Fighting inertia
--- How, would you say, could non-mainstream forms of music reach wider audiences?
I'd rather ask "why should non-mainstream music want to reach a wider audience?". Isn't "wider audience" a contradiction to "non-mainstream" all together? Many, many years ago I read an interview with Umberto Eco and back then he said that "not being on TV is a sign of quality". Back then I didn't fully understand him, but throughout the years it sank in. The clearer I see our current reality, and who is representing it, and most importantly how it is being represented, the less I feel an interest in becoming part of it.
I mean, I am happy about a wider audience, don't get me wrong, but I'm not concerned about the technique of how to reach or generate it. Any art, or even any form of expression, by definition, holds within whom can be reached by it. Nietzsche described it as "selecting ones audience by the very content of your work". In return, every art and certainly every piece of music, automatically selects its audience. Sure, you can always optimize public relations, this is true, but there's a limit to everything. The current PR methods are systematically all functioning the same way (money) and therefore that wider audience is by definition, excluded to a specific and large portion of non-mainstream music.
Usually, it is considered that it is the job of the artist to win over an audience. But listening is also an active, rather than just a passive process. How do you see the role of the listener in the musical communication process?
An artist doesn't have a job, because art is a vocation, not a profession. It's funny how for many decades winning over the audience was the job of a record label, promotion agency, media, etc., while now all of a sudden it's supposed to be the artist's task.
While there was still enough money in the system, the artist was preferred to be seen as inactive, as far as the business was concerned. Nobody asked the artist about business, marketing, the audience, the market, the formats, etc. As long as the artist delivered the music and, in the best case, collected mediocre paychecks, due to having signed mediocre contracts, the world was in perfect order. Let me say, that I'm tremendously glad that entire shit hole of parasites called music industry went down the drain, and at the same time I refuse to win over anybody.
I'm tired of art being forced to do the dance of economy, and trying to win over an audience does certainly resemble that. As an artist, following ones instinct and interest is very much the only option. If by that, an audience can be won, well, then that's a lucky circumstance. Part of the current problem is that we are having this fat, sluggish audience sitting there, wanting to be won..."entertain me!" they say. In physics the very same effect is described as inertia, the power of passive force. I'm not sure I want to work against inertia!
Reaching audiences usually involves reaching out to the press and possibly working with a PR company. What's your perspective on the promo system? In which way do music journalism and PR companies change the way music is perceived by the public?
Answering your 15 questions, this very much talks about my perspective on the promo system, doesn't it? I see the necessity of doing promo work and for the biggest part I like doing it. It is a system that works in between the music, the musician and the audience. Due to the complexity of our society it seems necessary to go that route. , While seeming like a natural tendency for the function of economic exploitation of music, the media dealing with music, to a certain degree, has developed questionable, cancerous tendencies.
To everybody who had to deal with, for example radios (public or private), not to speak of TV and everything that's related to it (ever wondered who is winning the Grammy and how?), the cancerous mutation of something that is initially a good thing, must be obvious.
I don't want to judge all media the same way, since there are certainly and nowadays even more than in the past, very good publications and programmes around. But at the same time I have my reservations towards it. It is of course necessary for an interested listener to obtain some sort of information from somewhere, basically that's what it's all about, and strictly speaking I have no problem with it.
It's naive to believe that somebody ends up on a front page, because somebody decided that this person was "worth" it. Mainstream media is a business first and foremost. What is perceived as reality to us, may it be print, radio or visual media, including the internet, is actually a distorted version of reality.
I personally don't consume any media, neither printed or in any other form, since I consider it as second-third degree reality. Most importantly, when it comes to tendencies, what the media depicts as real time is by definition someone else's past! This may work out for most of the planet, yet for me it doesn't and I decided a long time ago, only to consider relevant what I am able to perceive in real time and with my own eyes. This necessarily brings the amount of relevant parameters down to a manageable size. Over the last two decades, information obtained through music journalism has very, very rarely impressed me or changed my way of seeing things.
Please recommend two artists to our readers which you feel deserve their attention.
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