For any logically-minded individual, the music industry today resembles something akin to the lottery where (in lieu of a lottery ticket) you simply cast off your newest album release into the exponentially expanding vast ocean of the internet and hope that somehow it finds its intended shore of superstardom. Its path, which once felt navigable, now feels impossible to follow even to the most experienced music industry experts. This is because the ocean between where we start and where we want to go is simply getting much, much larger. Our current north star is to follow streaming numbers, instagram traction,and tiktok statistics to chart our paths to success. Music industry “experts” who often lack real artistic taste and are far too confident in themselves need some sort of external metric to be able to justify their decisions. We as artists listen to their foreboding forecasts on how the “state of the industry is so volatile” and how “there's just no money in music anymore,” and because we are so fixated on our crafts we don’t really think critically about any of this until it's too late and we’re left with a completed project trying to figure out how the hours of slaving away can somehow turn a profit. Because we think we don’t know any better, we listen to industry experts and have adopted internet statistics as our north star too, often relying on social media to tell us if we’re successful or not. After all, what are industry people there for if not to handle the processing of our art in the industry when we're done with it. It's our job to make it and their job to figure out how to sell it. But with so many musicians flooding the market, most independent artists have to try to navigate the ocean for themselves. To make it easy for ourselves, we simply follow the social statistics model. Nowadays, we follow it so ardently that it's become something of a religion, the cult of social statistics which now are available in such cruel and stark accuracy. There’s no hiding the amount of traction you are getting anymore. This North star however is a false one. One created by unartistic minds so they can “figure out” the rapidly-changing world and whatever else they tell themselves they are trying to do to make money. Actually, following this path has led us to endless banal records and an overarching sense of artistic gloom. Most people seem to feel that our current world is cultureless compared to previous decades. We’ve entered a dark age, turning away from the paths to a brighter artistic future laid out for us by myriad artists and instead meekly submitted to our new God… social media statistics. And a very cruel, unrelenting, and deceptive God it is indeed. So.. where’s the path? The real question is what is the path and where are we even trying to go as musical artists. Superstardom as we once knew it with all of its vanity, riches, and glorified debauchery is dead; for most people anyways. And I believe it should die completely. We live in a world today where music has not only lost its physical currency (revenue) but also more importantly its social currency as well. We are in an era that is anxiously aware of how the mindless taxation of resources, flawed social hierarchies, and global corruption perpetrated by previous generations has left us in what we feel are dire straits (forgive the pun). How then can we glorify musicians who don't seem to contribute anything tangible to our crumbling societies and dying world but also expect to be showered in money and allowed to live in palatial mansions engaging in unabashed sexual promiscuity while they snort and smoke their way through life ignoring everything going on outside of what they call their “creative bubble.” The era of superstar musicians beholden to nothing and no one except when their drug budget has run out and they have to put out an album or do a tour (also at immense expense of a record company) so they can return to the couch and syringe. Why would we want more of these useless people in our world when we need all hands on deck to help tackle the endless problems looming over all of humankind. The superstars of today (what few are left) are no longer symbols of youthful rebellion but are symbols of the social and political change of the past. We want our rock stars to represent hope, a hope that despite all of the challenges in our world that we’re all too aware of, our world is capable of new artistic inspiration and the change we need for our time. At the moment, the symbols of artistic change we find most easily are people who are not White men, not those who dominated the Western world throughout history and who are largely responsible for its endless problems. If you are able to make it into superstardom today regardless of your background you will be held to a higher standard (publicly) than that of the stars of the past. Symbols cannot be what they are meant to be if they are tainted with consistent scandals. When superstars slip up today they are not easily forgiven. I think we should eliminate the superstar altogether and not give artists the ability to work their way to unchecked vanity and gluttony. The artist should work towards something else if they want to dedicate their lives to their art and make art their sole means of earning a living. In fact, they already do. As I said before, music has lost its social currency. In the 50’s through much of the 80’s, musicians ruled over regular working professionals. We idolized rockstars and lusted after their carefree lives, and pitied or dismissed workers who toiled at day jobs in banks or shops. Nowadays, however, working professionals and dedicated volunteers are the new rockstars as they contribute to our world as opposed to simply taking from it. Making art is seen as a leisure activity and not an actual viable job. When I walk into a party and I tell people that I am a musician, I get everything from eyerolls to “I feel sorry for you lot.” In response to the growing resentment of artists and its diminished social stature, musicians are currently looking to