life of a musician
With this enterprise I took on, the release of my song California Forever, my mind goes back to all the other times I released music under different names.
Releasing a single is no easy feat, especially when there’s no backing up or sponsorship from a label and it’s all on your shoulders: not only it’s hard to keep the engagement alive through social media (platforms such as Instagram and Tik Tok, which are overly saturated) , but it’s extremely expensive to create and publish something that meets the industry standards of today. Below is a list of all the things we, as independent musicians, have to take care of financially:
recording;
further processing;
mixing;
mastering;
album art;
publishing;
social media assets;
music videos;
pitching platforms.
Now, you’d think “it’s gotta be worth something”, right? Not really: most of the time, all we get out of this is a bunch of likes, views and streams. Nothing more.
Imagine, how it feels to spend all this time, energy, effort and money (we’re talking thousands of dollars), only to be briefly seen and passed by, and mind you, this happens whether your music is of debatable taste or if your song has the quality and potential to be the “hit of the summer”.
I know, the question that comes to mind is “why going through all of this then?”.
But what if I tell you that, rather than a right answer we should think outside the box and find the right question: who are you trying to be?
In the world of today, as independent artists we need to think of every release as an accessory to our identity establishment. Think about it, what would you want to be associated with your name, should anyone by any chance decide to look your name up on the internet? In order to answer that question, we need to be backed up by our creations, our songs, journeys. If anyone was ever to look up my name they would eventually bump into my songs, maybe decide to give them a listen and hopefully conclude that I am indeed a professional musician, not because I (or others) say so, but because each release is tangible proof, and hopefully, upon such conclusion, they’d decide to work with me.
In conclusion, to answer the question “why going through all of this?”: to make a statement.
And you, dear reader: who are you trying to be?
