Symbolic hustling

I'm currently writing a business plan for my startup. As the non-tech cofounder, my responsibilities will involve making cold calls, finding clients, attracting investors⁠— in short, hustling. But wait… I hate hustling! Don't I? After all, "I hate hustling" pretty much sums up every single post on this blog. And the whole point of my startup is precisely to make it easier for artists not to hustle. The more I think about it, though, the more I realise that there are actually two kinds of hustling: the regular kind, and what I call symbolic hustling. And my revulsion is strictly towards the latter.

Let me explain with an example. Let's say you're looking for a job. How do you go about it? Well, you need to send out resumes, schedule interviews, and network. Is that all you have to do, though? No, you also need to go to school, develop skills, and build up experience. But it's pretty obvious that these belong to two very different categories. The first category describes "things you do to tell the world what you have to offer." The second describes "what you have to offer." We call the second category "qualifications," and the first, "hustling."

Now, finding a job is pretty hard these days. For every job you might want, it always seems like there's someone more qualified. Wouldn't it be great, then, if you could be judged not just for your work skills, but also for the time and energy you put into hustling? Once you think about it for a full second, however, you realise that this is a really bad idea. If you could get credit for hustling, then everyone gets credit for it. The job market would become a race to the bottom, as applicants try to gain an edge by handing out more and more resumes and racking up more and more interviews.

I call this symbolic hustling. It differs from regular hustling not by how it's done, but by how it's received. Symbolic hustling counts no less than your qualifications do, effectively merging the two categories into one. Ordinarily, no institution would put up with this. It can only become a reality when a) qualifications are too fuzzy or capricious to ever be objectively measured, and b) the pool of applicants is way too large for even a fraction to be given fair consideration. In such cases, immediately identifiable and quantifiable metrics are desperately needed, and symbolic hustling does the trick.

Not surprisingly, then, this is what popular music has become. I often hear it said that musicians have to hustle now, just as they always had in the past. This is a half-truth. They're hustling again, all right, but not like in the past. Jimmie Rodgers and Charlie Parker never imagined they'd get credit for hustling. They did it because, well, that's just what you did back then to get your music heard. And if things worked out and you made it, you stopped hustling. Why keep sending out resumes when you're playing Carnegie Hall?

Look at Sun Ra. No one had to hustle harder than Sun Ra. Yet how much did his struggles as a working musician figure into his own self-created mythology? None. He preferred to talk about his trip to Saturn. That's how little hustling was worth back then. You did it to let the world know what you had to offer. That's all it was. It wasn't the actual thing you were offering. By contrast, so many of today's successful musicians will continue hustling throughout their careers⁠— keeping a constant online presence, touring at a heavy loss just to show they've done it⁠— because hustling is precisely what we love them for.

Here's an interesting question: When symbolic hustling counts, who wins? I'm going to venture a guess: not the best bands. That's just my hunch. I'm certainly nowhere near the best, but I've always aspired to be the best, and you need to aspire to be the best before you can be the best. (This is why British bands dominated in the '60s. They were all working-class kids desperately trying to break out of a rigid class system, and thus had a much stronger work ethic than their American counterparts. You couldn't tell by appearances, though. Ambition makes you look pretty ugly, which is why none wanted to show it.)

So if I hate symbolic hustling this much, then it's a good bet that others like me, the ones who aspire to be the best, probably do as well. This makes logical sense: Why divert time and energy away from things that will help make you the best musically, towards things that merely count symbolically? But then this means that the ones who aspire to be the best will never get heard, because they can't possibly compete in a world where symbolic hustling is given equal weight. There's just no upper limit to how much others can and will symbolically hustle.

I truly, truly believe that music will make a staggering leap in improvement once we do away with symbolic hustling. Sometime in the future, a pioneering band will come along that the mainstream can rally around, like Radiohead, making us all wonder if it might just as easily have happened much, much sooner, were it not for our current priorities. Because this band certainly won't be the kind that symbolically hustles, the kind that gets all the attention at the moment.

So that's why I'm eager to get this startup going, because it will help those artists who hate symbolic hustling as much as I do. And this is the best part about startup culture: Here, you hustle to get things done, not to get credit for it. It's an awesome deal when all you care about is getting things done. Just the very idea makes me feel empowered in a way that I haven't felt in so long. Seriously, it's like being a modern-day Sun Ra.

