Many, many, many, many, many, many, many musicians detest
the idea of ‘packaging’ their music in anyway. This is often because they don’t
want to be pigeonholed into a particular sound and retain their creative
freedom at any cost. Given the kind of work, passion and more that goes into a
song, it’s hard to blame for not wanting to think of it as a product and their
band as a business. However, there is a middle ground. You don’t have to demean
yourself by trying desperately to sound like Maroon5, but the hard truth is
that very few people, if anyone, reach what a reasonable person would consider
success completely on their own terms. So if you want thrive in the fringes,
think about which particular fringe is most appealing to you and package
yourself to be accessible within that niche fan base.
John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) did this extremely well with his
post-Sex Pistols project, Public Image Ltd. He ironically embraced the ‘music
as a business/product’ mantra, relentlessly insisting that the band was a
conglomerate and music once just one of their products. The product he was
selling was ‘irony’, made especially meaningful by his history with the Sex
Pistols – a band designed to self-destruct by sex shop owner and their manager,
Malcom McLaren – but that’s another story. But with a broader concept as their
product and a generously encompassing holistic approach, Public Image Ltd were
able to genre-jump between, punk, experimental/avant-garde, dub, and pop/new
wave. The moral of their story is that marketing yourself doesn’t necessarily
limit your creative freedom. The punk and art scenes love(d) irony, especially
in the 70s and 80s, and they just ate up what Lydon was serving. Whether he did
this cynically (by the dictionary definition, e.g., ‘ulterior motives’) or as a
cathartic statement about car-crash-career of the Sex Pistols, isn’t entirely
clear. But the point is that it worked and you can make it work for you and
have fun with it while still employing your creativity. By neglecting/resisting
this strategy, you are denying an objective truth of the music industry and
thus, will always be exiled from any meaningful success.
There is no way to win a war on objective truth. You may
triumphs in some (ultimately meaningless) battles and maybe even go on a
winning streak, but you will always lose in the end. If you still insist on
fighting the good fight and changing that truth, the best you can do is make
some tiny, tiny dents towards your goal and although someone(s) may benefit
from your efforts decades down the road, in the meantime you will be martyring
your creativity and hard work unless you can find a middle-of-the-road strategy
that satisfies you and your debt collectors. To read more, click on the link below:
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