bolster their art with something that can supplement their lives to make them seem more useful to the world. Many musicians turn to some kind of activism, promising to use their following to steer their fans to good and help perpetuate positive social change. Activism then must inherently be a focal point of their careers and artistry, as it would be ingenuine to falter in their commitment. Those who do not want to permanently intertwine their careers with activism usually turn to musical academia and the avant-garde to make themselves feel like what they're doing is actually useful. This is very rarely done consciously, and is currently being done by almost every musician I know - usually with very poor economic returns. Many artists who formerly wanted to be jazz musicians, pop stars, or play chamber music are turning to the academic side of music to contribute to its philosophy (the role of music in society) while ignoring its psychology (the individual emotional responses to music). Some musicians pursue their old dreams alongside the more experimental academic pursuits while others dive head first into academia and forget about their old performance paths completely. The hope is with whatever addition they've found for their lives, they can at least be something more than a musician. Hiding within academia is not the answer. The future of music is to demand much, much more of musicians than before. Our society’s fear of global catastrophe has entered us into an age of staunch pragmatism. We can try (and fail) to continue spouting the usual arbitrary nonsense about the power of music and its innate ability to heal the world, but the bluff has been called and most of the “artists” today cannot back up any of their grandiose activist caterwauling in any concrete way. Whatever energy transference, divine divination, or subliminal message channeling we think we’re doing through our art is meaningless to the public if you can’t back it up in some other concrete way. And why shouldn’t it be? If someone was really healing the world simply by writing songs in a mansion and being paid immensely while doing little or nothing else for the world around them, then wouldn’t we all be healed by now? Generations of the past set the precedent that musicians are to be praised for their artistic endeavors and compensated amply for their work, And as a result, their children have grown up thinking this will be the case. Immense amounts of young people today are shooting for this old model of music success, spending thousands of dollars at universities only to then cast off their projects into the ocean of the internet and never see anything come of it. Ironically, the pious older generation of art patrons and champions are the strongest critics of music today. They refuse to accept the direction art has taken and will only support music that resembles what they knew when they were young. We, the young generation of musicians, are still stuck in their aging ontological societal structure and seemingly have never thought to question why the general feeling of the music industry’s falling state of today doesn’t align with how we were taught to think about it as children. In other words, our parents and grandparents’ ideas about music are just as useless as those of music industry people. We need to erase these false ideas and come up with a new epistemology around music that reflects the current state of the world today and not that of the “Beatles generation” or any other antiquated viewpoints. But we too have a path for success. If you're a young artist today and you're feeling hopeless, confused, and upset about the way things are, here are the steps you need to take to find some peace. Shed all of the ideologies coming out of record labels today concerning social statistics and streaming numbers. They’re meaningless and do not reflect anything concrete about art in any way. Shed all of the big ideas your parents or grandparents told you about the importance of the arts and how somehow getting a degree in the arts will make you better. In their time musicians were cool, now they’re not. And besides, they don't care about yours’ or other contemporary artists’ art, they only care about what they grew up with. Those big ideas don't extend to you. And even if they do, that generation rarely puts its money where its mouth is when it comes to dishing out cash for musicians. Find out what you are besides being a musician. Get out of the practice room, bedroom, parents’ couch, or laptop and go experience the world. Travel. Live life to its fullest. And when you're ready, find out what your actual contribution to the world will be. Recognize that nobody is exempt from this, not even the fake rock stars of today. Everyone HAS to be something alongside being a musician. And that's fine. If you’ve made it this far you’ll notice I haven't talked about how these changes will actually turn a profit for you as an independent artist. That is because in order to shift the ailing revenue in the music world we need first to initiate the epistemological shift I've outlined above and bring the music industry into the 21st century. Only then can the reliably behind and stubborn music industry drag itself along to try and catch up. Practically, we need to establish an industry that doesn’t look at meaningless figures and statistics in order to see if someone is capable of being something that simply doesn’t exist anymore. It's obvious to see why it doesn’t work, right? Kill the rockstar, ditch the social media, and value the artists who are caught up and are actively pursuing their art in a new multi-faceted way. Value the experimental musician (part time works too), film composer, music therapist, music academist, musician activist, music teacher, and whatever else over the mere musician. And listen to our music, watch our videos, and attend our performances - support us because the world is no longer in the 50’s - 80’s, and music has changed along with the rest of the world. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------