What startup culture can teach indie rock

In his latest essay, Paul Graham, whose company Y Combinator helped fund Reddit and Dropbox among others, explains one of the inherent complications of investing in startups:

The best startup ideas seem at first like bad ideas… If a good idea were obviously good, someone else would already have done it… One of my most valuable memories is how lame Facebook sounded to me when I first heard about it. A site for college students to waste time? It seemed the perfect bad idea: a site (1) for a niche market (2) with no money (3) to do something that didn't matter.

In other words, it might be wiser to invest in a startup's underlying ambition and competence rather than how well its ideas presently speak to you. After all, our gut feelings are shaped by what's already out there in the world, the same world that everyone else lives in. So anything that speaks to you probably speaks just as well to many others. This doesn't mean it's not a good idea. It just means it's unlikely to be the next big innovation that takes everyone by surprise.

I've argued before that the indie label habit of trusting gut feelings, of signing bands that best speak to them, is what's killing innovation in music today. But I'm slowly realising that it goes way deeper than that. In the past week or two, as I've renewed my search for bandmates, I've gotten a few responses from those who really enjoy the music and dig what my band is about, but just don't see it as something they personally want to join.

Now, the notion that a record label should be like one big, happy family united by a common sense of purpose is probably specific to indie rock. On the other hand, the notion that joining a band is a deeply personal decision, much like being in a relationship, is embraced by everyone. A band has to be the right fit on an emotional and spiritual level. To argue otherwise would be comparable to endorsing forced marriages.

And yet, those gut feelings telling musicians which bands to join are really no different from those telling labels which bands to sign, aren't they? That is to say, they're shaped by what's out there in the world, the things we already know, the things that are familiar to us. So if you're a musician, the bands that best speak to you probably speak just as much to everyone else. This doesn't mean they can't be good bands. It just means they're unlikely to be the pioneers of tomorrow that take everyone by surprise.

Is it possible, then, that the Internet, which makes it so much easier for us to find bandmates with similar habits and ideals, is also keeping our latter-day Lennons away from their latter-day McCartneys? It's probably no coincidence that many of today's promising bands are essentially one-person operations, like Bon Iver or Tune-Yards. The praise is well deserved; they sound amazing. Of course, it's no surprise they can pull it off: They're one person making the kind of music that one person can reasonably be expected to make.

But what about the future of musical innovation that necessarily requires lots of collaborative effort? It's not likely to come from musicians joining only those bands that best speak to them, nor from one-person bands making one-person music. Our best hope, perhaps, is the epic bedroom recordings made by lone individuals who remain unconcerned with tailoring their sound for live performance. The ambition and competence shown in such works can be taken as proof of the promise they hold as future collaborators.

And if their works don't speak so well to us here and now, or if they sound too polished or too rough or just plain off, that shouldn't be cause for concern in the long term; after all, at present they're just one person trying to make the kind of music that one person can't reasonably be expected to make, especially live. Of course, as I've said before, live performance is exactly what matters most to indie labels. Which is understandable, given that it's the main source of revenue and a reliable means by which word gets spread.

But that doesn't mean we should just give up on these bedroom artists completely. Surely there's a middle ground to be found, where labels can publicly assert confidence in them without undertaking the same financial risks demanded by the official bands on their rosters. In fact, validation from a respected source might just be the final step needed for these bedroom artists to find interested collaborators. It would be the indie rock version of a startup incubator like Y Combinator.

Because until someone finds a way, we're probably not going to discover the indie rock versions of Reddit and Dropbox. Right now, those bands are being killed off before they're even given a fighting chance.

Footnote, September 15, 2012: For those unclear on the Beatles reference, Lennon was as much threatened by McCartney's talent as he was in awe of it. But he was also a working-class kid, during a time of limited social mobility, who saw music as his ticket out of Liverpool. Thus, the only practical option was to make McCartney a Beatle (or rather, at that time, a Quarryman), rather than risk losing him to a rival band. And through the years, this friendly competition between them kept them both in top form as songwriters, making the Beatles the greatest rock band of all time. But the two weren't ever really close. My point is that this isn't a situation most musicians today would consider ideal. They'd probably try to avoid it if they could help it.

Would Asthmatic Kitty sign an unknown Sufjan Stevens?

