Be really curious of your thoughts
I think the way Mary Spender framed this on this week’s podcast was really enlightening and optimistic, and she’s walked the talk.
I’m going to do a follow up Q&A episode, so feel free to pop your questions below
No
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I think it’s a great time to be a YouTuber. I think if you gear your revenue stream to be popular on YouTube you could do well. Maybe ok go style videos. But let’s be real YouTube’s structure by far pushes long form content.
Mixing reviews, teaching, with songs is maybe a good way to make a living but it’s throughly different to where most musicians want to focus their energy on
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This doesn’t make it sound such.
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It’s certainly a sign of the times seeing where Field Music are at and we talked about building platforms that work better for artists on this podcast
I feel like a collective off ramp from the current platforms needs more pied pipers to lead the charge
It’s interesting that even tho I follow Field Music on every platform this Doors post was one of their first posts that have cut through for a while - and I wonder if that is half the battle, having to create art and to share your humanity, in a way that is calibrated to the attention economy algorithms
A lot needs to change but so do a lot of approaches of all of us
Are you sure?
I’ve made a bit of a digest of the podcast and included some of the stats on how well the music biz is doing on this carousel
https://www.instagram.com/p/DMDXXN2t-V0/?igsh=NTMzdDhzeHJiNGpp
They’ll be calling it Indie music next
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No
The best time was probably the mid to late 80s where bands and labels could get a grand together (somehow!) and get on the enterprise allowance scheme, making enough to live on. There was also, paradoxically, a better conveyor belt of music with the filter of DJs and magazines (mostly, sometimes if was just their mates) promoting the best stuff to us.
Lots of people now bemoan “the gatekeepers”, by which they mean music fans like me who set up media organisations and online communities to try to help artists find an audience. And back then, people could certainly have some sort of bird’s eye view of what was happening in music, like film reviewers still do of the year in movies, and work out what to champion.
Now, I think we need human filters and ambassadors championing artists more than ever, at a time when doing so is probably the least supported and respected as it has ever been.
With all the AI slop, we need some sort of food standards agency for music, that checks what we’re sticking in our ears is legit and how we invest our time (and money) (and attention) in music is worth it.
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Exactly this - and just like back in the day, you discover your own “gatekeepers”, who are basically just people with the drive and passion to want to tell people about music. I was pretty lucky that Mark Goodier and Steve Lamacq pretty much liked the same stuff I did (or seemed to on the surface) so I could just stick with the easy daily BBC option.
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I’m gonna say definitely not
For reaching an audience it definitely is. For being fairly remunerated for any of the work you do (recordings, live performance), definitely not.
Re: gatekeepers, I absolutely don’t mean
gatekeepers to me are like institutions such as the BBC or Glastonbury who are impenetrable for certain kinds of artist while having a massive audience. On a smaller scale, gatekeepers still exist in terms of promoters/venue owners who control lots of live spaces in a city, or who might operate in a niche and be the go-to in that area for a specific kind of music.
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Tbf, lots of people have thrown the gatekeeper tag at DiS (especially back when the website had 2-3 million readers a year from 2008 until I popped it on pause in 2019)
If you’re lucky enough to catch the wave of some kind of virality (even if it’s fairly low level), it seems this can be parlayed into some fairly decent live shows, which’ll perpetuate the content/minor virality/shows cycle. From that perspective - you can use the various platforms available to try and navigate this. Chloe Slater is a good example of this, I saw her stuff popping up on Tik Tok over the last year and it was clear that kind of less annoying 1975-isms through a non-male prism would catch said wave. I’ve no idea if she has/had some form of funding though. That seems to be the other piece of the puzzle. You need a fair bit of gear/assistance, as well as the time and patience, to create that continual conveyor belt of content. I know a few people that started doing this but it’s a volume game and it takes its toll.
Let’s see if we can work out the best time to be an independent artist.
First, what was the best Geological era to be an independent artist?
- Precambrian (big bang - approx 541 million years ago)
- Paleozoic (when the little fellas arrived, 541 million years ago - 252 million years ago)
- Mesozoic (when the big fellas arrived, 252 million years ago - 66 million years ago)
- Cenozoic (when the human-like fellas arrived, 66 million years ago - present day)
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voters
Depends whether you liked T-Rex when they were just acoustic with bongos or full on glam rock, I guess.
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I’ve been enjoying the few episodes I’ve managed to catch thank you Sean! They’re really nicely produced too. No idea how anyone makes money inside or outside the arts these days but I think the most important thing is real life connection and community. They’re probably the only things that ate going to cut through in the long run. I love that those have been a running theme in the podcast from loss of different areas.
I recently did an interview for a journal for some people at a uni in Edinburgh on my practice with collaborations and it all came down to the community around a local label and events, how we support each other and how we all make no money. Maybe when they’ve written up all their interview for their journal article they’d be up for talking about their findings. I’m looking forward to hearing what they find out either way.
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Call me a fatalist…but whenever I see artists (in this case musicians) talk about marketing themselves, I switch off. I understand the need to consider this if you are a musician and want to spend all your time doing it, but it is completely at odds with creating art.
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