Hahahahahaha, I mean fucking hell:
Pulling the old 'do it for the exposure' thing, but pulling it on Taylor Swift is a beutiful encapsulation of the music biz, really. You couldn't ask for a better headline than that. I mean, fuck me - she earns *billions*, never needs to play a festival ever again because each one of her shows is basically a festival anyway. It's insane, the GDP of countries go up when she rolls into town, and the fucking Superbowl thought 'nah we're not paying for that, if you're lucky you can pay us' hahaha. Incredible.
Got me thinking about exposure though, mainly in the ways I've personally been royally fucked over by it over the years.
I suppose, this being an 'industry' and a 'business', you will eventually have to dance with the devil at one point (or several to be honest), but part of doing this, of making music, is finding that line between 'this might benefit me' and 'this is a joke, fuck off'. It's all part of growing up, I guess. When you're young, you're bulletproof - you can do whatever, whenever, and it just doesn't matter. Yeah, play that gig for free, do that remix, get your name out there, sure why not eh?
But as you get older, as you wise up, you get experience. People always make fun of me because I have a 'grudge list', which is essentially a big list of things I'm never doing again, and a list of people or entities whom it's not worth my time to entertain anymore. I don't look at it as a grudge list though, I look at it as my protection - a way of shielding myself from another shitty experience. You'll, in time, come up with one whether explicitly or not, trust me.
But we all have to play a game we don't want to sometimes. I once did a remix, and against my better judgement, said yes to a band I didn't really know. I asked about budget and they just came up with some stuff about not having a budget, having to pay loads of other people, etc. Now I don't mind doing freebies for mates - I do them all the time tbh, but if I don't know you just yet, it's different. So having the rug pulled like this, I did whatever I could to at least have some control over it. So I loaded in their remix stems, put reverb up to 100% on all of them and called it a day. Took 30 minutes, but I figured they were getting what they paid for, ie. absolutely nothing. They loved it anyway, haha.
So anyway, my advice is to hone that instinct - know what you're worth, and don't accept anything less. It takes time, and you'll have to eat the occasionaly shit sandwich, but we all do. Just don't eat too many.
Do you find that you have to push your music onto people after developing a wealth of experience in the industry? Or are you still having to market (perhaps heavily) what you produce/release?
ReplyDeleteAnd do you keep your grudge list to hand in an A6 notepad?
Now that you've wised up does the industry seem a lot clearer what your works' value is?
Really interesting article, thanks.
Jamie.
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