Has working in the music industry lessened your love of music?

Also, it seems lots of people get into the music industry for the wrong reasons (i.e. the first Fleetwood Mac album, or whatever, changed their life...so they got into the industry despite not having any sincere business acumen). The music industry, it seems, is awash with vocational wreckage, ennui and unfulfillment writ large.

Being in a band that was trying to "Make It" quite seriously in The Music Industry for 4 years almost destroyed my love of music entirely.

The more successful we were, and the deeper we got into the actual mechanics of the music industry, the less I enjoyed it, to the point where, after the band broke up, I went through a quite serious midlife crisis/major depression which I didn't really recover from until very recently.

The only way I was able to recover my love of music was to totally remove myself from the industry. Stop playing gigs, stop going to gigs, stop talking to many of my friends who were still in the music industry, basically go without music for almost a year.

Only then could I actually get my love of music back, through things that I discovered myself, on my own.

I always contended that the best a musician/band SHOULD hope for is minor cult status. That, and not having your music cost you anything to make and play.

x-post. Although I see your logic, PP, really, that kind of attitude just smacked to me of self defeatism and common or garden British Fear Of Success.

Being in a band in the music industry is a cutthroat outing to start with. No matter where you aim, chances are, you will fall short of the mark. Do you think that cult bands set out with the aim of being cult bands, or did they really believe that they were the best band in the world?

If you don't go into it with the belief that you are the best band in the world, what is the point in even trying?

The best you should hope for is to have fun and not have people fuck with you. Just because this is a truism (if it is) doesn't make it any less true

xpost

Uh, because it's not a competition?

Because its fun and exciting and important to write and play music!

What I meant is that this is a lot healthier that to want to "make it big". I really don't think that you probably should shoot for anything in particular apart from "I want to, or need to, make music".

I'm not a self confident person. I write songs because I *have* to, because I would go mad if I didn't. It took someone with self confidence and belief in those songs to drag me out of my bedroom, and stick me on a course which would end up on the stage of the Shepherds Bush Empire.

I would never have got there if we'd just aimed to be "a cult band" or "just a bunch of mates playing together for fun."

I mean, honestly, the band I'm in now is just a bunch of mates playing together for fun. I have modest goals now, to play gigs in London, maybe a few out of town gigs in the UK. It's a completely different thing.

If you are going to take that step and decide to go and actually try your hand in the Music Industry, then you had better have the self belief and determination. Because if you don't, then you will be eaten alive and have your ego turned to mincemeat. That's what happened to me.

It's all very well to say that it's art or something, and it's not a competition. But at the end of the day, everything is a competition.

(I don't actually believe any of this any more, in fact, this is the stuff that f*cked me up so badly, but I do feel like I have to explain our motivations at the time.)

But why does being the best band in the world = *most successful* band.

**if you dont think youre the best in the world, theres little to drive you**

You just have to think you're good, not necessarily the best. Because you never are.

The Most Unforgivable Thing (What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Stronger)

Because I would be going insane with grief and loneliness if I didn't have music.

And please note, I'm not saying that these things were the motivations to be in a band, but they were the motivations to try bloody hard to "Make It" in the music industry. Which is not the same thing at all as being in a band with your mates.

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This song was ment for me, I would be bagin some guy and with my luck my mother would probally walk in or something and then I would be screwed! I am trying to meet new peeps so e-mail me!

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THIS SONG IS PIMPIN LIKE HELL!!!!!!!!!! IF ANYBODY HATES THIS SONG AND HATES ASIAN PPL E-MAIL ME AT [email protected] YOU CANT HATE AZN PPL IF U DO U BETTER WATCH OUT

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Shaggy I think that song is rediculous!!!!!!!!!!!!!And so are you!!I don't like that song or any of your other songs!!You are an AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

my parents have owned a restaurant for nearly 40 years, which is a lot like the music business, in some ways. [especially when it comes to dealing with the fickle public]

ive been raised to not a) get so crazy over anything and b) do the best that i can. taking that approach to plain parade and combining it with my appreciation for labels like simple machines and merge records, its easy to see why we're not "industry" at all. i guess one of the good things about indie rock was that it taught me you didnt have to follow the formula that the music industry dictated.

as a photographer, ive found more success in applying this easygoing approach than i did when i took my art "seriously" as a freelancer, applying for grants and submitting work for exhibitions.

all of this just sounds stupid and feels borderline new-agey to me, so ill shut up.

truer words spoken. i think people actually prefer easy-going characters than stressed out seriousness. this approach has made me honest-to-goodness friends and has given me alot more work and well, i just feel more 'a-part-of-it' then i did before when i was super-serious.

