(#musicindustry) Some musicians slog it out for decades without recognition or real compensation.
They forgo health benefits, stability, satisfying relationships, and sometimes their sanity to play music. These are the performers that are sometimes legendary, but mostly tragic. And sometimes, acclaim only happens after death.
But what about the business side? Could you imagine yourself doing anything that isn’t somehow tied into music? Regardless of how many times your parents told you to go to law school, no matter how bad the books looked? No matter how gloomy the doom gets?
Well, here are some tell-tale signs that you might be a music industry lifer:
(1) You’re broke.
(2) You’re rich, or have been both (1) and (2) within a short period of one another. Maybe a few times.
(3) Things like a 9-to-5, a morning traffic jam, or a “case of the Mondays” are similar to death in your mind.
(4) You’ve turned down a well-paying, non-music job opportunity to slog it out at your indie label, major label,
management agency, production gig, or similar.
(5) Your parents still prod you about going to law school. Or, if you listened to them, you quickly flew your legal eagle towards something music-related.
(6) You just found an amazing artist.
(7) You believe the industry is going to bounce back any day now.
(8) You found a way to stay in the industry, though only highly-specialized industry peers know what you do.
(9) You found a way to stay in the industry, though no one at all really understands what you do.
(10) You spend Monday nights at a club listening to music, composing in front of a piano, or twiddling the knobs at a studio. You really don’t care if the Bears won, if you even knew they were playing at all.
(11) You firmly believe that the world is missing out on life by listening to MP3s through white earbuds. The world would be a much, much better place with higher-fidelity codecs and pro-level headphones.
(12) You’re writing a comment to this story right now.