A long-time, part-time musician -- one of those sensible guys who kept his day job -- recounted recently in a recording bulletin board a short history of his long musical efforts, his recordings, the sensible limits he'd tried to place on his aspirations, but seemed to wonder, ultimately, what it was all for...
I've wrestled with many of these questions... ultimately, it depends on what you want out of music. If it's money -- there are a lot
easier ways of making it, for the most part. Money isn't a very good reason to get into making music -- or engineering/production at this point, either, studios are closing and the ranks of un- and under-employed recordists is swelling every day.
It's similar to the period in the 50s when good, affordable professional-grade camera equipment became available. Suddenly, photography schools were popping up like flies, usually tied to government GI/student loan programs. It produced a big explosion of interest in more advanced forms of photography -- but the economic activity was typically restricted to fly by night schools taking advantage of government loan programs in a "glamorous" field, and the burgeoning ranks of under-employed photogs and would-be photogs simply devalued the services of the experienced, seasoned pros who
had been making some kind of living.
I think you've got to look at some of the underlying value equations in your post... You find yourself wondering
if it's all worth it... and, reasonably enough, you're looking for a measure of that worth. In this society/culture, one of the first places we have tended to look for
valuation is in monetary.
If the search for valuation is restricted to
money, I'm afraid the equation is pretty bleak.
But I'm betting that money was never the biggest motivator for you as you learned to play, write, and record. (Although, hey, you're human, you could dream, couldn't you? ;) )
But taking money out of the equation (at least partially) allows us to focus on other aspects of musical life where one
does have a chance of finding satisfaction and a sense that it's not all wasted.
For some of us, just the simple act of playing is a big reward. Some folks bowl. Some folks do crosswords or watch TV. Musicians are lucky in that, at least sometimes,
other folks may enjoy their efforts from time to time as well.
But becoming
too focused on that external, social aspect can lead us
away from the fundamental zen -- and the simple joy -- of simply making music. There's the satisfaction of learning and honing one's skill... and there's the uniquely satisfying pleasure of
doing something /
making something that brings pleasure.
I remember one of the first times when I was learning to play when I sat on a rock in the sunshine and just played for the simple joy of it. There I was, for one of the first times, it seemed like, doing something that entertained me and I wasn't paying anyone an hourly fee or a subscription or sitting through a bunch of advertising. I was plunking on my $20 guitar and music was coming out.
That was really something.
Still... man is a
social beast. And we musicians may be driven in ways that crossword puzzle aficionadi and weekend bowlers are not.
Twenty-five years ago, one could set up a home recording setup for the equivalent of a couple thousand dollars today... but getting the music into folks' hands was
pretty difficult. Distribution was largely tied up by big labels or sometimes equally thuggish indie distributors. You could put your tunes out on cassettes -- but that was slow and expensive and distro was typically hand to hand or maybe through personal relationships with local record stores who would take a few cassettes on consignment (out of friendship or just to keep you off their back).
Now, we have amazing avenues of replication and distribution. With a few clicks you can put your latest work right up on the web and folks can be hearing it right away. The trick once you're out there, though, of course, is as it has always been, getting the audience to meet you halfway... getting
them to click -- and hopefully stay tuned through the whole song.
(Getting them to engage in an
economic transaction, particularly in the current music paradigm, is a far more difficult proposition. It's an uphill slog and I think we can all see the shape of the bottom line in the mist: almost no one is really making much money at this outside of hard-working touring bands [point-of-performance sales are still one of the big drivers for sales of non-popstar music] and the heavily packaged and promoted
product that the big companies gamble on pushing into the distro tube, typically at great cost in terms of advertising and "promotional considerations" [various forms of kickbacks, bribes and payola, not-quite-legitimized by the notion that they are
standard music business practice].)
Some folks will listen, most won't. A percentage of those who listen may like one's music, others won't.
In the new online world of micro-indie music distribution, raw numbers aren't hard to come by, as a rule. But making any kind of reasonable sense of them
can be.
I have a folkie blog/podcast filled with mostly quite impromptu (and often quite sloppy and occasionally
really bad) versions of my songs. It's been going since 2005. When I started, I posted every day and, at the peak, I had 30-50 people visiting a day. Over the years, I accumulated around 400 recordings and those have been downloaded something over 300,000 times. Does that mean 300,000 fans? No, of course not. (It may well mean 299,999 folks screwing up their faces and stabbing at the skip button.)
In fact, over the years I've collected a number comments from visitors and listeners and readers. (My blog/podcast is a two-pronged fork,a little write-up, often in the form of a vignette or anecdote related to the song, an image, and links to the song in various forms). But you can count that feedback in the
scores of comments or messages, certainly not even hundreds.
Still, we know most folks tend to listen anonymously. In the so-called Golden Age of Television, network execs used the reckoning that every letter that actually came into corporate offices represented about 35,000 viewers. (This was before organized letter-writing campaigns and particularly latter day email campaigns made those equations all but meaningless.)
So, for those of us
not getting out into the clubs and coffeehouses,
putting it out there may be something of an act of faith.
As I paused writing the passage above, wondering where to go from there, Neil Young's "On the Beach" came up in my randomized playlist...
[quote]... I went to the radio interview
I ended up alone at the microphone...[/quote]
Young repeats the line 3 times in a sleepily spooky voice, referring to a long-ago incident early in his career when, as I heard the story, he ticked off a late-night underground radio DJ supposed to be interviewing him.
I'm left with that image of Young... late at night, alone, talking into a mic to...
maybe no one.
To paraphrase one of my own, old songs,
I don't want to go cosmic on you baby... but ultimately, isn't
all communication ultimately based on faith? -- Faith that, somehow, someone will pick up the signals we're sending out and maybe, somehow, against all odds, suss out something vaguely parallel to what we meant to say?
We're all parallel lines... in theory, we'll all meet at
infinity.
Until then, I'm sitting on this rock, in the sunshine, strumming my guitar...
)