My love and passion gets totally sucked up by the daily corporate vacuum when I have to deal with the overt greed, consumer's lowest common denominator approach, record company hype and tediousness of product placement that comes with this industry.

To the bosses upstairs, music is a collective by-product for the fat cats to get richer of anything floggable. I used to love my job and now I now I just gotta get out for the sake of me totally losing my passion/grip for new and old discoveries. I have become a battery-hen to the chain store and any inpiration I want, I will - and always have - need to search out entirely for myself!

If I (or we) don't make budget, add-on sales or get numbers of pre-orders, etc, we get our arses kicked from above. Anything we try to push on to the public's headspace is done very discreetly as we serviced with in-store CDs for every given week and MUST be played continuously every day as record companies pay for all this promotion.

My love of music is now replaced by bitter and twisted cynic that reflects my attitude to work whereby mostly everything I now have to put out on the shelves is mere "product", just like a supermarket!

I hate to say that but the industry is killing me slowly. My desire to want to listen, make, and appreciate good music had been superseeded by getting as much dollars in the tills and I hate myself for corrupting my soul!

Deep down.. the passion is still somewhere inside. I know there's great music, and we stock it, but getting the consumer aware of it is a harder task than what you think.

When someone offhandedly says "...Geez, it must be great working in a record/CD store... playing any musics you want....!!" it is very hard to explain how truly f**ked up this industry is on a surface level. Bullshit, deception, ego and superfluousness runs very deep when you are dealing with the might of those actually paying your wage.

I'm thankful I've go a job but, at the end of the day, the satisfaction quotient is low. All power to the independent stores doing it for the genuine love!

Is "just because it's fun" really not enough? If you're not having fun, how do you expect your audience to?

Also, if you're not having fun when you're at the bottom, what the fuck would it be like if you ever actually made it to the top?

And obviously, the motivations for people who just want to make music with their mates and occasionally play the Bull and Gate are quite different from those who want to get signed to EMI and play the Shepherds Bush Empire.

It's like the difference between people who want to kick a ball around in Hyde Park at the weekend, and people who actually want to go out and play for England. Or something. Different reasons, different priorities.

I'm sick of repeating myself on this one, so I'm going to stop now.

I can remember when we were starting out, we played gigs at the Betsey Trotwood, and my bassist could never understand the bands that we played with, how they were perfectly happy just to be playing the Betsey. Like, she only ever saw playing the Betsey as a stepping stone to be getting somewhere else. It was almost like she got angry at bands that had no ambitions beyond playing the Betsey. I remember her saying that if that was as far as we ever got, then there was no point to doing it, that she'd rather not do it at all.

Which was the choice that she eventually made.

The difficulty (in my experience) is that if you want to get beyond the Betsey Trotwood, everyone in the band has to share the same ambitions and be able and prepared to take the same risks.

We were offered an opportunity: me and the bassist (why does it always seems to be the bassist incidentally?) were prepared to take a chance and go for it; the guitarist wasn't (the keyboard player and drummer were both frankly replaceable - the guitarist wasn't).

Afterwards I didn't play again for a couple of years, but in the end I enjoyed it too much and couldn't keep away but was happy playing our local equivalents to the Betsey Trotwood from then on.

The bassist sold his bass and has never played since.

(And yes, I say this as a former session bassist who was forever being drafted in to replace or overdub rubbish bassists who just wanted to be rock stars.)

Afterwards I didn't play again for a couple of years, but in the end I enjoyed it too much and couldn't keep away but was happy playing our local equivalents to the Betsey Trotwood from then on.

I am getting to this point now. But it's taken a year and a half of not playing.

Some of my favourite music ever made was made by people who probably had to suppliment their income with other jobs. Playing in dives to a couple dozen people. Yet, because of the music they made, I would never ever say that these people lacked ambition!

Not at all - the key issue in my experience is that everyone in the band has to have a similar idea about what the ambitions of the band are.

