Every Musician Is A Marketer

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written several insightful and oft referenced books on creativity and the creative process, particularly Flow and Creativity.

In Creativity, he discusses the Systems Model of Creativity. This system describes how a piece of creative work becomes significant in the general culture. There are essentially three pieces to this model:

1. The domain is the area of creative work (e.g. painting, music, literature).

2. The field is the collection of gatekeepers for that domain (e.g. art curators, music critics, editors).

3.  The individual learns the rules of the domain, creates new work, and submits it to the field for acceptance.

Recently, things have gotten interesting.

The gatekeepers for any given creative domain have become less clear in recent years.  The traditional gatekeepers, like music labels, hold less power today in dictating culturally accepted works of creativity.  Viral videos, Kickstarter, Yelp.  Who needs a high brow food critic’s review anymore?

This leads to (at least) two things

1. The traditional gatekeepers take less chances.  When a music label could rely on their clout to generate sales, it was worth betting on middle-level or upcoming talent.  The risk was low because they could at least count on recouping their costs.

But with less sales clout, the risks of losing money go up, which means less willingness to promote those middle level artists.  All the money goes to ‘sure bets’, the top performers with the proven track record.  This is why so many movies right now are sequels or reboots.  These are the safe bets of beleagured gatekeepers.

2.  Every musician is a marketer.  Maybe this was always true. Every creative person is responsible for creating their own audience.  It’s unlikely someone else will do it for you.  On the bright side, there’s never been more tools for doing this.  On the darker side, there’s never been more voices competing.

The more serious concern is that the relentless need to self-promote saps energy from the more important work of creating something meaningful.

The practical solution?

Find your audience.  Find the group of people who care enough about your work to support you.  It doesn’t have to be huge.  A 10o rabid fans outweigh a 10,000 disinterested acquaintances. Connecting with them becomes an investment that pays dividends, rather than a money pit that leaves you broke. For a large amount of creative people, this is the way forward.

For the real scoop on this, check out Seth Godin’s Tribes.

 

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