Indie rock embraces an incredible diversity of musical styles, from Afropop to chamber music, and we in this scene should be commended for always seeking out new sounds and aesthetics. But what if tomorrow's musical innovators aren't different so much in terms of their sounds and aesthetics, but rather, in their methods and approaches? How confident would we feel then about being able to identify this next generation of pioneering bands?

I mean, let's think about how new bands are currently discovered. As we all know, the indie labels keep their eyes peeled on the local music scene. They attend live shows, listen to word-of-mouth generated by live shows, and follow a network of personal connections kept hidden from much of the music-buying public. And they almost never listen to demos from unknown bands. This isn't just how it's done; this is how everyone in this scene agrees it should be done.

For example, when Asthmatic Kitty signed Shapes and Sizes on the strength of an unsolicited demo, they made it clear that they felt comfortable doing so only after seeing the band's live shows and meeting the members in person. Fortunately, this proved an accurate measure of Shapes and Sizes, a four-piece band whose brilliant, angular sound carries through no less effectively whether live or recorded. But would it have worked out quite so well had that demo been, let's say, Illinois?

Let's imagine that Sufjan Stevens never released Michigan or Seven Swans, making Illinois the debut album of a complete unknown. Now, a good home studio requires relatively little investment these days, so the quality of the recording would probably be just as good. But when you're a complete unknown, it's exceedingly difficult to coordinate and schedule times when all your supporting musicians can get together to rehearse parts that they didn't write, and then play a local or regional show for zero pay, over and over and over again.

So the live shows of an unknown Sufjan Stevens probably would have failed to match the promise of his demo by a long, long shot. And, pretending for a moment that we're in some parallel universe where Stevens himself hadn't founded Asthmatic Kitty, it isn't difficult to suppose that ultimately they would have rejected him for this reason. After all, when it's just so simple and straightforward to "get out there and play," how can a label take seriously any artist who proves so fundamentally incapable of fulfilling this most basic of prerequisites?

(If you're unfazed by hypothetical scenarios, this is exactly how my band was rejected by Slim Moon in 2007 when he was doing A&R for Nonesuch. He really liked our "Ulysses of rock albums," but promptly walked out after he saw we were just two guys onstage playing to a mostly empty room. Given that he knew I played every instrument on that album myself, and that I'd just moved to New York a few months earlier, I'm not sure what more he was expecting to find.)

"But wait!" you might protest. "When I read an album review and listen to the music online, I'm not worried about the quality of their live shows. If I don't like the music, then it's irrelevant, but if I do like the music, then I'm happy to see any live rendition, no matter how stripped down⁠— and I assume they'll just keep getting better over time. And anyway, wouldn't having the support of an indie label be all that a complete unknown needs to finally be taken seriously and cobble together a road-ready band?"

Well, these are my sentiments, anyway. So presently, the indie labels base their decisions on the strength of live shows, even as the music-buying public's initial loyalties always lie with recorded albums. And sure, when file sharing started killing album sales a decade ago, making live shows the main source of revenue, this strategy might have proved prescient from a financial standpoint. But with technology now allowing anyone with enough time and energy to create mind-blowing bedroom recordings of epic scale and imagination, it might be time to reassess what we're missing out on from an artistic standpoint.

What if we needn't be subject to the whims of established artists to hear the next Illinois or Ys? What if any unknown artist or band with the ambition to create such an album could do so, and stand a realistic chance of being heard by the public if it's truly that amazing? This notion hardly seems revolutionary. And yet, sometimes revolutions are born not so much from fiery upheaval as from a singular shift in our most basic assumptions. Which means the time for this next one is as near⁠— or as far⁠— as we want it to be.

Major labels not too shabby on the People's List…

In my last post while discussing privilege, I linked to an editorial that lambasts Pitchfork's recent People's List for being made up mostly of artists who are White and male. Plenty have discussed this aspect of it to death, so I won't. What I find interesting is that half the artists in the top ten debuted on a major label, including Radiohead, who occupy the first, second, and sixth slots. (The other three are the Strokes, Wilco, and Kanye West. Since Radiohead appears three times, there are only eight total.)

The fact that Radiohead makes the strongest showing by far is particularly noteworthy, given that few had any real faith in them when they were first signed. Remember, they were just a Nirvana clone like every other band of that era, all swept up by the major labels using the shotgun approach despised so much by indie rock kids to this day. And through the years, Radiohead themselves have tried hard to downplay this ignoble origin, along with the incredible resources afforded them because of it. But in doing so, they're doing us all a huge disservice, by obscuring the reality of where great music might come from and how it might be discovered.

