Music must be marketable to matter

In preparation for my new startup, I've been reading books on various subjects related to business, such as negotiation, accounting, and so forth. One subject that keeps popping up again and again is marketing. Now, in pretty much every music scene out there, marketing is just a synonym for promotion. When you look at the word itself, though, there's much more to it than that. A market is where sellers compete to offer goods and services to buyers. So being marketable means staying competitive in the marketplace, and marketing is really about asserting a constant presence within it.

In every other industry, all of this just goes without saying. Ask a pizzeria owner how they stay in business, and they'll speak in terms acknowledging that their customers might just as easily go to their competitors. But they maintain loyalty by using only the freshest ingredients, offering fast and friendly service, sponsoring community events, and so on. How a pizzeria gets paid is directly related to how it competes in the marketplace. It just wouldn't occur to the owner to think any other way.

Ask the loudest people in today's music industry how an artist is to get paid these days, however, and they'll chatter on about new distribution channels, online tools for booking shows, and so on. Almost none will speak in terms acknowledging that each listener's time and spending money are limited, and that a gazillion other bands out there are hoping to claim their share of it.

The worst offenders are those established artists who gained exposure under a previous model, yet are now trumpeting some new model as the road to salvation for each one of the gazillion unknown bands out there. These artists get invited to give TED Talks on "The Future of Music." Any first-year business major, however, can easily out them as snake oil peddlers. Until you've acknowledged the competitive reality of the marketplace, your proposed solution belongs in the fantasy fiction section, alongside hobbits and vampires.

I do get it, though. Rock music has finally reached the point that classical music was at half a century ago, where the most pioneering artists are now the least likely to achieve mainstream popularity in their own time. Given this reality, competition naturally loses any meaning as an arbiter of artistic worth and thus gets left by the wayside. I get that.

But when aspiring pioneers stop competing for financial success, they lose a valuable tool for self-appraisal used by everyone else, including artists from the past, to improve what they have to offer. This makes it easier to neglect their marketability in areas that definitely should matter, such as social relevance and intellectual interest. And then they're left woefully unprepared to compete in the only market that can possibly redeem all their efforts: the marketplace of history.

Consider two frontrunners in today's indie rock and contemporary classical scenes, respectively. Bon Iver might beat Jack Johnson hands down, sure, but he still has to compete against the Beatles. Thomas Adès might have the edge over Eric Whitacre, but there's still Beethoven to contend with. (On a side note, it just occurred to me that Adès and Bon Iver's Justin Vernon share a resemblance, although maybe it's just the beards.)

While both are highly accomplished, neither Adès nor Vernon has invented a new musical language or idiom, which doesn't bode well for their chances at posterity. Sure, it's easy to think of history as an awards show, where one only has to beat the other nominees in one's respective category for any given year. But even if this were a fitting analogy, let's not forget that when we pore over lists of winners past, plenty will fail to stick out as names we recognise, much less care about. Their years are now placeholder years to us; there's no rule saying we must treat them otherwise.

And there's no rule saying that music history can't have its own placeholder years, or even decades. So how does one stay competitive in the marketplace of historical relevance, when the passage of time is forever compounding the artistic worth of those who came first? Where do new musical languages and idioms come from? Looking at past composers and bands who've managed to hold their own against Beethoven and the Beatles, I'd say they come from some weird combination of blissful naivety, relentless ambition, and heightened awareness of history's crushing weight. That's just my guess, though.

But finding a definitive answer isn't my concern here. I'm just pointing out that any artist who remains blithely unconcerned about competing in a marketplace will probably get trampled by history, because history itself is a marketplace. And until this reality is acknowledged, music won't be following us into the 21st century. We need to shout this from the rooftops again, and again, and again.

Music must be marketable to matter. Every other solution being peddled out there is just so much snake oil.

Waiting out "sitcom good"

As everyone in the startup world knows by now, the most successful ideas challenge our basic assumptions about how things might be done. Because they don't fit any existing standards for what counts as good when we first hear about them, by default we judge them as bad. For instance, Hewlett-Packard famously turned down Steve Wozniak's idea of an affordable computer to be kept at home for personal use. So if you're looking to invest in startups, or to find co-founders interested in starting one, it helps to keep in mind that startup ideas that sound plausible usually fail, while one that sounds awful might actually change history for the better.

