MADE

Revolutions on the level of the one brought about by the Internet happen rarely. At most, once or twice a century. This one’s a big one. Few industries have been untouched. And it’s just getting started. Perhaps no industry has seen the degree of upheaval that the music industry has.

We’re going to see a lot of new music acts come up. Many we’ll never even hear about. Unfortunately, we’re also going to see a lot of failure. Many will come and go with nothing more than a whisper. Lots of people are going to try to start new bands and record labels and many won’t succeed because the equation for success in the music world has fundamentally changed.

The most profound change of all is that the distance between music consumers and music creators has evaporated. The biggest cause of failure for most aspiring music acts is that either they don’t realize this or they do, but don’t understand what it means. Taking advantage of the new direct relationship between markets and creators requires a way of thinking that’s foreign to most people.

That way of thinking is one that entrepreneurs are familiar with because they have a brutally direct relationship with markets. The more distance you put between yourself and a market, the less entrepreneurial and the more employee-like you become.

The greatest cause of crushed music dreams is a lack of entrepreneurial thinking. It’s impossible to succeed in the new do-it-yourself landscape if you aren’t entrepreneurial and willing to take risks. Trying to get a record deal is the opposite of entrepreneurial because a label puts distance between you and the market. Signing with a label makes you more like an employee.

But you don’t become entrepreneurial by getting out of bed one day and deciding to be entrepreneurial. There has to be a burning fire inside of you fueled by something. To have that flame I think there’s an important thing you have to understand about money; and about how it fits into the notion of markets and your life.

Most adults go through life hating or at best not liking what they do because their parents, teachers and mentors never explained what the deal is with money. And that’s because most of those people never understood what the deal is with money themselves. Almost everybody’s idea of work is a job.

It’s only when you graduate from college and get a real job that it begins to dawn on you how fundamentally demoralizing a job really is. You’re required to be in a building with a strange group of people between certain hours doing things you don’t always want to do because another person says so. Of course, being an adult, you don’t absolutely have to do anything, but the consequence is that you get fired. Fundamentally, the equation is do what you’re told or starve. It’s brutal.

Most employed people at one point or another realize this and quietly complain in the shadows of their mind. But most will never do a thing about it because either they’re afraid or they don’t know what the alternative is. And they don’t know it because they don’t really understand how money works. Most people think money is just something you put in the bank. But that’s not what it is economically. If you can’t see beyond that, it’s hard to see what your alternatives could be.

What most people don’t get is the relationship between money and wealth. Unless you’re lucky and inherited wealth, you need to create it in some way to make a living. You can either create it through a job or you can create it yourself. What you’re really doing when you have job is creating wealth for somebody else and receiving the equivalent amount in money through a paycheck.

For some people, what they do in their job coincides enough with what they love that they don’t mind doing it. But that’s rare. And even in most jobs where what you’re asked to do is close to what you love, many aspects of the job won’t coincide with what you want on any given day.

The alternative to a job is of course to create wealth on your own. But how do you do that? Remember, wealth is anything that people want. Software, music, cars, etc. People who strike out on their own are usually much happier than people who have jobs because what they do for a living is what they’ve intentionally chosen. If you’re given a choice of doing anything you want, naturally you’re going to do what you love. Nobody else can decide what you love.

One problem you inevitably face when you do what you love is that you have to make sure you can make a living from it. But making a living can be a relative thing. There are many degrees of it. One problem with a lot of music artists is that their idea of making a living has been shaped by the MTV/Record Era. Making a living isn’t necessarily driving a Ferrari or having a 10,000 square foot mansion with gold crusted bathtubs.

I think that the longer you’ve had to struggle with the transition from a job to a full time music career, the more you realize how precious any degree of success in music is because the alternative is so horrible.

This takes me back to the second paragraph of this essay. Lots of music artists don’t succeed because they half-ass their careers. And they do so because they don’t realize how horrible the alternative to doing what they love is. A serious music career like a seroius business isn’t just fueled by love for the craft, but by a cold-hearted realization of how horrible it would be to be like everybody else. That is, to be exchanging your time for money doing something your heart’s not into.

That’s the part of entrepreneurship that’s never taught because it can’t be. It has to be experienced. Successful entrepreneurs think that way and music artists today have to also because they’re entrepreneurs. Deep down you have to believe that there is no alternative to a music career. That’s how you get the raging fire in your belly that you need to get anywhere.

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