In this episode, I discuss the crisis in music in two acts: Act I - Music is too Easy to MakeAct II - Music is too Easy to Consume...and their cumulative neg...
In regards to there being an abundance of songs, I’ve also found that this kills off my motivation to make music.
For one, because well, obviously there’s musicians out there that produce music at a much higher skill level and production value, so it’s easy to just never even try ‘competing’ with them, even though with a bit of effort, I definitely can create something that a certain niche will enjoy.
But similarly, it also feels like every niche is covered. Any song I’d want to make, I would just need to search long enough and I’d find something similar on the internet.
I myself don’t have a real demand for the songs I create. I don’t expect to create something that I would find so much better than what everyone else does.
I do get the bonus of writing exactly the songs that ding the neurons in my brain, but those other musicians get the bonus of having more skill and production value and being the proverbial infinite monkeys with typewriters.
At this point, I tend to go back and forth between listening to all the excellent music out there, to try to keep my own creativity up to speed, and then for a few weeks, I’ll only listen to relatively mellow songs, so that the songs I’m writing actually sound decent in comparison and I get the motivation to continue working on them.
I blame the defunding of reliable curators. The good gets lost in the torrent of mediocre content. This isn’t just music, but videos, news, art, and so on. Most anything that both craftsmen and amateurs can produce is now easily accessible to everyone everywhere. In addition to the old method of producing albums where the band had to go to some location and work on it as a regular job, and with the label sending in extra musicians, equipment, professionals and such, there used to be trusted critics.
Historically, we had a short list of vetted reviewers who could point us towards the best stuff without the need to wade through the rest. Even if it turned out that your aesthetics did not match that of a given critic, you could probably see why such critics held their opinions and could quickly locate a critic whose tastes did align with yours. Now we have a billion fake review sites run by the companies and/or families of those being reviewed. They are not trustworthy. A person is left to try everything on their own and we often run out of time looking for ‘good’ and settle on ‘good enough’.
In regards to there being an abundance of songs, I’ve also found that this kills off my motivation to make music.
For one, because well, obviously there’s musicians out there that produce music at a much higher skill level and production value, so it’s easy to just never even try ‘competing’ with them, even though with a bit of effort, I definitely can create something that a certain niche will enjoy.
But similarly, it also feels like every niche is covered. Any song I’d want to make, I would just need to search long enough and I’d find something similar on the internet.
I myself don’t have a real demand for the songs I create. I don’t expect to create something that I would find so much better than what everyone else does.
I do get the bonus of writing exactly the songs that ding the neurons in my brain, but those other musicians get the bonus of having more skill and production value and being the proverbial infinite monkeys with typewriters.
At this point, I tend to go back and forth between listening to all the excellent music out there, to try to keep my own creativity up to speed, and then for a few weeks, I’ll only listen to relatively mellow songs, so that the songs I’m writing actually sound decent in comparison and I get the motivation to continue working on them.
I blame the defunding of reliable curators. The good gets lost in the torrent of mediocre content. This isn’t just music, but videos, news, art, and so on. Most anything that both craftsmen and amateurs can produce is now easily accessible to everyone everywhere. In addition to the old method of producing albums where the band had to go to some location and work on it as a regular job, and with the label sending in extra musicians, equipment, professionals and such, there used to be trusted critics.
Historically, we had a short list of vetted reviewers who could point us towards the best stuff without the need to wade through the rest. Even if it turned out that your aesthetics did not match that of a given critic, you could probably see why such critics held their opinions and could quickly locate a critic whose tastes did align with yours. Now we have a billion fake review sites run by the companies and/or families of those being reviewed. They are not trustworthy. A person is left to try everything on their own and we often run out of time looking for ‘good’ and settle on ‘good enough’.