In his latest essay, Paul Graham illustrates this point by imagining the kind of startup a sitcom character might start. If the underlying idea of the startup were truly daring and original, then the audience wouldn't understand it, or worse, they'd mistake it for one intended to sound laughably bad. So instead, the sitcom writers would probably choose to piece together elements of familiar successes from the recent past⁠— for example, a social network for pet owners⁠— to convey the impression of a daring and original idea. But of course, this is exactly the kind of startup that's least likely to succeed in real life. "Sitcom good," in other words, doesn't mean "real-life good."

Graham's point reminds me of the time I watched High Fidelity a while back. In the movie, Jack Black's character is always asking his friends to come to his shows, but each time they politely decline because his band has a terrible name. Towards the end of the movie, however, they finally go see him play, and he wows them all with a faithful rendition of a Marvin Gaye song. As it turns out⁠— to no one's surprise in the audience, of course⁠— his band is actually really, really good.

Except I was disappointed, because I was expecting "real-life good," not just "movie good." In other words, good enough to impress in real life the kind of music snob played by John Cusack in the movie. But then I realized I was being unfair. Had the screenwriters actually called for Jack Black's band to be "real-life good"⁠— as in daring and original for its time⁠— the audience wouldn't have understood it, or worse, they would've mistaken it for something intended to sound laughably bad. So instead, they had to call for something familiar to convey the impression of a band good enough to wow everyone present. "Movie good," in other words, doesn't mean "real-life good."

In the past decade or so, file sharing and streaming media have changed the nature of how we hear about and listen to new music. There's now a palpable feeling in the air that not only are we watching history being written in real time, but we're all helping to write it. So as history's screenwriters, we need to advance the plot every now and then with the discovery of new bands making daring and original music. What might such music sound like?

For starters, it can't sound like anything anyone would mistake for laughably bad. Black youth from the Bronx delivering spoken rhymes over scratched turntables and sampled beats, for instance, wouldn't have flown thirty years ago. Instead, the most plausible candidates would probably piece together elements of familiar successes from the recent past. So the key to finding them would be to stay alert and informed enough to know in advance what the next big thing will be, and then once we spot them, to single them out with surgical precision.

A perfect example might be this description of Bon Iver from a Pitchfork review: "There's something irresistible about the thought of a bearded dude from small-town Wisconsin retreating heartbroken to a cabin to write some songs." But of course it's irresistible⁠— it'd be instantly recognisable in any sitcom or movie as the backstory for some mysterious, misunderstood character whom we all wish to be, or be with, in real life. And of course the music itself doesn't disappoint, hitting all the right tropes that convey beautiful and heartfelt to us. So Bon Iver is "sitcom good." Heck, he might even be "sitcom best."

This isn't to argue that it's cynical in its emotional appeal. Of course listening to Bon Iver is a genuinely moving experience, just like Jack Black's channeling of Marvin Gaye was a truly masterful performance. But we're being asked to take on faith that the bands we've chosen for our times aren't just good enough to be written into History (the script), but actually daring and original enough to be remembered by history (the actual thing). And that's where it gets problematic.

Because, as with startups, lowercase history recognises bands as good not because we say so and then root for them to succeed, but because market forces demand that they be reckoned with. These markets don't need to be financial, mind you; they can be cultural, intellectual, and social as well. After all, Reddit and Wikipedia don't make much profit, just like the Velvet Underground still doesn't sell many records. But people use Reddit and Wikipedia because their services are extremely useful, and people still talk about the Velvet Underground because there's so much to say about them. These are things we actually want, sometimes in spite of ourselves; we don't just want to want them.

And the startup world now knows this. It recognises that history can't be written in real time. History is simply made, by people and events that no one expects, and to believe that greater awareness and more experience can help one get better at predicting the future is to completely misunderstand how innovation and progress work. By definition, we can't expect the unexpected. Instead, the key to preparing for the daring and original ideas of the future is to stay open-minded, dismiss nothing by default, and always diversify, taking enough smart risks so that many small failures can be offset by a few large successes. Much like how the major labels operated in their heyday, come to think of it⁠— minus the heartless part, of course.

