5) Making It No Longer Means Superstardom

It is the most exciting time to be a musician in the history of the music business.

Never before could you have a successful career as an original performing musician without the help of a record label. There are more ways than ever before to make a living as a musician. For some reason to many, music seems to be the only industry where the sole definition of ‘making it’ is superstardom. Don’t waste your time with people who think that. If you are making a living, supporting the kind of lifestyle you’d like to have, doing something you love then you are making it. Anyone who tries to belittle your success is unhappy with their own. F*ck em.

The red part is from an article in Digital music news, here is a link to the whole article.

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/07/27/millennial-musicians/

This one is both true and untrue. Yes, I’m totally in that if you make a living you have made it. The truth is that all these strange artists that everybody is talking about that make a living out of some strange fan base, where are they?

I get a lot of these so called artists having internet courses about different kind of “smart” marketing tips, that other artist should buy from them. Then you have the occasional ones like Amanda Palmer who makes a lot of money on crowdfunding to get out her music and makes a living on it. The other side of that has anyone heard Amanda Palmer’s music? I have read about her but never heard a song. To be honest I really don’t feel like it either in some way it feels made up.
I guess some have tried listening to her, I just wonder how many go away and how many stays? What is the ratio? Also, Amanda was the first phenomena in this game of crowd funding. A lot of her story is that people told that store, not so much about the music.

I checked her stats…I know I have been talking about that numbers doesn’t count. In this case, it can be interesting though. On Spotify she has under 10 million streams. She has the number of my indie success, which is kind of low compared to the publicity she got.

Facebook, here she has 390 000 followers. Okey the engagemnet is pretty ok, it’s around 1000 to 2000 likes comments on her posts. Yes it very small from all of her followers. Still A good crowd that cares about her.

Youtube was just a death, her account seems to have four videos, the main one 2 million and the rest a couple of hundred thousand.

Instagram 150 000 followers. The interesting here is that what she market first is her BOOK “art of asking”. 2000 in engagement on each picture is kind of low under 2%.

We can easily see that Amanda is not that good musician. She is a good facebook poster, or good on social media, old social media to be honest. Is that success? Yes, she makes a living out of it. I guess she does what she wants to do. Still, it feels like many stars today more lives out of the social media channels than their real art.

I guess that many means to “make it” is to be famous for what you really want to do. Angus Young wants to play guitar, not post pictures of cats on Facebook. He won’t publish a book, he will play a guitar solo. I guess there is the success that people identify with. Today do it’s fully possible to juggle this around on different platforms. Like being successful blogger and author. Right now in Sweden, there is one of the dancers from”Let’s Dance” who released a single and wants to be an artist for a small while.

Then what happens to Amanda if Facebook and Instagram disappears? That never happens…I’m not too sure. the companies will remain but the can burst into other markets. We all know the story of MYSpace and in Sweden Lunarstorm. That is just 10 years ago and this will happen over and over companies and sites comes and go. So if you are stuck in a system like Amanda you can have a hard time. Angus Young, he will still keep playing guitar on the new platforms as well. He will only go under if we ban guitars, I have a harder time to see that happen then Facebook disappear.
We just have to hope that Amanda has been smart enough to also collect a lot of email addresses and phone numbers to super fans. And to tell you the truth I think she has.

So just the definition of “make it” is hard. Then you have an artist that has “made it” totally independent like Chance The Rapper. But remember he had a team of 60 employees to help him. To get to that is not easy, but doable, also nothing new. We have seen an artist before go independent and start labels like Epitaph records that were founded by Brett Gurewitz to give out his band Bad Religon.

I guess the goal here is up to you. I remember when I spoke to Johnny Ramone short after Joey Ramone died. Johnny couldn’t get how much attention Joeys death was causing. He didn’t realize how big The Ramones actually was without ever having a solid chart hit. At the same time, they were more than the one hit wonder. It’s all in the eye of the beholder. I guess the goal is to do what you like the most. That is what I’m doing. I guess they will never do a Wikipedia page about my work. I hope though that many of the artists I work with get a lot of pages and change peoples life.