Music Biz 2.0: The Crowded Playing Field

[Joh Padgett]

In previous segments of this series of blog posts on the modern music business I have discussed The Local Impact of Big Box Music Shops and The Economics of Live Music Entertainment. A common thread running through both posts is a connection to a subspecies of musician that I refer to as Instrument Owners.

I should warn you now this post may offend the sensibilities of some folks on this website. I wish I could apologize in advance for this condition, but I cannot and I do not mean to say that with malicious intent. I believe there is a dysfunction in American society today that needs to be addressed whereby it is considered impolite to criticize the talent display of others. I guess I have more in common with Simon Cowell from American Idol than I care to admit, I think that folks who delude themselves about their own talent level are setting themselves up for failure which I think is the real issue.

Many people have seen the show American Idol and the biggest audiences seem to be according to the ratings for the show in the beginning of the competition and at the end of the competition. I am postulating this is due to the desire of folks to watch the audition shows to see the trainwreck performances and to see who wins out after weeks of competition. This is generally how I watch the show. I don't get all attached emotionally to specific performers and watch them throughout the show's run.

I and other music professionals view that whole show with a kind of disdain because it is selling the idea that anyone can be plucked off the street and made to be a huge star seemingly overnight. Its a kind of insult to professionals who spend their whole lives working hard to create opportunities for themselves which this show just hands to someone who may or may not have worked as hard as others who made it to stardom before through working for it. There are American Idol winners with exceptions, Taylor Hicks comes to mind, but this is how a number of professionals I work with view American Idol, which is instructive for discussing the concept of Instrument Owners.

For me, there are three categories of musician. The first category is Professionals, whom may have huge success like an Elton John or a Gwen Stefani or simply be a consistently working local musician who makes a living from performing.

The second category is Amateurs, who I can best describe as budding professionals who have a modicum of natural talent sufficient to achieve Professional status but may be just starting out on a track to professional status or may be a very young performer.

The third category is Instrument Owners. This kind of musician is someone with deficient natural talent who buys all of the instruments and equipment they can afford and makes unserious attempts to learn their instrument of choice. They compensate for this lack of talent in many cases by purchasing more equipment, blaming their instruments for the God awful racket coming forth from them.

Musicians reading this will recognize who I am talking about. It's the guy who has the best gear in the band and the latest gadgets and gizmos for playing through who still runs half a measure behind the rest of the band but never improves beyond that point no matter how much practice time they put in.

The motivations for musicians of the third category are a varied lot and are what defines which category a musician falls into. Professionals are like pros in any other line of work. These are folks with high quality talent, whether naturally or artificially achieved via education, training and practice who have professional goals and standards to which they adhere to.

Amateurs are motivated by a desire to become professional and are in the process of educating, training or practicing their way through to becoming professionals. They also tend to have passion and a strong desire to succeed in common with professionals.

Instrument owners have a long list of motivations. Some just want to be cool. Others have a narcissistic component to their personality. Some seek fame and fortune at all costs. And some have an earnest desire to acquire musical talent which they do not know how to achieve and are unwilling to commit the time necessary to get a music education, or practice long enough to get a piece of music right.

Musicians who have had to deal with Instrument Owners find themselves very frustrated sometimes. The key to great music is great collaboration. This requires teamwork from all members of the band, ensemble or whatever type of group is assembled to perform. One member of the band not pulling their weight on the part of the piece assigned to them can ruin the performance for all musicians on the stage. It's not fair to the other musicians who worked hard to perform well to have a substandard performance because of an Instrument Owner who has refused to face the fact that they are not talented to the same level as the people around them.

The music business is a very emotional business. It can be difficult to tell a friend that they are interfering with the progress of the group through their inability to improve their talent. Companies deal with this all the time in the regular business world by firing people for substandard performance. Bands should be the same way and fire their instrument owners so that they can acquire talented Amateurs or Professionals. Surviving in music business 2.0 is going to demand high quality talent from Amateurs and Professionals be put forth.

Next time we will discuss the social aspects of music and how it affects distribution in the modern music business.