But here's the depressing thing. It took the startup world decades to learn this lesson, and only after seeing numerous instances of smart, influential people not initially getting the point of personal computers, web-based email, micropayments, camera phones, and so on. Indie rock, by contrast, not only hasn't even taken a first step towards understanding this yet, but for the past few decades has been teaching itself the completely opposite lesson that tomorrow's pioneers can be anticipated and chosen in advance. So Bon Iver's entry into the mainstream, which wowed few outside this scene, has been tallied a roaring success, while Pitchfork's recent People's List⁠— in which indie rock kids overwhelmingly favoured a major-label band whose rise to critical acclaim could never have been anticipated or guided along by the indie labels⁠— doesn't seem to have inspired any real soul-searching here.

But even once indie rock finally does experience its definitive "Hewlett-Packard turning down Steve Wozniak" moment, most likely it'll still be decades before people in this scene start to figure out how innovation and progress actually work, and that history just can't be written in real time. Until then, they'll continue to insist that the key to discovering daring and original music is simply to stay alert and informed enough to call it before it happens. Good in indie rock, in other words, is going to mean "sitcom good" for a long, long time to come.

So if you're interested in hearing the daring and original bands of our times, you might want to dust off some old vinyl records for now. Maybe take up knitting.

Because you're in for quite a wait…

Addendum, December 17, 2012: Yes, Bon Iver certainly has a market, but markets can be artificially inflated. When an indie band is granted exposure to the mainstream and wins a Grammy, only to then suffer an immediate backlash while failing to gain widespread support or recognition, it can probably be said to have had its cultural worth inflated somewhat by various insiders and press.

By contrast, the latest teen pop stars are not an artificially inflated market, because no major label signs them believing in their longevity to begin with. Releasing a few singles that sell millions before fading into obscurity is exactly what they were meant to do all along.

I'm not saying that Bon Iver can't eventually make history. The market for his music will now correct itself by deflating somewhat, yes, but he'll have the spotlight for a long time, along with multiple chances to get it right. And to be clear, I do agree that his music is beautiful. It's just that it isn't capable of maintaining cultural relevance on its own without the crutch of indie rock's hopes and values to prop it up.

Doing without such crutches, though, is exactly what needs to happen for any artist to be historically memorable. Today's mainstream and tomorrow's history might share few similar priorities, but the one thing they definitely do have in common is a complete disregard for what indie rock wants them to want.

Scalable and non-scalable music

In preparation for my new startup, I spent this past summer reading some books on the subject, including The Lean Startup, The Innovator's Dilemma, and Founders at Work. As it turns out, some of the shortsighted practises they mention as cautionary tales are exactly how many of today's indie labels operate. So I've been trying to draw further parallels, hoping that knowledge of startup culture can lead to greater understanding of the problems currently facing indie rock. But so far, none of my attempts on this blog have really quite grasped it.

Until now, that is. I think I've got it now. And in retrospect, it seems absurdly obvious. It's really all about a distinction that's quite basic in the business world, even as it's rarely acknowledged, if it's understood at all, in the music world. I'm talking about scalability.

Startups such as Blogger, Facebook, and Twitter are scalable. That is to say, they're designed to accommodate unlimited growth of customers and users. This is because what they offer, ultimately, is new ideas. Since there's little precedent to show how well a new idea might succeed, though, startups operate under great uncertainty. A seemingly bad idea today might be worth millions tomorrow. Or… it might just be a bad idea.

A non-scalable business, by contrast, combines time, labour, and raw materials in a way that doesn't easily accommodate new customers or users. A pizza joint is a good example. Since each pizza joint can only make so many pizzas a day, none competes intensely with any other. And everyone likes pizza, so there's no need to create a new market from scratch. The downside of this certainty, of course, is that few in the pizza business can expect to make an easy living.

Since a pizza joint's sales are relatively steady from week to week, whether it can stay in business might depend on the tiniest sliver of net profit on each pizza sold. When I was a delivery guy many years ago, the owner could give me the exact cost, in pennies, of a single handful of each topping. So once a pizza joint is firmly established, its main priority is to extract ever more value from the limited time, labour, and raw materials it's able to invest.

