I say in the intro to this podcast episode that the only way to support artists is to buy directly, which obviously leaves out platforms such as Substack and Patreon that artists are using to add a stream of income. When I wrote and recorded that, I was thinking exclusively of being paid for your art, and I’d like to emphasize the divide between that and subscriber-based content creation because I think it really puts a spotlight on what we value.
In the current climate, it’s more difficult than ever to be compensated strictly for art, and with music in particular, paying for what you listen to is completely optional. I think that services and communities such as Substack and Patreon are amazing in providing a way for artists to monetize their material, but it’s also dependent on consistent content creation and cutting off a slice of that content to offer as a bonus to your paid constituency. It’s about the hustle. It doesn’t foster or encourage the drive to create a masterpiece over a long period of time.
As a project, Weird Music is totally out of step with the current state of art. I didn’t intend to take as long making it as I did, and I had no thoughts about how it fit into overall trends. To me, the most important thing throughout was just to make it. I’d worry about the rest once I was done. Now that I’m coming to the end, I realize that it’s a statement about our artistic values. We value the hustle, and the art is optional.
Check out the Weird Music album on Bandcamp, iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify, and all other places where you can find music. Some of this material can also be found in the post “My Weird Music” on the Talking Writing website.
These interviews were all conducted between 2009 and 2011, and music has become even easier to find and listen to since then. When we started touring and booking shows in the mid-2000s, MySpace really enabled our entire network to develop. The ability to immediately listen to bands’ music was a huge game changer.
But, as Vice Cooler says in the following clips, “I wouldn’t want to be a band coming up now. I feel like now is a hard time to get noticed at all, for anything, even though there are things that are instantly accessible. But because of things being instantly accessible, everything’s over flooded. More competition.” Coming up in this over-flooded environment, gaining traction and standing out has been a huge challenge.
As an artist, it’s easy to feel divided about the increased availability of music for cheap or free. It’s important to keep in mind that artists are also audience members, so we all benefit from being able to listen to pretty much whatever we want whenever we want.
There’s no denying the allure of Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL, or whatever other streaming services you use. But in terms of supporting artists, the only way to actually provide financial support is to buy directly from the artist, either from Bandcamp, their own website or at shows. I’ve gone through long periods of limiting myself strictly to Bandcamp.
Sometimes when I talk to artists about this subject, they get defensive because they use Spotify, and I want to be up front that I have no qualms with anyone using Spotify or any other streaming service. Even though all the streaming services offer different payment amounts per stream, they’re all laughable, and therefore essentially the same. As a pay stream for any artist who’s not hugely popular, they are and should be treated as a minute passive income. And there’s no doubt it’s the main way most people listen to music these days.
But the trend towards buying physical media is ticking upwards right now, and it’s still more important than ever to put that extra effort into making something nice for people to hold onto.
Billy Dufala: I’ll say, being in a band is the best way to find out about new music. {laugh}
Matt Gibson: Yes. I agree.
Billy Dufala: Being in a band is the best way for me to have expanded my musical vocabulary. So a lot of what is on my hard drive and on my iPod is stuff that I’ve gotten off of other people’s iPods and other people’s hard drives.
I did this stupid thing a couple years ago where I gave away all my vinyl. I was sick of carting it around and I gave away a bunch of it, I just let go of it. So as far as buying new music, I don’t do it very often and sadly I bought a lot off iTunes. It’s not a bad thing, but honestly when I think of something or if I want to listen to it, I’ll see if I can buy it on iTunes.
And for new artists coming out now, I usually get it from somebody who has it already, as crappy as it sounds. But that definitely makes you think about the way that things go these days. People don’t buy music and that’s not how you’re going to make a living making music.
Matt Gibson: The way I’ve always looked at it is that I have the blessing and burden of being interested in almost everything musically. People will ask the question, “What do you listen to?” And I’m just like, “That is probably one of the most ridiculous questions you can ask,” only because I can’t answer that.