[David Bagdade]

Jon wrote: "I'm sure that you, David, know something about this--being in a top-notch group that fits outside the box a bit makes it difficult to market yourselves, eh?"

Surprisingly not, Jon. It's really not an issue that's plagued us very much. I can imagine if we were with a major label and some A&R twink had to sell us by comparing us to someone else, that would present a problem because we don't really sound like any other bands. But my description of us as a rock band with bluegrass instrumentation, humorous material and a fairly wild stage show usually seems to get the basic point across. People are still generally pretty surprised when they actually see us, but at least the description is not too wide of the mark.

[Jon Silpayamanant]

Yeah, and I think the possibly variants are multiplying nowadays--with such easy access to music media (alot due to the web) anyone can be inspired to pursue a musical direction that they would not otherwise pursue due to the proximity (or lack thereof) of a particular style of music in their region (or lack of a particular style that's been commercially produced). The music industry in general is trying to put all these pieces into their pre-defined marketing boxes but it's just not going to work--also with the changing demographics, regional and local music industries/communities are having similar difficulties. I'm sure that you, David, know something about this--being in a top-notch group that fits outside the box a bit makes it difficult to market yourselves, eh?

Some, like the greater Cincy/Lexington area can maintain a modest market of "bands" that work with bellydancers regularly because there are tons of bellydancers in that area (much less the big Coastal cities and Chicago).

And yeah, Robert in il Troubadore, is just that person that performs over 100 shows a year for pay, and records a solo album every year, but has that day job thing going (though he would like to shift his day job to music, obviously)--where exactly do people like that stand?

I'm not saying there aren't meaningful ways to describe musical professionalism, but it seems to be increasingly more difficult to do so these days!

I'm trying to get Joh back into the discussion, David--I know we've had many of them in the past ourselves and I think it's good and healthy for musicians, music industry professionals, and just fans of music to "hear" alot of this!

[David Bagdade]

And thanks, Jon, for drawing Joh back into commenting on these topics...I've been waiting for his next words for a while now!

[David Bagdade]

I agree with both of you that professionalism in music can be very hard to quantify or describe with all the variants which are possible. I don't think a great singer is any less of a musician than a great instrumentalist, for what it's worth. We could easily twist ourselves in knots over this...for example, Jon's excellent band has been known to combine instrumental ability with dancing skills. And what about the guy who performs over a hundred times a year, usually for pay, and also records and teaches but also has a day job unrelated to music (Joh, you and I have discussed this variant before)? It's hard to draw the line in any meaningful way. In defining musical professionalism, I think, for myself, I will adopt Justice Potter Stewart's reasoning when called to define obscenity -- I know it when I see it.

[Jon Silpayamanant]

Nothing wrong with how you divided things up here--there are probably plenty of other ways to divide things up--depending on what ways we want to show how things work. I guess part of what I'm emphasizing is that there's also a difference (that makes a difference if we're talking about the music business from an economic standpoint) between what is sometimes considered professional entertainers (that happen to use music as a vehicle for their trade) and professional musicians.


One of the reason some professionals don't care for the American Idol phenomenon that you talked about is because in a way it's really looking for the entertainers rather than the musicians, maybe?

I remember in an interview, Janos Starker (world class cellist and teacher at IU) pejoratively said of the late Mstislav Rostropovish (who by many was considered the top world cellist of the past century), that he was an entertainer and that he "just happened to play the cello."

Obviously I have my own criteria for what would consitute being a professional musician as opposed to a professional entertainer. Not that I really care one way or the other who does what. But what I do care about are people who make protestations one way or the other when they obviously (to me, at least) are not what they claim to be--so the issue for me is more of an ethical one rather than an economic one (I say this with the understanding that what's ethically acceptable in the music industry is shaped by economic forces to some extent too).

Another distinction I sometimes make--and this bears more on the skill level of the musician--is a continuum between craftsmanship and (or lack of a better word) "artistry." Great craftsmen (and apologies to all the feminists out there--I use the term as it's given to us but by no means limit it to a specific sex denotation) at one extreme can get around perfectly well on their instruments, but this doesn't necessarily mean that they create or can create great music. Then there are people who can write great tunes, symphonies, whatever, but aren't necessarily great at playing any particular instrument.

