Interesting article, but I definitely do believe that it is a bit muddled and oblivious. Yes, you should not study Ricardo Villalobos as a template to emulate any more than you would for Mozart -- if you like that music, you digest it and enjoy it and then create something that is intrinsically yours; how could you genuinely just want to produce something that is exactly someone else's vision and aesthetic? I am a bit skeptical of the author's potential embedded assumptions about what ought to spur and what currently does enable music composition as a full-time career path.
My biggest issue with that article is how much weight it seems to place on the "lucky idiot" theory: why assume that the cycle of the guy who 'makes it' for a few weeks of popularity and then abandoned for the next hot thing actually implies anything general about "making it" in electronic music? I don't want to jump to conclusions, but I detect a hint of an entitlement complex there -- namely that if one wishes to be a musician badly enough and works hard enough at it with enough genuine passion and self honesty, that person deserves a career. That's ridiculous. Those qualities are always important, but being a working artist of any kind requires an audience--that's not just an afterthought that's tacked on after the fact or something which can be separated from the production process itself, but something that's embedded into the whole creative process.
If you are not able to discover a desire to experience something that a large group of people express and are not able to find, why should you get any money or indeed any indication for you to continue your current strategy of earning a living by producing art? You can't ever just jump on a bandwagon and ignore your own individual vision, but you need to balance it with an ability to connect with supply and demand forces of a market if you want to making a living out of it. You can complain all you want about the imperfections of the current system (it has its warts), but shouldn't you be focusing more on continuing to develop an audience whose desires align with your creative vision, and just generally experimenting with the understanding that some experiments fail? I don't understand how anyone can ever feel entitled to being an artist as a stable, full time job without the risks, hard work and inevitable rejection that must be dealt with along the way.
Further thought about the "lucky idiot" idea: of course fashion trends exist and have their girth, but the cultures connected to various strains of art (along with their surrounding environment) are always a more meaningful lens to look through. Of course, I am looking at this through the eyes of someone who loves composing, mixing, experiencing and thinking about the nature of electronic dance music while simultaneously being skeptical about committing to making it a full time job. It's certainly possible, but it's not guaranteed--there's a lot of competition and a tough market, which requires a decent exit strategy if one tries and fails at it. I know some talented musicians who do not have trouble making music their day job, but they 1) are talented, 2)understand and have experience with the reality of being a performing artist, and 3)have a direct connection and investment in their audience. The last bit is the most important part for me -- the direct connection part. I am not sure if I will ever want to make music my day job, but it is an important part of my life, so I invest a lot of care into it--I've got to say, the environment for making electronic music nowadays with just ONE site (Soundcloud) is wonderful.
For what it's worth, I really love Soundcloud. As a programmer, I really have to admire how minimalistic and useful its design is as well as how it well it implements the freemium model. The free account is usable, but the premium levels are worth their costs, enough for me to actually have one because of the value it provides to me. That's pretty cool. As an artist, It's probably the web application that has helped my artistic endeavors the most in a way that I really don't think would be so possible without. It has succeeded in creating an application that connects an enormous community of musicians with each other through as directly as possible: the music. It's really cool to observe how it has actually made a geographic space from the virtual space of the signal trace of an audio clip -- when you comment on a track, you can make either a general comment or a timed comment. For a timed comment, a blip appears over the point in time in the track that you're making the comment over, so anyone who subsequently listens to that track can experience not just the music as it plays back in real time, but what other people have said about certain parts of it, as those parts come up when you listen to it. For someone who creates music, this opens up the way you and your social network connect to music. If someone starts following you, you can immediately grasp some of the music they've written and the responses they've got and vice versa. If there's a producer you really dig, you can muster up the courage to send them a track of yours and ask for their feedback -- I've done that lately, and I've been amazed that they even respond at all. They're producers that have enormous followings and are already really successful, but they can still find the time to listen to a track I wrote and give me feedback.
To witness a producer you respect and admire give you positive feedback about a track you wrote is a pretty incredible and deeply validating feeling; that kind of feeling is the kind that motivates you to keep working on your music and keep going on it despite how challenging it is. It's also independent of your ability to turn it into a profession. I dunno, but that throughout the article, I never got the impression that the author's analysis was aware of that whole evolutionary process of creating music, connecting to others who create music and giving/receiving feedback that I experience/am in awe of with my soundcloud.
(http://soundcloud.com/airlab-am if you're curious--I feel weird about plugs but I think it makes sense in this case so you can contextualize how I am responding to this article's description of the music making process relative to
my music own music)
Goodness. That's a really long wall of text. I hope someone enjoys it. I'm glad that this kind of thread can come up on hackernews and get this kind of a lively discussion though!