The indie labels look for bands whose creative habits appear fully blossomed. This approach helps guard against nasty surprises, but it also ensures that a breakout phenomenon like Radiohead will probably never happen under their watch. And yet, Radiohead made the two best albums of the past fifteen years, according to the very subcultural demographic that most ardently supports these indie labels!

Isn't that weird? That's weird to me.

Juche rock

In my last post, I compared Beck's upcoming lead sheet album with my own comic book album about Rosalind Franklin. Music writers hail one as a clever idea with definite promise, and appreciate the other for the ease with which it slides right into the recycling bin. But let's be honest, if we were to ask people who know nothing about either project to guess which one met which fate, they'd first have to ask, "And… which did Beck do?"

In other words, no work speaks for itself independent of the artist who created it. So it's technically impossible for a complete nobody to create a work of merit, because if that person doesn't exist, then the work doesn't exist, and existence is an essential precondition of merit.

But that goes against everything we believe, or at least wish to believe, about how success is won in the indie rock scene, doesn't it? I know I clung on for as long as I could. Surely the only path to becoming a somebody is through creating works of merit. And besides, if that weren't the case, how else could a nobody ever become a somebody? After all, every somebody starts out as some nobody.

My answer is that there are other factors involved, which I've narrowed down to these three: privilege, luck, and grinding.

Privilege

Privilege is any unearned advantage. Everyone enjoys some form of it, but of course some have less and some have more. In the case of indie rock, some people are just pleasing to behold. Others are admired precisely because they're not. Some long ago won the lottery for race and gender. Others have the right friends and connections.

Identifying privilege isn't a witch hunt; it's a necessary measure to prevent a downward slide into oligarchy, or rule by a permanent elite. Since we only ever hear from the successful, and theirs are the only opinions that matter, it's very easy to settle into an attitude that equates success directly with merit while neglecting every other possible cause. Given that most indie rock fans are social progressives, hopefully this point doesn't need to be explained further.

Luck

Duncan Watts once conducted an experiment in which thousands of participants, divided amongst parallel social networks, were asked to rate the same set of songs by unknown bands. However, each person could only see the votes made by peers in his or her own network, not those of any other. The results? Each network came up with a completely different order of ranking.

As Watts explains in a guest post on the Freakonomics blog:

Enormous differences in success may indeed be due to small, random fluctuations early on in an artist's career, which then get amplified by a process of cumulative advantage⁠— a 'rich-get-richer' phenomenon that is thought to arise in many social systems.

So luck matters. A lot. Sure, we might minimise how much it helped bring us the bands we love, but it also goes a long, long way towards explaining those we don't. It's not a difficult conclusion to accept overall, is what I'm saying.

Before I move on to the third and last factor, let me make it clear that I'm not denying the merits of any band that's found success. What I am saying is that when success means success over others, and the sheer number of talented bands out there is taken into account, then pure merit is a completely dishonest explanation for why a few somebodies get to be elevated above the countless nobodies. It's like insisting that anyone you date should have no prior conviction for armed robbery. A few other criteria might need to be involved.

So a problem arises when we discuss any successful band's merits. If I choose A over B, then compliment A for a certain trait and leave it at that, I'm not lying even if B also possesses that trait. But I'm clearly doing B a disservice. Similarly, when we marvel at the innovative genius of a somebody, we should also note that some nobodies out there might be just as deserving of the same applause, if we were to actually pay attention to them.

Grinding

Grinding in World of Warcraft means doing something mindlessly repetitive like killing boars, purely for the sake of acquiring items or leveling up. It's also an apt term to describe the one surefire way for any band to grab the reins of its career and gain massive respect in indie rock. I'm talking, of course, about paying one's dues.

So what does it mean to pay one's dues? Does it mean to work hard? Not quite. After all, the hard work that goes into something like a comic book album is pretty evident on the surface. No, paying one's dues specifically means working hard according to predefined and observable metrics. You know, self-promotion and distribution, endless touring, and so forth.