Obviously the two aren't realy mutually exclusive but the whole covers vs originals debate usually falls under discussions of this type. And in Classical music (and alot of music pre-1950s in the Western World) you have composers that can write music away from any instrument (excepting a piano/keyboard in many cases) and yet crank out beautifully crafted pieces not ever having really played them (or even having the ability to play them).

This latter way of dividing things up can be useful in discussions of the history of the music industry--Sinatra, Dean Martin, and the rest of the Rat Pack were all considered great crooners/singers, but they never (or rarely) wrote their own music. Most of the popular music was produced this way before the rise of Rock and Roll (and still is for some of the big pop superstars) but now some of the biggest stars are those that write their own tunes. The model in classical music is still along the lines of the pre-1950s pop music for the most part though there's a slowly rising movement of smaller ensembles that are writing their own music with some success--most of those are composer-formed ensembles (where the composer is a member or "bandleader" of the group--making it more like what we'd find in Jazz/Big-Band/Swing groups).

You were just making broad generalizations, which is fine--it's a blog post after all and not a full blown dissertation on the music industry you were trying to write, eh? There are alot of conceits that people in music have about what and why they do what they do. But having some awareness of the limits of the generalizations they make about what and why they do what they do is usually not one of them, eh?

[Joh Padgett]

Well as you said, there is a rather huge divide there, and perhaps I oversimplified the entirety of my argument somewhat, but for a further discussion I will have to write a second part to this post. The "music business" as we have discussed in the interview I am posting shortly is a much larger market than anyone is aware of. The forces at play in this market are varied and powerful.

[Jon Silpayamanant]

I think, if you want to stick to this tri-partite division of musicians, you might want to consider adding a y-axis to your x-axis. For lack of a better way of putting it--let's just make that y-axis a division between "employed" and "unemployed" with all the gradations in between (with the priviso that "employment" here just means "employment in a music making field" e.g. in music performance).

In other words, there are fully employed professional musicians and that continues on a continuum to the fully unemployed professional musician. For example, take a fully trained classically trained musician fresh out of the conservatory-he has the same training as any other, say, symphonic musician--but if there are no positions in a symphony orchestra, this professional musician (who would otherwise be a cinch for any career in a symphony orchestra) is otherwise unemployed.

Then take what would be nothing more than one of you "instrument owners" (I'd just call this kind of musician a "hack", btw) who just happens to be fortunate enough to find full-time employment in a group for any number of reasons. Maybe he's the brother of so-and-so who has the biggest market share in music ensemble corporation (say, the Blue Man Group or Stomp); or maybe he's the one in the full-time cover band that owns all the sound/light equipment; or maybe he's a fully tenured music professor at a university (I'm obviously saying that getting that university training doesn't automatically make someone a professional musician here).

Having gone through the Conservatory training and realizing my prospects for employability given the oversaturation of classically trained musicians in the [especially] US market I've had to find creative ways for creating an audience for what I do--or, on the other hand, for finding work in ensembles I wouldn't ahve otherwise have even bothered with given my training (cf the number of classically trained musicians in bands as opposed to classical ensembles nowadays).

Sometimes the market doesn't necessarily weed out the chaff from the wheat for completely other reasons than what you describe--and sometimes the wheat gets thrown out with or without the chaff. It wouldn't matter if a musician is the best, brightest, most professional (e.g. great work ethic) Kora player in the Midwest if there's no audience (i.e. market) for Kora players in the Midwest.

On the other hand, it wouldn't matter if a guitarist is a no-talent hack if she happens to have other favorable circumstances keeping her gainfully employed as a musician.

i know this overlaps som of what you said, but I think there are far more powerful forces that create a divide between the employment and marketability of a musician and the unemployment and unmarketability of a musician. This is probably going to be a part of the issue I'll explore in that "On Being a Republican Musician..." post I've been threatening to write! ;)