A question for the artistic people

[MaxV]

Well as the title already says,  i have a burning question for the artistic people here who make a living or earn some money with their crafts. 

I have multiple creative hobbies which i slowly but surely develope.

One of these hobbies is music production. I have a passion for a specific type of electronic music (hardstyle or 'classic hardstyle'). 

there is a label who contact me who shares the same vision. Which is bringing you the sound from the past to the present. There is a growing demand in that particular sound. 

 

What i've noticed about most edm dj's, weither they are newbies, intermediates or professional artists,  they all seem to act in the same kinda 'orange' and robotic way on their social medias. 'how was your day? have you seen my new track? burpaderppp link in bio or comment below'

and literally 80/90% of the artists are doing this. So i suspect there is some kind of marketing trick at play here. 

The problem is, i really dislike this. i tried working in this way, but i got really miserable doing so. I am genuinely interested in people who would like my music, and i have a vision for music with more higher conscious subjects (which hardstyle is actually quite  ideal for). 

I just want to stay authentic and write music and than put it on Facebook or publish it via some structure on Spotify (The label is definitely interested!)

i'm about to launch a new project which fit this idea perfectly. i'm still working it out and writing it down but for the biggest part i'm happy with where i'm headed with this. 

But i how did you guys tackle this? What i've learned from Philip Glass (a composer who i respect to the heart) is the following quote: The Music world and the music industry are 2 fundamentally diffrent things.

 

And this is exactly my struggle! The industry is orange at its core and the music world... well definitely stage green and beyond. 

My goal is to get my music exposed and heared without doing all these weird inauthentic tricks and mechanical messages. 

[Aeris]

Totaly my point and explain to another producer Friend Yesterday.

We can't go along with this chimpery spamming Dick sucking and dot network headjob. Never we will be a part of that.

I completely understand what you're talking about. The disease is spreading. ( We are Into dubstep/électronic bass )

People don't want to transcend art & beauty. They accept people who give them cancer. 

That's the same shit who doesn't allow vidéo games to be good since 2008.

I'll work harder smarter and middle finger this entire chimpery industry.

Work hard with passion love and strenght and I m sure it will pay off.

That's marketing in itself to be anti marketing. More me anyway.

 

[denydritz]

Isn't every industry orange at the core?

I'm a part-time songwriter, and the way I made money was doing sound engineering at a studio making music for TV commercials. In my opinion, the most realistic path to make money as a musician is to accept orders from what the market needs, e.g playing in wedding bands.

Right now, I'm writing a song for teen pop music, very market oriented. But I try to put some of my idealism in the lyrics, I am not attached to the genre because I believe any genre can deliver an optimistic and uplifting message.

[Aeris]

5 hours ago, denydritz said:

Isn't every industry orange at the core?

I'm a part-time songwriter, and the way I made money was doing sound engineering at a studio making music for TV commercials. In my opinion, the most realistic path to make money as a musician is to accept orders from what the market needs, e.g playing in wedding bands.

Right now, I'm writing a song for teen pop music, very market oriented. But I try to put some of my idealism in the lyrics, I am not attached to the genre because I believe any genre can deliver an optimistic and uplifting message.

that's why I separate "music" from "all ways to have monney on the table without wasting time & energy for art/work".
I won't spend my time wasting my ears and high frequency on mixing shits of others

[MaxV]

@Aeris Exactly my friend! Cool that you're into those genres, do have music to show? 
I've been dealing with some doubts about the genre i produce if its even something i want to produce anymore. 

