I think it is so important that musicians can empower themselves to not be children in the process. I think sometimes it is counter-intuitive — because to be creative is not to sit around and think about numbers and deal structures all day. My thinking is you are going to have to deal with it eventually — when you wind up having to sue your record company or sit around with lawyers. If you can develop the skill to separate your work, that is key. We take care of a lot of this stuff, then we go in the studio, turn off our phones, and just forget about it. But the oblivious musician is a very sad story to me and is in a position of being exploited.
–Emily Haines from Jason Schmitt’s “Rethinking the Music Business”
Music Ethics: So it’s been almost 6 months since I started to treat OK Music as a serious business venture, and so far the path has taken me to very different places than I first started. It’s been a fairly wild ride so far, but the process has been very enlightening and I can now see tangible — and very realistic — possibilities of earning a decent living as a professional musician. None of what I learned, unfortunately, was given to me during my schooling so there was a long process of un-learning and re-learning before I could take the plunge into this new path. And things do look very different from this angle, I have to say.
The quote above strikes a particular chord with me, and is also part of the reason why I decided to pursue the Music and Ethics paper as my doctoral project. While the patronage-based “fine arts” world often likes to contrast itself against what the commercial sector is doing, in practice, their track record doesn’t tend to be all that much better than the rest of the industry. The bottom line is that musicians aren’t being paid enough for the type of work that they do, and many of them are (often unknowingly) being exploited because they don’t have a clear idea of how much they are worth. A sizable number of artists either end up going broke, enter into situations of financial dependency, use backdoor dealings to get ahead, or end up finding some other line of work — none of which tends to be good for the motivation, self-esteem, or output of the music world overall. And it’s particularly sad when it happens to musicians of exceptional talent, since you can see their passion and craft dwindle as reality gradually eats away at their core.
Books such as Blair Tindall’s Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music is one example of such a story, where personal interests and power politics have triumphed over artistic integrity and accomplishment. (These types of stories are much more common than one might think, especially among the lives of artists that are never talked about or made public.) Art, however, has a tendency to reveal the truth and these sentiments end up surfacing in works that reflect these transactions. (See Tracy Emin’s work below for a particularly clear example.) Confessional aesthetics, fueled by the transparency of the internet and the popularization of psychoanalysis, has now become a fairly popular method of art creation.
Crotch - Tracy Emin
For the artist, confessions may have a powerful, albeit temporary, feeling of liberated from guilt. In the long run, however, these practices makes it difficult for the art world to make a case for supporting the arts when its output is muddled with so much personal resentment and regret. While Tindall’s autobiography may have been a necessary wake-up call for the classical music world, the book can only hope to evoke sympathy — not respect — from the general public. Common sense would say that people are more likely to throw support at things that inspire them, especially when it comes to government spending. The pessimism of the art world, however, compounds the problem and will probably continue to spiral downward unless there is a major overhaul in regards to its aesthetic choices.
Most, if not all of the people in the business world I’ve met has in one way or another echoed the sentiment that if musicians want to do their craft as more than a hobby, they need to think themselves as businesspeople. Unlike jobs that are based on how much labor one puts into a certain task, there aren’t many salaried positions for creative jobs so it becomes necessary for the artist to be proactive about finding clients and sponsors to fund their livelihoods. This gives the musician a degree of choice in regard to where their income is coming from, as opposed to being at the mercy of whomever or whatever happens to be around.
Artists, like entrepreneurs, are in a field with a high amount of risk but are rewarded with the possibility of working for themselves. In order to pull this lifestyle off effectively, however, it is necessary to gain a good sense of what things are worth and how to convince people of its value. Business is, after all, the language that the whole world speaks and is universal to all cultures — it’s the glue that binds the world together and keeps things running. Business is about understanding people and their needs and wants, with the knowledge of the former contributing directly to the latter.
These are the lessons that I’ve learned during the last couple of months and am hoping to put into practice over the summer. The one thing that took a while to process was that the idea of “expressing yourself” has no meaning in the marketplace. As an artist, that phrase is often hammered into your head as something important — or even necessary — in order to make good art. Nonetheless, letting go of that idea is a necessary step artists must take in order to make an effective transition into the work force.
The market does not care about who you are, where you come from, or how you’ve been feeling on that particular day. It’s cold and uncaring in a lot of ways, but also very fair and potentially liberating — it allows people to escape from past mistakes and be judged based on their ability to perform rather than for qualities that they have no control over. (Appearances, age, race, gender, etc.) In some sense, this is what Haines may have been talking about when she argues that artists have to “empower themselves not to be children” — to reach a point where one can leave the nest and learn how to fly on their own.
Massachusets Institute of Technology (aka M.I.T.) recently made a controversial move in naming Joi Ito, a venture capitalist who dropped out of college twice during his lifetime, the head of their media lab department. The department already has an entrepreneurship program where it combines aspects of art, technology and business practices in order to help artists turn their creative ideas into marketable products. Perhaps programs like these will become more commonplace as time goes on, in order to better prepare students for the outside world.
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