But if such metrics already exist, and the means by which to fulfill them have long been understood by everyone, doesn't that mean we're merely retreading the same path over and over, instead of forging new ones? Yes, that's correct. And truth be told, I don't think anyone really gets all that excited when hearing about the latest band to finally get noticed after having paid their dues. It's just that the option has to be kept open if there's to be any semblance of meritocracy in this scene.

So while it's called paying one's dues in indie rock, and busywork in the academic and corporate worlds, the concept is the same: earning respect by working hard to contribute nothing of genuine value. But I'm just going to call it grinding. To me, killing virtual boar after boar after boar… is exactly what it feels like.

Juche

The interesting thing about grinding is that it's the only one of these three factors for success that's specific to an ideology. Privilege and luck are unavoidable facts of life, and much effort has to be invested to counter their effects. But the same isn't true for grinding. We either choose to value it or we don't. It's as simple as that.

So, I was sitting here trying to think of any other culture or institution besides indie rock that places such a high value on grinding. NASA? Jazz music? Professional hockey? No, all of these care deeply about results. If a process that leads to superior results doesn't match an original assumption, then they discard that assumption, not the process. So no, in these fields, there's probably zero patience for hard work undertaken purely as a symbolic gesture and signaling device.

Then I remembered Pyongyang, a comic book novel by Guy Delisle that tells about his time there. We don't think of North Korea as producing anything of value, and yet the North Koreans work incredibly hard. Their workweek lasts for six days, and on the seventh, they "volunteer" for hastily planned civic projects. In one instance, Delisle describes seeing schoolchildren watering a park lawn by running back and forth carrying buckets.

If you weren't born to privilege, you can still get ahead in North Korea by grinding: keeping your head down, doing exactly what you're told, and not making waves. Most of all, you don't innovate, because innovation means disrupting the system. And there are just too many people whose lives and livelihoods are at stake. "Hey, I didn't spend weekends in my youth watering park lawns with a bucket, just to watch you invent something called a sprinkler! I paid my dues! You die now!"

So there you have it: indie rock and North Korea, two institutions where grinding is celebrated and rewarded. Incidentally, indie rock stands for independence, holding as its ideal a world in which no artist and no label must rely on any other. Meanwhile, the official state ideology of North Korea is Juche, which can be roughly translated to "self-reliance."

I don't think that's a coincidence.

Pseudepigrapha

When I was a religious studies major many moons back, I learned about pseudepigrapha, the practise of attributing authorship of one's works to another of greater renown and authority. The Gospel of Thomas is one famous example. At the time, I accepted this ancient custom on an intellectual level⁠— but it just made no sense to me on a personal level, young and idealistic as I was, and holding the individualist values that I did. If your message is profound enough to resonate with the world, I reasoned, why would you deny history the truth of whom it came from?

Well… I'm starting to really, really get pseudepigrapha now. Because, man, when you're a nobody, nothing you say or do matters! Nothing counts, because you don't count. All the thought and energy that goes into each individual project of yours, at the end of the day, still has to be multiplied by the zeroness of your actual being. What's ten times zero? Zero. A hundred times zero? Zero. A thousand times zero?… and so forth.

Based on initial reactions from the labels and press, it looks like my prediction is coming true: The Rosalind Franklin comic book album isn't impressing any of the powers that be. I can argue all I want about the promise it holds for combining unrelated mediums to create new storytelling possibilities; or that, as a female scientist she was robbed of her place in history, and this album hopes to correct that injustice; or even simply that the songs are really, really good. But none of these arguments matter, because I don't matter.

In fact, the whole "female scientist" angle is a pretty good analogy for my position, I think. When you read about educated women and Blacks in the 19th century, it's always the same story about how their accomplishments were ignored. But really, it's not like everyone around them was trying to be a jerk. People back then simply weren't capable of accepting scientific insights coming from Blacks and women, any more than I'm willing to accept relationship advice coming from a talking banana. You can't take it personally. When you're a zero, you're not being ignored because they hate you. You're being ignored simply because people and things that don't count… well, don't count.

By now, everyone knows about Beck's plan to release an album solely as lead sheets. Given that there are plenty of genres such as gospel music where sales in this format have always been strong, this by itself isn't noteworthy, of course. We find it new and exciting because it's Beck. Meanwhile, what would happen if Beck were to release a comic book album? I'm guessing there'd be a bit of talk about the promise of combining unrelated mediums to create new storytelling possibilities. Beck is a somebody, so anything he does, multiplied by his nonzero self, will actually be, like, multiplied. That utterly blows my mind.

