distribution have switched to subscriptions.

Consumers are fed an endless cycle of content designed to zone them out and keep them on app, leaving less and less attention for art, personal connections and well anything else.

Do I need to go on ?

Shit is hard, but possible. Don’t get lost in the negative hype cycles that feed engagement. Build your own world, find value in new places. Focus on your wellbeing.

Remember the value the things you love bring to your life, and be conscious of how they can sustained in healthy ways. Help them grow, think long term and don’t just get lost in the doom scroll.

And finally…

Create because of the way it makes you feel.

Something is wish I had realised earlier: aim to make your day to day life now what you want it to be. What do you want your hours to be spent on? Too many of use make that our goal at the end .. when are ‘successful’. What do you want your perfect day to be? Exercise, see friends, have a relationship, spend some creating? Start by making one day a week your perfect day, then try and increase that over time.

Don’t loose sight of what really matters. What at the end of the road will you remember? What are the things that inspire you, heal you and ground you? We all look online for everything, but sometimes the smallest worlds are more rewarding than trying to reach the whole world.

It’s crazy we are always battling this narrative that we should be happy with the bare minimum, that because the system is failing independent musicians, that survival is enough. It’s not. We can build new ideas, new approaches and we will adapt. We can find value in other places than where we are told to look. We can aim for more.

What matters? What will we remember?

Don’t wait. I’ve never started any project knowing what I’m doing. Learning because you have an idea you want to execute, or just experimenting until you find the right idea is the best way to learn.

We have been become trapped by our own perception of where the value is in what we create. The formats we are used to have become our metric for how we judge our output, and thus are intertwined with how we value ourselves. We are not one thing. We digest the world and translate it through a process, and all the facets that make up our lives have value and contribute to our art. We need to rethink how we see ourselves, our creativity and what is value to us. The process is the value.