By the Ocean
Clear 69 Degrees
6:17 a.m.
I spent Sunday afternoon deconstructing a music label that’s been trying to get my son to sign with them. My son is one of the few independent artists out there, at his level of success, that isn’t signed. It’s not that he hasn’t gotten offers, it’s that he has said NO to all of them.
This label has really impressive numbers. And me, being the dude who can’t just look at something throwing off money without trying to figure it out and what I can learn from it, decided to look under the hood and see what was going on.
As it turns out, we discovered these folks aren’t exactly just a music label. They’re actually a marketing company backed by a multi-billion dollar corporation that basically bought up the entire food chain that is needed to get Spotify to spit out cash.
They own the artists (have you ever read a contract from a music label?), they own the tech/marketing platforms, they own the audience by way of user generated content on TikTok.
This means they can “make” artists at will. They just press GO and they get 3,000 videos on TikTok all of a sudden featuring their music. “Wow this artist must be really popular!” says the mind controlled crowd.
Some people might look at this and say it’s amazing. I know investors do. That’s why they’re dumping hundreds of millions into this company.
When I look at it, all I see is FAKE. It is all fake. Engineered. Manufactured (usually temporary) “success.” That’s my opinion, of course. But apparently my opinion is enough to turn my stomach.
Am I a Communist? Socialist? Brainwashed with some religiosity-induced form of lack and envy?
Of course not. I just have an aversion to what feels fake. And I have a deep reverence for the sacredness of art.
Humans are in a state of unprecedented turmoil largely because they have been fed a lie that art doesn’t matter. That it’s a nice to have. That “someone has to pay the bills!” and that’s why humanity has to suffer to get money. The art we see that IS allowed to rise to the top is largely used as a tool to CONTROL humanity instead of EXPRESS humanity.
Art is the reason you’re here. You get to make up what that word means for you. But it’s what you’re here to do. CREATE. THEN CREATE SOME MORE. If that’s not what you’re doing right now, you already know it. That’s why you have that feeling in your being every day that asks, “Is this it? Isn’t there something more?”
I’ve spent the last 20 years trying to figure out how to sell my art. My art comes in the form of ideas, in writing, in the services I offer to the world.
I don’t make it because it will sell, I make it because I have to. (I would certainly fail out of business school.)
What this means is that I win even if no one buys anything. But I’ve worked to bridge that gap so I can do my art, still have a family with 10 kids and live a beautiful life.
It didn’t just happen though. I had to WORK at it. It’s a puzzle. Sometimes it just falls together. I had to put mine together piece by piece (I’m not done yet!).
Does it matter that you make money? Does it matter HOW you make the money?
The answer is YES.
When in doubt: don’t be fake. Don’t take the bait. Don’t be dumb enough to reach for the short term wins at the expense of your long term fulfillment and the purity of your Soul.
Here are the words of T. Bone Burnett, a guitarist who played in Bob Dylan’s band in the 1970s:
The goal of technology is to create efficiency.
The goal of art is to create conscience.
Art is not efficient.
Efficiency is not an attribute of the good.
Efficiency can be efficient for good or evil, but as it has worked out in practice, efficiency would seem to be a prime attribute of evil.
Without conscience, efficiency has the potential for apocalyptic evil.
These surveillance capitalists do not have the ethical foundation to be able to order society as they have presumed to do.
They lack conscience.
I will stay with the artists. Artists contain the accumulated knowledge of generations. Artists create conscience. The artists are our only hope. The sciences have failed us. The churches have failed us. The politicians have failed us.
Do the art you came to do. That journey is one worthy of a life.