If You “Guess You Just Weren’t Made For These Times”, Guess How Many Albums You’ll Sell

Everybody loves the music they grew up with. Many established artists still site their favorite band from high school as their formative influence. Even if they sound nothing like them on the surface, the artist still often feel their influences in the songs they right. For example, indie super-icon Kurt Vile has a deep, deep love for Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. Although you would never guess this from listening to his eight-minute psychedelic drones back-dropping his disjointed pop songs, somewhere in his head Dylan and Springsteen are still working through him. But he’s smart enough to know that trying to sound like them is a futile effort. Why? Because Bruce Springsteen already sounds like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan already sounds like Bob Dylan. It’s the same reason that contemporary classic rock bands are inherently doomed, because even if they’re technically better than Led Zeppelin, a Zeppelin fan is always going to pass up their demo for a rare bootleg of Jimmy Paige yelling at a cat and pay ten times the price for it.

The moral of the story is that if you want you’re band to be successful, you have to stay on top of the proverbial music fan’s ever evolving taste or doom yourself to obscurity. I know some bands who outright refuse to do this and bring up anecdotes of playing for a packed house in New York and people loved them there, but they can’t seem to catch on anywhere else. While I’m sure that was a rewarding and encouraging experience, there’s over 8 million people in New York. Finding a hundred people or so who love classic rock or grunge is not quite the accomplishment it seems to be. Ask yourself, how many of them bought your CDs or merch? The old mantra “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere” doesn’t refer to filling a dive bar in Bushwick. It refers to making a living, which you’ll never do if you’re still playing music that, as good as it might be, peaked before most of your target audience was born.  For tips on how to stay ahead of the curve, or at least ride its coattails, click the link below:

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