I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about just who gets affected by decisions made about how music gets from performer/writer to audience – so much of the discussion on this stuff revolves around the wishes and careers of record company execs and ‘rock stars’ – those handful of the world’s musicians who are selling albums in their hundreds of thousands or millions, who for some reason seem to be the focus of talk about the music industry.
Only that’s bollocks. As with almost any industry, the interesting stuff isn’t in the top 2%, it’s in the long-tail, the 95% of musicians that are just about making a living, on the kind of wages they make as assistant manager in Cost-cutter. Working-class musicians, often reliant on a partner’s good paying job to make up the deficit in their earned contribution to the family income.
Those are the people who play the vast majority of gigs, who play behind the celebs on the TV shows and on tour… Just regular working people like shop keepers and plumbers, who happen to be plying their trade in front of 10s, 100s or sometimes-but-not-often 1000s of people.
And they are why I just wrote a piece for Creative Choices entitled The Myth Of Success
The whole post is summed up in a GENIUS comment from the ever-illuminating and wonderful Kennan Shaw who said “First Prize is 10 years on a bus.” – the quest for celebrity is clearly BS, and shouldn’t really play much of a part in us thinking about where our industry goes… have a read of the post and let me know what you think…
There’s lots more about this issue on the way very soon, I promise.
How did what you were advised to do at school connect with what you ended up doing?