The turning point was being offered a gig headlining a Friday night at the Metro on Oxford Street, and her turning it down cause it wasn't "big" enough. Christ! At that point, I went and booked a bunch of solo gigs, opening the bill at places like the Windmill, just to try and recapture the fun of playing. Of course, playing by yourself isn't exactly fun.

I think this is quite true - at least in my personal experience, perseverance is one of the most important ingredients.

i think not being serious about it made me a better photographer. i think the work im doing now is much better than when i was in art school and those first couple years when i was primarily freelancing.

bringing this back to music though...

up until march, plain parade used to book a club in philly called doc watsons. prior to our booking there, the club had a rep for being one of the worst venues in town [shady owners, horrible bands, etc etc]. sara and i worked really hard to turn their image problem around but in the end we kept on running into more problems and as a result, making ourselves completely miserable in the process.

most of the time the bookers are separate from the actual staff, but that wasnt the case for plan parade. not only did we book our own shows, we worked them in addition to our regular dayjobs.

rather than butt our heads against the proverbial wall we kept running into, we decided that brain-damage for the sake of music wasnt worth it, and left booking the space.

now that we're independent of a venue, we're much happier. we dont have to book shows for the sake of filling gaps in the calendar. we have great relationships with other clubs in town, so if we feel one space isnt a good fit for a band, we can plug in a show at another space. most importantly, we're booking shows for what we feel are the right reasons.

For me the key to longevity is understanding that the only true reward for making music is the act of making music. Enjoying the creative process SHOULD be enough. In this day and age you don't need a lot of money to record your songs, touring sucks, and why even bother with labels?

If you can find a cool day job (for me it's graphic design), then you can enjoy stability AND put out all the records your little heart desires. You really can have the best of both worlds.

i am very fortunate in that if i encounter an asshole in the industry, i can choose never to have to deal with them ever again and unless i'm working, i never hang out with 'biz' types (although, i'd gladly hang out with mr. 803 more if he wasn't so darned straight edge!)*

a) flogging Pro Tools and other DAW-ishness at a specialist shop that caters to both pro and newbie alike,

and

b) cranking out jingles, voiceover demos, and club remixes in a small-budget studio run by myself and a partner.

Do I hate the music industry? Oh good Lord, I do. But do I still love music?
Absolutely. The trick has been to find the dividing line in my head between "This is the wankery I must abide in order to keep myself in food, shelter, and gear" and "Wow, I'm really digging this new (fill in the blank) record".

My moments of cynicism are routinely balanced by moments of discovery and excitement.

Do any of you still work in the biz?

I wasn't in the music business per se, but I was in bands for about 15 years trying to 'make it'. So I had to deal with people that were in the music industry on an independent level (never major labels, that would be horrible).

With that in mind, I always avoided associating with artists and musicians and sound engineers, etc., during that time, which sounds strange. No one understood why I did it and I never felt I needed to explain myself. Thus, most people saw me as some pretentious bastard. These people also thought that I thought I was better than everyone else (because it just so happened a lot of people thought highly of my work and my musicianship/abilities). Mind you I never bragged, but I never spoke either. I would let the music speak for itself, but people in the arts generally do not use their analytical skills, unfortunately. They're too busy socialising.

Anyway, I never associated with them because I did not want to deal with the 'industry types'. Luckily, I had very good friends and band mates that did that and a few did understand where I was coming from, but they also understood I was a very private person, so they never wanted to talk about me to others, as they felt it was not right. I respect/respected these people.

This is how I prevented a lot of people ruining music for me. I used to listen to stuff and my musician friends would be very surprised because they associated it with people that were not 'serious' music listeners. The thing is they were used to being in music circles so they were tainted by what others thought was cool and what wasn't, whereas I listened to stuff on my own accord and as an analytical listener, developing my own theories and aesthetics; finding my own way, forging my own path, if you will. I read books about music, sure, but I never talked about music with people (and very rarely with my band mates). I still don't, except on a couple of forums like this, which you'll notice I hardly participate in.

In the end, I spent thousands and thousands of dollars on music gear and music recording, then sold it all. I grew tired of music. I'm not a hateful person (on the contrary), but I started hating music. I felt art and music had ruined my life and felt very betrayed. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has experienced something similar. There is a slew of personal details I'm leaving out. But it taught me a lot about myself as a person, about society, social interactions, money, and the nature of humanity. I don't like to surround myself in a negative environment. I have enough problems on my own.

