Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy

https://klangmag.co/lifers-dayjobbers-and-the-independently-wealthy-a-letter-to-a-former-student/

good article

I've often times thought the game plan should be to become a corporate sell out for just 1 track, which you could sell to someone in the music industry for bank. put all your effort into making a generic radio friendly 4 on the floor copy of the poppy shite, which the normies would suck right up. create an easy to follow melody, a few chords, straight ahead beat, polish it, make it ready for someone to sing or rap over. then use the $ made from it to support what you really want to create... but if I've thought this, then a lot of others have too, so it's a plan that lacks originality, and will probably fail...and the $ you can make from selling 1 track wouldn't be like enough to live comfortably for an extended period of time.

luck + originality + good karma. these are what it takes IMO. that can't be taught. yeah you can practice until you make it perfect, but what happens after that is all up to the flow of the universe. 

Also willpower. And don't underestimate boredom imo

(I'm lacking both for a while now btw)

I wonder if anyone has thought of starting a streamfarming collective, where a group of musicians and artists comes together to collaboratively build a few lucrative, fake Spotify-or-whatever-platform artists and then distributes the royalties according to some kind of profit sharing model so that everyone can live in modest comfort off of their share and spend their time doing music and art that they actually care about.

Anyhow, I reread The Manual (mostly, have a bit to finish up today) for the fourth or fifth tim yesterday evening and other than the stuff about the specific details of production and promotion in 1988,  it ahsn't gotten any less relevant.  Everything about popular music itself and the general psychology of the music industry is if anything more relevant than it was the last time I read it (I read it every 4 or 5 years).  Just swap in the technical details for how things work today (and skip the whole chapter about recording studios, whatever those are).

EDIT: the one (minor) flaw with that article is that the author - like 99.9% of people (or at least Americans) doesn't know what "meritocracy" means, and that all of the things he's describing ARE meritocracy.  "Meritocracy" was literalyl coined to satirize the collective delusion that social power and success are earned.  It means the opposite of what most people think it means. The intro to the second edition of Rise of the Meritocracy (the novel that coined the term) is a great, long essay/rant about that, it's worth logging in or creating an archive.org account jsut to read that part (but read the whole book if you care about this stuff)

  On 7/14/2023 at 1:06 PM, TubularCorporation said:

I wonder if anyone has thought of starting a streamfarming collective,

i think spotify does that themselves don't they? a way to kick back money to themselves or whatever. it's mentioned in a few of the "spotify is shit and full of fraud" type articles of recent years. 

  On 7/14/2023 at 4:00 PM, ignatius said:

i think spotify does that themselves don't they? a way to kick back money to themselves or whatever. it's mentioned in a few of the "spotify is shit and full of fraud" type articles of recent years. 

Yeah but that's kind of different since it's top down.  I mean like a dozen artists with no real commercial prospects getting together for a few days to make some boilerplate pop and then botfarming it to the top of the playlists, splitting the payout and repeating every 6 months or so.