By contrast, what's a startup's new idea worth? Since there's no market for it yet, no one knows. Even a ballpark range is impossible. So instead of fretting about the net profit of each individual user, startups simply work to acquire more and more of them. And since the underlying idea is ultimately what makes or breaks fortunes, they need to stay flexible should their initial assumptions prove wrong. But a pizza joint would be foolhardy to stray from its original mission of making the best pizzas ever.

One last difference is that since startups have no fixed limit for number of users, they're often open to hiring more people. After all, the cost of dividing their fortunes even further is easily offset by the resulting growth to their user base. By contrast, a pizza joint with a fixed customer base shouldn't hire any more workers than it needs to get stuff done.

So which is better, scalable or non-scalable? Of course such a question is absurd. We want online chat, but we also want lunch. We want people out there thinking differently and challenging our basic assumptions about how the world might be. But we also want people out there giving us exactly what we want, the tried and true approaches that keep the world sane and running smoothly. It's pointless to compare the two. They fulfill vastly different needs.

The music world has its own versions of scalable and non-scalable. The former see creativity and the ability to generate new ideas as their best assets, while the latter focus on cultivating skills that'll allow them steady work. In the classical realm today, for example, composers generally belong to the former, and performers the latter. And just as in the world of business, it's pointless to argue which is more important. Throughout history, however, the circumstances of the world have not always treated them as equally important.

Even as late as Mozart's time, composers and performers were both treated as tradesmen. In fact, it was the critic who was held in highest esteem back then! (If this sounds bizarre, remember that those doing the critiquing were the nobility.) So both were non-scalable since their efforts weren't appreciated outside the courts that hired them. It wasn't until Beethoven inspired the cult of the "brilliant, tortured artist," and new advances were made in printing and publishing, that the world's first scalable musicians arrived in the form of the Romantic composers. A century later, audio recording allowed performers of popular music to be scalable as well, and everyone was happy.

Unfortunately, scalability didn't (and still doesn't) always equate with quality. New business strategies sprang up to wring maximum sales out of minimal talent, thereby undermining the key premise of scalability, which is that achievement of scale is its own proof that scale is deserved. So when file sharing came along to disrupt this practise a decade ago, most just shrugged, including myself. And since scalability, or the ability to scale, is meaningless once opportunities to scale have been removed, the spotlight has now shifted back to non-scalable musicians, much like in the time of Mozart.

These non-scalable musicians differ from scalable musicians just as pizza joints differ from startups, in that what they have to offer is their time and labour. In other words, their work requires them to be there in person to get paid, usually in small amounts at a time. Not surprisingly, then, for the past decade a certain glee has been palpable in the air now that creative works by themselves, without further time or work put in by the artist, no longer generate the exorbitant earnings they once did.

The newfound attention received by non-scalable musicians also means they're now filling up the rosters of the record labels, whose business model was optimally designed for scalable musicians. But… this is a problem, isn't it? Because as corrupt and degraded as scalability was at its worst, the historical record will always show the heights it reached at its best. These heights just aren't going to be repeated by musicians holding non-scalable concerns and priorities, and I think they themselves would be the first to agree.

But it's not too late to give today's scalable musicians the opportunity. And if any should succeed, it'll probably be the ones who think most like startups. That is to say, the ones offering new ideas, being flexible in their assumptions, and eagerly splitting fortunes with those who can bring them a wider audience. The first thing that smart investors often ask about a startup is, is it scalable? It won't be long before the smart labels start asking the same about the bands they sign.

So now I fully understand what my startup is meant to do. The point isn't to sow tension or resentment between scalable and non-scalable musicians, who fulfill vastly different needs for their respective audiences. We want some musicians to challenge our basic assumptions; we want others to give us what's comfortable and familiar. It's not a contest to determine which is more important. So I just hope to give all musicians, as well as other artists and eventually all individuals, the chance to be scalable by genuinely deserving that scale, in a world where such opportunities are quickly eroding away.

Yeah, that's it. I think I've got it now.

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'll help make you the best musically, towards things that merely count symbolically? But then this means 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'll 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'd 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.