Where did entrepreneurship go within the artist community?

G

GoldyM

New member
So I've been in the scene for a while. I dont have grey hair yet but I mean a while enough to understand whats going on in the scene. The scene I am specifically talking about is electronic dance music, thats overground and underground. I feel like entrepreneurship is slowly deteriorating and ill explain below...

A combination of timing, social media, things going viral and one hit wonders has lead me to the conclusion that a really large part of the artist/producer community has engaged in very little entrepreneurship or 'hustle'. I remember just even 5 years back, I would wait for a DJ to finish playing before approaching him and putting my phone next to his ear so he can tell me what the song title of this song was after recording it on the very basic 'color' phone. Going to production, I went and met with every single music producer and became friends with as many promoters, label owners, other producers, etc as I can. And it has paid off! It definitely worked for me. I never signed with big labels but I have been signed with 5 different indie labels and I have worked my way up to a couple of notable achievements. One being able to play 15 minutes on a global radio station, Ministry of Sound Radio.

However I feel thats not the case with (young) producers anymore. I have literally talked with HUNDREDS (no joke) of producers and the story is almost all the same. They aim for the top of the top record labels, never get a reply from their demo and they just pretty much give up. They might send a few more demos once or twice again but after no reply thats it.

I think there is something wrong here. You send your demo to 3 or 5 big labels, you don't get a response, and thats it? Now all of a sudden your putting your tracks up on SoundCloud for free because "I just want to people to enjoy my art for free" and all this hippy stuff but really its coming from the fact that they didn't get a response from a big label? What about hustling and finding a connection deeper in those big labels, or signing with a smaller label and building up your name first before approaching the big labels again? I'm telling you this because I have literally spoken to hundreds of music producers, I just want to point this fact out again. Its really kind of pathetic to see that they give up so quickly. Do you know how many of them say... "I wanna be the best or I would love to travel the world and play my music". Thats awesome! Me too! But they aren't willing to work for it. So how does that work?

What are your thoughts guys? Do you think I'm wrong? any label heads or artists here? Feel free to converse. I feel like this is a discussion that isn't mentioned enough.
 
Ministry of Sound is big. That's very cool! I agree with a lot of that. I started trying to connect with bigger artists, ...but never got a response or anything for years and years. I'd even reach out to the sound guys, only to be ignored. But now, they recognize me and occasionally will help with new project/give advice, etc. I know plastician at least hears my music, as well as om unit, and some luckyme artists. 6blocc (RAW) has helped with a song, just giving advice. but it took awhile to, idk what it is, ...gain their attention? lol this is a good post.

So I agree, it doesn't happen over night. It doesn't happen in month. It takes years and a lot of hard work.
 
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Epsilon-144 said:
Ministry of Sound is big. That's very cool! I agree with a lot of that. I started trying to connect with bigger artists, ...but never got a response or anything for years and years. I'd even reach out to the sound guys, only to be ignored. But now, they recognize me and occasionally will help with new project/give advice, etc. I know plastician at least hears my music, as well as om unit, and some luckyme artists. 6blocc (RAW) has helped with a song, just giving advice. but it took awhile to, idk what it is, ...gain their attention? lol this is a good post.

So I agree, it doesn't happen over night. It doesn't happen in month. It takes years and a lot of hard work.
Click to expand...

:victory: Nice one dude.

BTW... had a listen to your tracks. Super cool spacey shit man I like it.
 
Thanks dude. Ministry of sound is super cool! and why is that name automatically turning into a link (is there some secret connection with them on this forum...)
 
haha "Ministry of Sound" is automatically hyperlinked, for me but only in safari...It's normal in chrome. Must be something in the safari browser..

...but ya, I think entrepreneurship is vital for new artists and musicians. You're not going to get heard, by the right ears, immediately when you start. It's crucial to build a name and reputation in the industry that will eventually grow enough to be heard, eventually signed, heard by higher ups, signed again, etc etc..but new artists have to walk through each step of the entrepreneurial path. There are the rare cases of noobs being discovered and propped up to star-level heights but I think doing this so fast is dangerous. If new artists build a steady amount of momentum overtime, they ensure they can handle it (whatever it is, the stresses of it idk,) before moving up.

...And this is random as hell, but not everyone is a "rockstar" musician. Some musicians are studio only artists for tv and video games, so...idk lol its complicated field, but ya entrepreneurial spirit is at the heart of it. We gotta build up our names from nothing, just like we build each song.

(thats a really disorganized paragraph. sorry bout that...)
 
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If anything this is the era of more "hustle" than making music, and I'm not the strictly art for art's sake type as I applaud those who have made/do make some money from their endeavors granted selective marketing is exercised. If anything people need to put their craft first and foremost before marketing what their talent(s) is and/or are. I know and accept that money talks but I wouldn't pay for connections.


 
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Well put, both of yous. Couldn't agree more.