Bravo! Well said, all around. The world is changing in so many ways. Those of us who work day-in and day-out in technology are probably among the most aware of how if you don't adapt, you can very quickly fall behind while the rest of the world moves past you. But your post touches on a lot of other points the guy made, and how they're kind of ... not quite right. Anyway, thanks for the wall of text. Good read - better than the original blog post even.
My biggest issue with that article is how much weight it seems to place on the "lucky idiot" theory: why assume that the cycle of the guy who 'makes it' for a few weeks of popularity and then abandoned for the next hot thing actually implies anything general about "making it" in electronic music? I don't want to jump to conclusions, but I detect a hint of an entitlement complex there -- namely that if one wishes to be a musician badly enough and works hard enough at it with enough genuine passion and self honesty, that person deserves a career. That's ridiculous. Those qualities are always important, but being a working artist of any kind requires an audience--that's not just an afterthought that's tacked on after the fact or something which can be separated from the production process itself, but something that's embedded into the whole creative process.
If you are not able to discover a desire to experience something that a large group of people express and are not able to find, why should you get any money or indeed any indication for you to continue your current strategy of earning a living by producing art? You can't ever just jump on a bandwagon and ignore your own individual vision, but you need to balance it with an ability to connect with supply and demand forces of a market if you want to making a living out of it. You can complain all you want about the imperfections of the current system (it has its warts), but shouldn't you be focusing more on continuing to develop an audience whose desires align with your creative vision, and just generally experimenting with the understanding that some experiments fail? I don't understand how anyone can ever feel entitled to being an artist as a stable, full time job without the risks, hard work and inevitable rejection that must be dealt with along the way.
Further thought about the "lucky idiot" idea: of course fashion trends exist and have their girth, but the cultures connected to various strains of art (along with their surrounding environment) are always a more meaningful lens to look through. Of course, I am looking at this through the eyes of someone who loves composing, mixing, experiencing and thinking about the nature of electronic dance music while simultaneously being skeptical about committing to making it a full time job. It's certainly possible, but it's not guaranteed--there's a lot of competition and a tough market, which requires a decent exit strategy if one tries and fails at it. I know some talented musicians who do not have trouble making music their day job, but they 1) are talented, 2)understand and have experience with the reality of being a performing artist, and 3)have a direct connection and investment in their audience. The last bit is the most important part for me -- the direct connection part. I am not sure if I will ever want to make music my day job, but it is an important part of my life, so I invest a lot of care into it--I've got to say, the environment for making electronic music nowadays with just ONE site (Soundcloud) is wonderful.
For what it's worth, I really love Soundcloud. As a programmer, I really have to admire how minimalistic and useful its design is as well as how it well it implements the freemium model. The free account is usable, but the premium levels are worth their costs, enough for me to actually have one because of the value it provides to me. That's pretty cool. As an artist, It's probably the web application that has helped my artistic endeavors the most in a way that I really don't think would be so possible without. It has succeeded in creating an application that connects an enormous community of musicians with each other through as directly as possible: the music. It's really cool to observe how it has actually made a geographic space from the virtual space of the signal trace of an audio clip -- when you comment on a track, you can make either a general comment or a timed comment. For a timed comment, a blip appears over the point in time in the track that you're making the comment over, so anyone who subsequently listens to that track can experience not just the music as it plays back in real time, but what other people have said about certain parts of it, as those parts come up when you listen to it. For someone who creates music, this opens up the way you and your social network connect to music. If someone starts following you, you can immediately grasp some of the music they've written and the responses they've got and vice versa. If there's a producer you really dig, you can muster up the courage to send them a track of yours and ask for their feedback -- I've done that lately, and I've been amazed that they even respond at all. They're producers that have enormous followings and are already really successful, but they can still find the time to listen to a track I wrote and give me feedback.
To witness a producer you respect and admire give you positive feedback about a track you wrote is a pretty incredible and deeply validating feeling; that kind of feeling is the kind that motivates you to keep working on your music and keep going on it despite how challenging it is. It's also independent of your ability to turn it into a profession. I dunno, but that throughout the article, I never got the impression that the author's analysis was aware of that whole evolutionary process of creating music, connecting to others who create music and giving/receiving feedback that I experience/am in awe of with my soundcloud. (http://soundcloud.com/airlab-am if you're curious--I feel weird about plugs but I think it makes sense in this case so you can contextualize how I am responding to this article's description of the music making process relative to my music own music)
Goodness. That's a really long wall of text. I hope someone enjoys it. I'm glad that this kind of thread can come up on hackernews and get this kind of a lively discussion though!