Values Based Artistic Patronage
Look this is super fascinating. And by fascinating, I mean cringe-worthy and vomit-inducing. Read it “How Selling Out Saved Indie Rock.” OMG it’s hysterical http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicahopper/how-selling-out-saved-indie-rock
And very important. As record sales head towards nil, and all the other rescue attempts at saving the industry as it was constructed—2 GENERATIONS AGO—fail miserably, one after the other, its fantastic to watch the squirming of “artists” as they realize that their art is now selling cars, tvs, energy drinks and the like.
Ah, ART!!
Gosh, the death throes of the record industry are just hysterical to me. And they mirror the complete nonsense that is the rest of this country, this dead economic system and our own arrogance in thinking we can save something NOT WORTH SAVING.
I have no answers.
Except all of them.
And the answer in this context is to completely remake what it is to record, market, distribute and promote music. What it means, how its done, what the goals are, the economics of it, the kind of people to be involved, etc..
The record industry has always been about the lottery. And the lottery is just gambling. And gambling is a vice. When you engage in vice, you always lose, even when you win.Artists roll the dice and 1/5000 gets lucky, sometimes for a hot second, sometimes for a bit longer and very rarely for a career.
What I am far more interested in is in conceiving, ideating, executing and refining a new kind of record company. One that doesn’t make ridiculous promises, that doesn’t have ANY interest in working with artists who want—primarily— to be rich and famous, and one that doesn’t sell out its art to a major corporate brand so that it can be used to whitewash itself and sell some horrific, environmentally-destructive consumer product that feeds into the central spoof of our entire society, that buying things will make you happy.
The new record label will break from all these things and instead will use a mixture of recording, touring, merchandise, sponsorships with LIKE MINDED SMALL BRANDS and other entities.
And the promise will never be riches. The promise is: we can’t promise you anything. What we can work towards, WITH you, is a career making your art. That’s it. You might not ever get rich. You might not ever get famous. You might not ever sell a ring tone or play a $500k wedding for the prince of Uzbekistan’s grand niece.
But with the right mixture of record making, touring, merchandising, and holistic sponsorships, and ANYTHING ELSE WE CAN THINK OF, we can find a way to get you paid. Enough to keep you making art. And have a career at it, just like any career. Work hard, build the right way, month after month, year after year, city by city and if you, the artist, evolves properly, your art will improve and your base will grow and you’ll have a relationship with your community that will be worth enough for you to keep going. The riches will come. But they won’t look like the riches of the 20th Century.
To the point of sponsorships: No cars, no mobile phone brands, no Mcdonald’s commercials.
I am talking about a record company that aligns itself with other small businesses in a hyper local (at first) sensibility. Art comes from a place. It has to be of and for and about that place, about a specific moment of time, and the idea that that art is immediately ready to colonize anything outside that space quickly is just g-d-damn awful and not true and damaging to the artists and what they create.
Talking about self-conscious BOHEMIA.
Those businesses then own not only a piece of the art. They are incentivized to promote and distribute it. All businesses are brands now. Every hotel, brewery, concert venue, jewelry store, art gallery, restaurant has a community. They have email lists and Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, reviews online, they have online booking, they have direct to consumer engagement portals.
You go through them, they become incentivized to sell tickets, albums, t shirts, cough up $1k each to play that record release party. etc.
So you have all the regular things, record, touring, but, for instance, aligning record label with: a local community and the businesses of that place. Instead of Samsung writing one big check and then owning that art, you have 10 small businesses and growing brands all contributing…
a hotel, two restaurants, a winery, the local apparel store that just got picked up by Barneys, the three art galleries, the non profit down the street working to improve city parks. They all contribute WHAT THEY CAN and they all become part of the art. They become PATRONS> which is how art first moved away from being controlled by the state, the church, the feudal lords and princes. That art served POWER.
This is going back to Dutch Art. Rembrandt, Vermeer, some italian painters, they were the first ones to have their own patrons that weren’t the church, which freed them up to be themselves, to go into their art, to be freed from the constraints of custom, morality, etc. Think its an accident that the Renaissance flourished at a time when great commercial cities like Florence and Amsterdam emerged?
As the patrons go, so does the art they patronize. But again, this is about getting away from the idea of one single pill that will make anything better. This is flat, this is egalitarian, this is bottom up democracy, not top down health care bills. This is art that comes from the ground and stays close to it, not takes flight as soon as it can, and before its ready.
Many artists will look at this promise/ non promise and say No Thanks. And 99% of those will end up bagging groceries, or selling ads for Leo Burnett like the douche face they profiled in that Buzzfeed article. I’ll bet you he still wishes he was playing music in that band. They prolly kicked him out cause they knew he was a bourgeois pig.
But the artists who say yes will be truly partners, and you can rebuild that central relationship between artists and manager/ producer/ label from the ground up in a holistic sensible way that plans for and expects the future to be VERY different from the past.
Also, VALUES. The values of the art have to be aligned, somewhat, with the values of the businesses and entities that come into support it. You can’t have a deli selling shitty commodity meat becoming a patron of the avant rock trio just out of music school who are all motivated by environmental issues because they studied geology in school.
This is about remaking art that speaks to people, places and specific times. And that can only be done through the communication and adherence to values. That is what consumers want to connect to. The whole experience. But that experience has to be grounded in values. Anything more than “i want to be rich.” Which is not a value but in fact the absence of value.