Despite that, the latter half of my music 'endeavour', I spent writing music for myself, and never even bothered to release any of it. A few close friends sometimes would nag me about it and I'd let them have a listen, but would be bothered to actually give them a copy of it. In the end, I destroyed most of what I had (when I sold everything I had and moved out of the country).

Like many, I'm sure I can write a book on my experiences.

My thoughts? Don't let it jade you? Know what you like, be authentic, listen to music with an honest ear, don't cover up your authentic impressions. A lot of people are cynics and cover up what they feel or like just to fit in or a lot of critics feel they need to give some deeper meaning to music and judge it without ever having step foot in the musician's path. Some music doesn't need to be judged, because it wasn't meant to be judged. There are all types of music. Critics aren't musicians for a reason. And listeners aren't musicians for a reason. When we listen as a musician, we are not hearing as a listener. When we are listening as a critic, we are not listening as a musician or a listener. If that makes sense. Yet each music is not complete with one or the other. This is the beauty of music. It is everything and nothing.

Check out Claude Debussy's Monsieur Croche, antidilettante, if you ever get the chance. My aesthetics derive from a lot of old literature from that 'school' of thought.

The nice thing is that as a musician or composer, even though I sold everything, I never stopped composing music. I still write in my head. I still come up with melodies, rhythms, structures, ideas. That will never stop. It is part of who I am. I don't need an instrument or external things or to record it. It's all in me.

It has been about 3 years (2 years since I completely stopped writing music), and I do sometimes miss it, but I know my focus is on completely different things now.

I never go to shows anymore, but since I still know people in the music industry, I go to a couple sometimes just to support them or to check in with them. They are all my age, yet I feel the whole music scene, especially with the type of indie music most of them do, is so childish. I don't recognise them anymore. They're not the people who I befriended. They put on an act. They have this 'cool kid' complex as if we were back in secondary school. It's very strange for me. But maybe this is because I've distanced myself from them.

My friends who are not signed are more level-headed and I actually do keep in touch with them and we seem to share similar ideas. I like these people. They're some of the best friends I have.

If I ever go back to music, I would probably be someone like Bill Fay, without the greatness, of course :-)

I always hated performing. I hated marketing my music and advertising it. Just listen to it! If you don't like it, fine. If you do, great!

But it could never be my career.

Anyway, it's too complicated to explain it all in a silly forum.

Sorry for the long reply.

Yet each music is not complete without one or the other.*

Yes.

I never got that close to the 'industry' as a performer, but if I had, I think I'd have been the same.

Also, this:

I still write in my head. I still come up with melodies, rhythms, structures, ideas. That will never stop. It is part of who I am. I don't need an instrument or external things or to record it. It's all in me.

It has been about 3 years (2 years since I completely stopped writing music), and I do sometimes miss it, but I know my focus is on completely different things now.

.. change it to 10 years, and this is exactly me. I'd add that "in my head, all these songs are awesome, they would only be ruined if I actually wrote them down or recorded them. That Flaming Lips thing of "USB sticks inside jelly skulls", I understand what that is 'saying'...

I don't make music, but I work for a label now, after being a freelance journalist from 1998-2011 (and still one, though I don't write nearly as much as I used to). It has not lessened my love of music, because a) the label I work for puts out a kind of music I would listen to anyway, and b) I have outlets - including a site/occasional print zine I run - to talk about other stuff I like. Plus, the people that I work with really love the bands and records we put out. Honestly, what bums me out the most is Internet turds who either know nothing about how labels actually work, or (in one particularly annoying case) worked for a label but couldn't hack it, and bitch constantly about "sellouts" and "corporate record labels" and other empty-headed bullshit.

I've been in and out of the outskirts and up and down the lower rungs of the music industry (and occasionally marginally involved with some semi-hip stuff) for about 10 years. Hasn't hurt my enjoyment at all. But I can easily see how being in the wrong parts of the industry (high-pressure, big biz) would steal your soul.

I do have to say that in my experience the cliche about music industry people being assholes is totally untrue. Maybe the more high-powered ones are, but other than the founder of Anti Records, everyone has been very cool with me, despite my being a non-entity as far as the industry is concerned. And I'm in Los Angeles, the supposed epicenter of industry assholishness.

Really good thread.

Have to think through my contribution to it, and post.