The great musician exodus
“If there is anything musicians need more, it’s an audience.“
Some might think that being a musician is a power trip, quite the contrary, it is a way to cope with ones own feelings. It alone helps bring emotions forth, from inside of a person and reveal what is hiding in our soul. We don’t do it to please others, but a simple need, or outlet must occur. People in general need art, and art helps the world feel. Without art, we all die inside, and dying inside is not something we want in a post-2000 world. Musicians need to share their work, it isn’t always for a career, but the side of an artist that most don’t realize, is that they are naturally performers. Something is brewing inside of you when you want to share your most intimate private moments, your music, with strangers, in hope that someone may discover you.
But those days are coming to a close, and while bleak as it may sound, the reality is a hard one to grasp. It’s a bitter pill… You can hope all like, and simply make music and you do it for the love of it, but your audience is nill to nothing. As it becomes more difficult for the artist to be heard, either through pay to play social media and other places, musicians in gross are leaving the internet. They simply pack up and leave, one by one, every day. You can follow this through Twitter, watching certain people toss their bags to the side of the road and say, “see ya, I thought my music was interesting, but I guess that isn’t so.”
This alone is a pandemic, and no one can do anything to stop it. Big tech is not helping, so we have to release music to other places and may never find our audience. A once ‘ray of hope’ is now diminished into a feeling of dread, wondering, “who will listen?” There isn’t much to say, there isn’t much to welcome, I bring you no kind words, but the truth. Musicians in general are their own audience; musicians listening to one another, and the fans of the world, finding the next pop wonder instead of the independent artist, who works even harder to be heard and finds little to no help getting their music discovered.
YouTube at one time would help boost the artist, but that was long ago, and Twitter, the same value, but as filters were put in place, we lost our freedom to be heard. This is a travesty of epic proportions, not to mention unfair. But then you might say, “just pay promo and you’ll find your audience.” This might be fine if the artist had money, but a starving artist is a starving artist for a reason. The days of free for all internet are long over.
Ask anyone in the music scene at this time and they will tell you, from the indie label to the free promoters and bloggers, “it’s hard, and we’re all suffering.” This comes from the world shutting down, and people don’t know where to find music. The tight grip from streaming services and lack of free promo has caused this to happen. Social media and Google have become censorship = socialism. We were warned about the loss of net-neutrality years ago. And we are all kept from seeing each other, in this digital wall all around us. The moguls who loom over us, with their tightly gripped wad of cash in hand, purposely find ways to “milk the system”. So… is there is a way out of this?
Pay it forward as much as you can, and help one another in this time of need, as #WEATNU has always done, simply put (artists helping artists.)
You become the fan of your fellow musicians, because, in no time soon are these juggernauts of the industry going to allow us to move forward. They stamp out art without regard, even if your music costs nothing, as they simply don’t understand the magnitude of doing this. Your fans are lost in a sea of digital 1’s and 0’s and it isn’t getting easier. Someone had to speak up about this, someone needed to, it’s up to the artist to find a way to correct it.
#WEATNU Digital Magazine
July 31, 2023