The crowd is extremely dedicated to the genre, but since i learn more and more about various things about spiral dynamics and reality, i start to see that the genre itself is also quite BLUE/orange actually. The dedication comes form 'this is OUR genre, OUR music' etc etc and i realized this is quite similair to our 'civilization'. It also has alot of orange in it because most of the themes are about quite superficial things, and alot of artists recycle the same old rap lyrics 'because it sounds cool' or ' it sells'  

 

i'm in this group on Whatsapp and some of these guys are so pure orange. They are artist too but they made making music into something to sell, and it works quite well for them, but its all calculated and such. Someone even shared something about 'People on the dancefloor dance for about 30 to 60 seconds on this genre, so we have to arrange our tracks to fit that'. Well empirically i can beg the differ,  i dance to music or get lost in it, and there is no timestamp or fixed arrangement that does that for me personally. 

But i find it a difficult pill to swallow that this happends quite alot actually. We have artists who purely make because the love to make music and express their feelings. But the orange part of music... 

Offcourse its the industry, not the music world. And ironically enough, alot of the artists that did stick to their own thing became game changers in the scene. Which, offcourse, resulted in a new orange following trying to imitate what that artist did. 

 

And its quite a hardcore world actually. An artist i really looked up too had a pretty bad disagreement with one of the leading organizers in the harddance scene and he was completely banned from all their events and got boycotted in other situations. Just a year before he had writtend the main anthem for that organizers event, and BOOM  banned. 
 

Now 5 years laters things seem to have been settled between the 2 parties. The artist already had well over 300k subs on facebook and became internationally recognized, so he saved himself. But can you imagine the damage that was done to his brand? i find it quite shocking. He was one of the pioneers who really revolutionized the hardstyle genre back in 2008. 

 

 

 

But @denydritz has a point though.

But that also depends on if its your primary source of income or not. I'm a painter(housing, monuments etc) so i got that part quite figured out for me. 

I can freely spend my free-time on my creative endeavours. 

 

[universe]

On 30.8.2019 at 11:14 PM, MaxV said:

My goal is to get my music exposed and heared without doing all these weird inauthentic tricks and mechanical messages. 

The more people you want to reach with your music the more it will have to follow a certain style. Its not by accident that there is a genre called "pop". Imagine someone who wants to write a book. If you write a vampire drama with a lovestory there will be thousands of people all over it. Because the genre is already defined and there is a big pool of people who are interested in that. If you write instead a cashier memoir its not really what most people are used to read.

If I was you I would just do more and more music and become better at it. Pick a style that is compatible with a lot of people that I enjoy myself as well (ie. dont do something too out there). When people start liking your music they will show it to others and you wont have to do much marketing by yourself.

Just put it out there. Make sure that people can hear it, maybe play it live in your local area (idk how hardstyle music works in this way). I think the time of making money from album sales is over. If you want / need money I would rather focus on growing a fanbase and having merch and goodies for them in store, have a patreon or some other form of donation.

[tom rAy]

There's a guy on youtube called Damian Keyes. He talks a lot about this kind of matters, lots of great points.  I like his approach, resonates with me most of the time. Try checking him out.

Just music is not enough anyway. There are tons of great music in the world that no one ever heard. You want people to invest their precious  time in listening to you music - you have to market it, and you have to give massive value (not only with your music). It doesn't have to be robotic and the same as everybody else does. Be creative with your marketing, it doesn't have to be inauthentic. And all this authentic/inauthentic struggle - I think a lot of it is bullshit. Like I may say that approaching girls in clubs is inauthentic to me, and I may really believe it, but  I would just  sound like  a bitch instead of taking actions, wouldn't I?

Stage orange is something to integrate, in your own way, not to be against it. It's not the music industry that is mostly stage orange. It's modern world. Nothing wrong with it.
 

Edited September 9, 2019 by tom rAy

[Strangeloop]

@tom rAy Agreed

[effy01]

the core of electronic music is HOUSE/disco music , start digging the crates ,embrace all genres of electronic music and see what you like the most

maybe it will help

i don't want you to sound like  all this producers nowadays

the intelligent audience that really like the music is not stupid , choose your target wisely

and yes i agree with you its a STRUGGLE to do that , learn about the biography of coltrane the jazz musician maybe it will inspire you

and yes just get better and better , luck is the opportunity meeting preparation .

.....