To my mind, what we lost is a sense of community and collaborative effort. Not as in making music together, but as in organizing and forming networks.
That's how Ministry of Sound and ID&T got back, they organised shit. It was a product of the time and available technology, like if you wanted to make music you had to do it together.
But nowadays everybody is happy being autistic on their own little islands.. euh sorry studios, hoping to someone will notice and lets them break out big.. yay.

To tell you the truth, that's not even how artists get broken these days. There's lots of ghost producing and 'management' behind a lot of what you see. And a lot of hustling and pushing, people using their connections..
Either that, or labels are just eager to jump on any bandwagon that looks like it's going somewhere. We're not so used to that in dance, and as long as the tunes are good, we don't really care.. still though. Something to consider. You don't send a demo to Ministry of Sound, they hear it and go "yo, nice beat... we're gonna make this our next headline artist!"

My dream isn't to get signed. My dream is to sign. Like, what do I really need a label for? As an outlet.. but with literally everything online now, it's easier to just create your own outlets.
The main problem there is.. I can get my music on Spotify, but what's the point if nobody listens? If I'm just a random nobody with some nice tunes, I get lost in a sea. Especially if you're
like me and you hop back and forth between genres, never quite conforming to any of them, it's hard to get attention. Music is an expanded hobby for me, I'm actually a designer, broke with
my heavy art school background and worked at a digital distributor where we developed concepts that allow artists to bypass the traditional label game and retain their independence.
And yes that does indeed mean that you have to think like a business person or merchant.

I've been fascinated for a long time by what the next idea after 'record label' should be. Or what a label could mean in the 21st century.
To me the frustration is that if I join a label, I still don't have a channel for my design and video work. I may not have the flexibility to
do contract work, which is something I like a lot as well. They wouldn't know how to market an animation I made or text I wrote... and so on. I guess a lot of electronic artists
have that issue. What if your live visuals are an integral part.. how do you even 'release' a multimedia project? If I could make my dream album it would actually take the form of
a videogame. Can Ministry of Sound get me on Steam and PSN? I think not.

I like disruptive business concepts. I'm working on one right now actually, but I can't really talk about it yet. This topic made me want to spill the beans though.
It's very much on the same line of thinking. I miss the sense of community and mutually beneficial cooperation and that attitude of: okay, no one plays my music at their parties?
Fuck it, throw my own party! No one wants to sell my record? Fuck it, load up the car, I'll sell em myself! Good old freerange capitalism. My idea is to bring that back.. or at least
empower artists to bring that back. If you're sitting in a corner wondering 'is this good enough?' hoping for someone to say "yes it is. Come, I take you to the rainbow now" then I can't help you either..
creativity is an act of aggression.

Anyways, some random thoughts. I'd like to end by planting the seed that what we need isn't labels, but guilds. Yes, like those in medieval times.
 
I finally just registered for music licensing. I found a cool music library website that lets music supervisors for TV, film, video games, etc use to find the right match for their scenes, games.

It's called crucial music library, but I'm sure there are a lot of them. They require that artists to be a member of a PRO (performing rights organization), so i signed up for the free membership with BMI.

This is kind of out of the area of this thread, but does anybody have thoughts on these libraries and licensing? I suppose it's still entrepreneurial because i'm doing it all for scratch.
 
Looks like a cool service, I might sign up as well. Do they want you to upload fully realised songs, or do they accept things like ambient loops, shorter movements?

Diversification is key and something like this is brilliant for that. I know that a lot of smaller labels and distributors are really focusing on licensing now. Or even making sample packs.
If you're in a relative niche genre, you won't make that much of your sales and streams anyway.. so grabbing every commercial opportunity you can is actually THE way to maintain your
artistic independence as much as possible.

On the other side of the fence, if you're looking for music/audio to use in a media project you have completely different needs and wants.
You're often not looking for a fully realised song, but something that compliments what you're already working on. I hate most libraries though because their music is always both bland
as fuck.. and too fully realised for me to work with. They don't really seem to get that..

Offering library music is something I considered for myself as well. But I don't think the workflow really fits me and my music is always a bit too far out to appeal to people making
commercials and things like that. It's too dark and weird, and that's only music I know how to do well. Then again, there is a large market for dark & weird too, lol.. so I may have to
reconsider my thinking on that.

If I made library music then, it would probably take the form of 'production kits'. Every editor has a timeline he or she (many of the best editors are women!) can drop audio clips in, match their tempo, do fades.. even add some basic effects on it. That's something that would hugely appeal to me as a director, editor or whatever your role might be.. they tend to blend on low budget productions.

So why not give them the 'library song' as a collection of loops, they can mix and match those to fit the project... instead of the other way around, which is normally what you end up doing when you're under time and budget constraints (aka always). I don't know if there are any music libraries offering that? If you know your way around it, I guess Kontakt with certain libraries comes the closest to it, but it's way too involved and technical for a non-musician to deal with routing, midi, DAWs and all that.
 
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