And suddenly, the idea of giving authorship of my work to a somebody like Beck starts to sound really, really nice. I just have to cross out "Bobtail Yearlings" and scribble in "Beck" on this comic book album. That's all it would take to have my work appreciated by millions! Seriously, how awesome would that be?

Footnote: Actually, truth be told, I'd happily take relationship advice from a talking banana. Lord knows, I need all the help I can get.

Labelmetrics? Musicball?

Peter Brand: People are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws: age, appearance, personality. Bill James and mathematics cut straight through that… Billy, this is Chad Bradford. He's a relief pitcher. He's one of the most undervalued players in baseball. His defect is that he throws funny. Nobody in the big leagues cares about him because he looks funny… This guy should cost $3 million a year. We can get him for $237,000.
—Moneyball

Some of you know that several years ago, I set out to create the "Ulysses of rock albums." The hope was that by putting out an album that couldn't fail to win stellar reviews, I'd gain a foothold in this scene without having to spend years playing in dive bars to crowds of three on a Wednesday night. Both Secretly Canadian and Nonesuch liked the album and kept in touch for a while, though both eventually declined. But overall, there just wasn't enough of a reaction elsewhere to solidly confirm to me that such a path isn't in fact viable.

So I concluded instead that my "Ulysses of rock albums," which necessarily demanded the kind of time and attention from its listeners that I as a nobody hadn't yet earned, was simply the wrong project to make it happen. My next project would leave nothing hidden below the surface, and all would be well. Feeling the sting of rejection and fearing that my place in music history wasn't as assured as I'd assumed, I decided to mix pragmatism with personal feelings by making a comic book album about Rosalind Franklin, the historically neglected English biophysicist.

But lately I'm beginning to realise that this new project is fated to be completely ignored as well, even before its first wave of promos has been sent out. The immediate visibility of its worth is irrelevant. The true lesson I should've learned the first time around is this: Any attempt to gain a foothold in the indie rock scene by crafting an album that can't fail to win stellar reviews will always be doomed to fail, for the simple reason that indie labels don't consider album reviews.

This is a provocative statement, I know. I could buttress my argument with observations I made as a former intern at Dim Mak, or exchanges I've had with various label reps over the years, but I'd rather not risk descending into snark, however unwitting, and anyway these wouldn't mean anything coming from a nobody like me. So let me just ask you to step into the shoes of the label reps, and see things from their perspective.

Music is hopelessly subjective, and familiarity breeds comfort, which makes it difficult to objectively judge things like artistic beauty and cultural relevance. At the same time, support for the indie labels is dependent on their role in nurturing artist empowerment and self-reliance. Consequently, a label's confidence in an unknown band is gained not through recordings, for which the barriers of entry are too low to be an effective gauge, but through live shows, with everything signified by what they entail: the voluntary presence and immediate feedback of the audience, the spirit and passion evident on each member's face, and the ability to meet and connect with the band on a human level afterwards.

So new bands are discovered through some undetermined combination of personal connections, word-of-mouth, and serendipity, and the live show is the forum where it all comes together.

Let's say you're a label rep, and you've just watched a fantastic set by a band you've heard great things about. They've built up a local reputation through sheer commitment and elbow grease, and it shows: A good-sized crowd for a Saturday night has turned out. A longtime fan pulls you aside and tells you she was there from the beginning, watching them play in dive bars to crowds of three on a Wednesday night, and even back then they always gave it their all like they were onstage at Wembley.

You meet up with the band after the set and they're super friendly and passionate about what they do. Talking to them feels like talking to old friends. Reassured, you sign them. Half a year later you release their album, send them on the road with a more established band on your roster, and wait.

The reviews come in… they're great! You pat yourself on the back for another gem well spotted. Or… they're not so great. You tell yourself, that's okay. You've heard firsthand their brilliance. It just wasn't meant to be confined within the carpeted walls of a recording studio. And you've seen them make it in their own hometown. With your resources and their diligence, they can just as easily win over Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, one at a time, in the exact same manner.

Your intern walks in with the day's mail, which includes a few unsolicited demos. You tell her to file them away with all the rest in an overstuffed bin at the back of a closet, and ask her to book your flight to the upcoming SXSW, which you've been eagerly anticipating for weeks.

