Here are some excerpts from a recent discussion between Steve Lawson and I. Steve is a phenomenal bassist/composer and a maverick in the emerging solo bass scene worldwide. A smart and articulate chap in his own right, he hosts his own blog at http://steve.anthropiccollective.org

OK, a little backstory - the marvel that is Billy Bragg wrote a piece for the New York Times last week about how social networks are ripping off artists, and we deserve a piece of the cash when they sell for hundreds of millions.

Billy’s logic is fine, it’s just a little out of date, and as the post I’m about to disagree with vehemently says, if that’s the problem, don’t put your music on there. It’s a trade off, and our best way to deal with it is to get involved with the unions and collection agencies that are supposed to be fighting our corner but won’t be able to accurately unless we tell them what our corner is.

Anyway, in response to Billy’s piece, Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch wrote a response entitled These Crazy Musicians Think They Should Still Get Paid For Recorded Music.

I’m not a big fan of his abrasive writing style, based on this post, but here’s the quote with which I take most umbrage -

“Recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist.”

See, I can understand that from the point of view of an artist whose whole Raison d’être is playing live. Great, use MP3s to give away. But to suggest that the art of making a great record is JUST there to drive awareness is horseshit.

Why? Because records changed my life - there are records that have become part of the fabric of who I am, how I see the world, have even brought me together with some great friends. The ART of making records stands alone as an artform in its own right, it’s not there to serve a marketing need.

The need to market, to recognise that attention is a monetizable currency in the new media world is vital, the need to spread the word about what we do is paramount if we want people to connect with it, but we as artists need to hang on to what’s important.

As I commented over the weekend about the danger of social network marketing changing the way we right, this new media model can really fuck things up creatively, in just the same way that record companies desperate for singles scuppered the careers of album-oriented bands for years. Some triumphed (Talk Talk, for example) and made great records DESPITE it. Some other acts no doubt took the challenge and wrote some killer pop songs that became part of the fabric of our lives. But to have such a heinously mechanistic view of the art of making records is anathema to what we do and love, and what made the records that changed our lives so special.

I’m sure Michael writing about it from the perspective of Tech Crunch is going to skew his thinking in a mechanised techie direction that ignores what music is FOR. The inference in his post is that the music is there to serve a market, when the opposite has to be true if you want to create ART. And I don’t mean ‘art’ in any pretentious lofty sense, just music that’s anything other than a glorified jingle. Music-as-advert is a million miles away from everything that makes music special to me as an artist and listener.

The big issue is how we keep that artistic integrity in a world where we don’t have other people to do the marketing side of things for us. In an ideal rarified never-existed-in-the-first-place version of Music 1.0, record labels left the artists to create, and got on with the marketing. Now we have to do it all, and keeping the two separate requires mindfulness, and doesn’t require us to listen to the ill-conceived BS from tech-heads like Arrington.
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Steve,

I think you have misinterpreted the spirit in which Arrington says “Recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist.” If you read his comments further down the post, you’ll see that he clarified his position, and took some of the venom out of that statement.

What he meant to infer is that recorded music is the most important marketing material to drive awareness of an artist.

But yeah, you’re right, his delivery sucks.

“The ART of making records stands alone as an artform in its own right, it’s not there to serve a marketing need.”

You’re absolutely right but I can’t help disagreeing just a bit. Your music, your shoes, your personality, your bass, hell, EVERYTHING about who you are as an artist and performer is there to satisfy a marketing need - whether you intended it or not. It’s all of those things about you that potentially attract people to your art. And in the end, isn’t that what we want?

If you place your music in the marketplace, you are a marketER.

And in the spirit of what you call mindfulness, I think the ability to reason with some cold analysis may help the cause once in awhile.
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Hi Aaron,

thanks for your post - I intend to blog more intently about this subject, because I think this confilct is at the heart of what’s wonderful about the potential of the web and appalling about the direction so much of the discussion is taking…

As is clear from my web-presence (I hope), I’m all in favour of marketing what I do. I do it as much as I can. What I HAVE to separate, though, is the process of creating music from the process of inviting people to listen to it once it’s done. HOW I market it is very much a savvy decision, but I try really hard to avoid letting it affect the way I make the music. To remove the mechanistic, money-oriented hit-driven motives of major record labels only to replace them with a web-culture that pushes artists towards viewing their work as marketing fodder would be to miss the glorious freedom that we’re offered.

Surely, if we’re to acknowledge the magic of the cost of making and distributing music being driven down, we should be looking to explore our creativity in a way that is LESS fettered by marketing BS rather than seeing the process of attracting an audience as our primary aim… that is unless we’ve bought into some music 1.0 BS about being a ‘full time professional musician’ being more important than the music we make…

So my art (and all those other things you so perceptively list) DO fulfill a marketing portfolio but it is neither a ‘need’, not their purpose… at least, ideally, to me, it’s not…

But, thanks, you’re right, I need to explore this further - I’ll be doing a podcast ASAP with Jeff Schmidt about this very topic - he’s got a similarly techno-darwinian view of all this to Arrington, despite being a monstrously creative bassist/composer… so that’ll be fun. :o)
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Hi Steve,

Y’know, you’re right about distinguishing the process of making the music from distributing it once it’s done. I should have said that even if it was implied.

I think from a marketing point-of-view, what I’d like to clarify is that I too agree that music creating and performing shouldn’t be unduly influenced by a “sales plan”. Quite the contrary, I believe the smart artist will draft an effective marketing plan once the music has been made and let the music be the catalyst - not the other way around. If not, at least reconcile the right and left brains of it all.

In some way though, a little calculation, even at the expense of some artistic ideals (Where the line is drawn is up to each.) can go a long way to sustain him/her in the long term. We all have to find a way to keep going.

And if I do insinuate compromise, I only do so in the s m a l l e s t sense.

And all that without yet using the word “entertainment”.
But that’s another discussion for another day…;-)

Looking forward to your podcast!

reference: http://steve.anthropiccollective.org/archives/2008/03/records_changed.html
reference: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/22/these-crazy-musicians-still-think-they-should-get-paid-for-recorded-music/

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