I saw this picture in a feed and posted it to my wall.

Then I talked to an older artist, “older” well they are over 30 actually not old but has memories from the old days when CD and Vinyl actually was the thing. I will call them older just to make it easy for me in this post.  And even though the kids today has big dreams and don’t have the tools to achive them. The older dreams of nostalgica and old glory days in past.

I got in a conversation with an older artist. The goal was to get on a tour in Germany and play on small clubs and then grow bigger and to the end make a living out of it. That is just plain stupid. Germany is hardly an option any longer. They are so after on the digital market that we don’t even consider to send bands down there. We rather go for UK and USA. And the small clubs, well my friends in the bookings in Germany complains how hard d it has become and that the kids don’t go on live venues any longer. In fact it’s the same story we hear in Sweden and kids will be kids in all countries.

Then the old artist didn’t want to be on a major label. No a small indie label is much cooler. I wondered then how the acceleration to start living on the music would happen and what this small label would contribute with? The answer was of course not that of a small label, a midsize.
Same here in Sweden as in Germany, these midsize labels are no longer existing. New ones is arriving but they are still unheard of by the old artist, the ones the artist was counting as possibilities several was no longer in operation.

Then it came to PR. The old artist really wanted to get reviews. I asked where he read about reviews lately. And he mention the oldest newspaper in Sweden, which is only read by older people, there this artist is actually their younger audience.  Then of course he wanted to be cool and added that some bloggers could write something.

Here again, the bloggers is also very out. Many of them have not even 10000 readers a month (just like my blog). So the efficiency is very limited. No words about Youtubers or podcasts that is the new thing with millions of subscribers.  And it’s not that this person doesn’t know this. It’s that the thing he thinks is cool is in the past. It’s cool to be on a small tour in Germany, because that was the start of a something in the 90:s. And getting good reviews was the way to tell the audience to buy your CD.
So when I told some of the really good success story’s I had with my “young” bands lately you could just see that the artist didn’t care about those things. Sure they were good but it was not part of the dream that he had. Even though he knew the dreams where old it was still there.

With the young artist doesn’t know how to do it. They will do it. And that journey the will do I will have old artists ten years from now talking that they want to do. It’s the walk of life.