In other words, a general prediction of how favourable the album reviews will be is never once made before a label signs a band. They simply don't matter. Live shows, not recordings heard free of any context, are what make and break the deal.

But wait! Let's step back into our own shoes now. How many of us prefer to discover new music by randomly going out to see unknown bands play live? At most, one out of ten of you just raised a hand. Many of us rely on recommendations from friends, but that just kicks the question up the road: How do these friends hear about new music? And concert reviews don't tell us much, since they contain more descriptive commentary than qualitative judgment, which is what we're really after. We read them to keep up with bands we already like, not those we don't yet know.

No, with new bands we want album reviews, preferably with the option to see all the various scores aggregated into a single number. Any band that has a realistic chance to reach our ears is obviously good enough, yet being bombarded by thousands of them, we count on trusted intermediaries to winnow down the selection even further. For most of us, album reviews are the lifeblood of our musical tastes, whether directly or indirectly. But you see where this is headed: The most important criterion by which we judge new music is actually completely irrelevant and only tangentially related to the actual decision-making process that brings new music to us!

The movie Moneyball, based on Michael Lewis's book of the same name, is about Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, who led a team with one of the lowest payrolls in the major leagues to a stunning twenty-game winning streak in 2002. Beane's strategy was based on sabermetrics, a system of statistical analysis pioneered by Bill James. As Peter Brand (based on real-life Paul DePodesta) explains in the movie:

There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening… People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn't be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs… When I see Johnny Damon, what I see is an imperfect understanding of where runs come from. The guy's got a great glove. He's a decent leadoff hitter. He can steal bases. But is he worth the $7.5 million a year that the Boston Red Sox are paying him? No. Baseball thinking is medieval. They are asking all the wrong questions.

For sabermetricians, the problem with traditional statistics such as batting average and slugging percentage is that in order to be translated into meaningful action, they need to be interpreted by human beings, whose gut instincts are woefully susceptible to irrational biases. In the movie, for example, we see Beane's scouts express faith in one player's abilities due to his "strong jaw," while another player's "ugly girlfriend" is taken to signify a lack of self-confidence.

What does all this mean for indie rock? Simple: In the same way that most sports fans are loyal to their teams rather than to individual players, most music fans are won over by the music first, not the artist. Consequently, an indie-rock version of Peter Brand might argue that there is an epidemic failure within indie rock to understand that an indie label's real goal shouldn't be to sign bands, but to sign music. And in order to sign music, you need to sign albums⁠— that is to say, the albums that have yet to be made.

It won't be easy to effect this change, of course. The indie labels will find it unsettling to focus primarily on hard results while ignoring the auras, personalities, stories, and human connections that speak to them most and count for so much in their eyes. But such a dispassionate approach would actually be a blessing, for it would encourage them to evaluate new bands the same way that first-time listeners already do. Indie rock will also have to drop its penchant for myth-making in real time, but this would be no real loss either, since history usually backfires on such attempts anyway.

Perhaps the most valid objection is that in baseball, wins are quantifiable and indisputable, while music is hopelessly subjective. All's fair when it comes to making judgments, so it's pointless to argue with whatever external features enhance our listening enjoyment, however much they're based on irrational biases. I get that. And it's natural to be suspicious of sterile calculations, especially when something that's so emotionally engaging and personally meaningful is at stake. The decision-making process will always retain some element of the mystical and ineffable. I get that too.

But I'm not asking anyone to accept some totally inconceivable alternate reality here. I'm simply arguing that this aversion to cold, hard numbers shouldn't cause the indie labels to neglect the one cold, hard number that most music fans not only already do trust, but possibly trust above all other criteria: the weighted average of every score that accompanies each album review.

Trusting gut feelings is what defines the spirit of Generation X, the generation that started indie rock. By contrast, the Millennials will accept all the mounting evidence that human intuition is largely irrational, and work with that as a fundamental reality.

So it won't be long before indie-rock versions of Bill James and Billy Beane come along to forever change the game of discovering new music. When that happens, the indie labels will have to ask themselves: Do we want to be the indie-rock equivalent of the 2002 Oakland A's? Or are we content to be depicted in the eventual movie as some old guys signing bands based on criteria that future audiences will find no less wrongheaded and superficial than "strong jaw" and "no ugly girlfriend"?