Billy Dufala: Or, “You need a certain amount of time to hear my answer.”
Matt Gibson: Yeah, or we’re going to have to have an hour long conversation about it. I like it all, so it makes it a little more difficult when you want to collect the music. That’s why I like having there be an area on the Internet for you to find stuff, or friends to easily give you their collection of music rather than going to the record store. I’d still want to go to the record store if I find something I’m interested in, ultimately. If they’re still around I want to go see them perform, and if they’re around or not I want to try to buy their record.
It’s just made it really easy for people who are interested in almost anything and everything to be able to at least get a good listen in before figuring out whether or not they like it instead of judging something based on the one time they heard it on the radio. The fact that there are so many good things, you’re not going to be able to hear anything if you just listen to the radio. You need to find it from everybody.
Billy Dufala: I have a great example. I was listening to PRB on the way home from the mountains the other day and I heard this song that sounded like a cross between Serge Gainsbourg and David Axelrod. I was like, “What the hell is this?” I’m waiting and waiting and the DJ gets on and says, “And that was the new Danger Mouse.” Like, “Get the fuck out of here!” And I have an iPhone now, so I went on, I checked it out, and I fucking bought that song. Not 99 cents anymore, either, it’s $1.29. But that kills artists. It kills them. But at the same time it’s the most convenient thing. {laugh} So awful and amazing.
There’s a lot of these paradoxical things happening with the industry that make it totally a brain fart and make you scratch your head. You want to feel guilty but you want to feel relieved. You want to feel super stoked and then at the same time almost mourning the death of an era. It’s so back and forth, back and forth.
But that’s the age we’re living in across the board, and it’s not just music. It is what it is, man. And I don’t really see any letting up in the trials for the middle-of-the-road type bands, the middle class bands. You have your low and your high and all those people in the middle, it’s going to be a challenge, because now the attention span of an audience member is getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
We released an album three and a half, almost four years ago. We didn’t release an album for another three and a half, four years, and now we just released this album in May, it hasn’t even been a year and we’re already talking about going back into the studio.
Matt Gibson: You kind of have to.
Billy Dufala: You have to! For where we are, where we fit into that demographic, that’s what you have to do. I remember Madlib released an album every month in 2010 and you’re just like, “Come on, dude, you’re going to make it so hard for so many other people.”
It’s really exciting because it’s making people have to think differently and do things differently and react to the way that the industry is shaping the expectations of artists in this day and age, and that is really exciting. You can’t hold onto what was and expect for it to just keep you afloat, so in that regard they’re exciting new times even though so many people are really worried. I mean hell, it’s change and that can always be exciting and really good.
Matt Gibson: The availability of everything is influencing the productivity of everybody. There’s so much [out there, and] people aren’t sitting and listening to their favorite song over and over, or their favorite side of the record over and over and over and over again, because you have a portable hard drive that holds a million songs. You can put on your catalog of music on here and you can, without repeating, sit here for a month listening to music straight. And that’s a lot.
It’s really good, but what it offers and what it takes away probably can balance out. What it offers is for you to have a more well-rounded musical pallet, and you can use that to make your own music.
[Nowadays] you don’t listen to the same thing over and over and really love it and get ingrained with it. People just keep listening to the next thing and then move on. So somebody who puts out an album every month is definitely going to be right where he needs to be in this day and age versus a band who puts out an album every three years, because you’ll get forgotten about real fast.
Chris Powell: I think the way all this stuff has gone with people basically being able to get records for free, of course it hurts all of the artists who put all the time and effort into it, but at the same time—turning lemons into lemonade—you can get your stuff heard pretty much anywhere in the world. And then if there’s enough interest you can go and perform there.
Jamey Robinson: Which has been happening.
Chris Powell: That’s really exciting. It’s a compromise, and you make the best of it. But at the same time, I still do believe that if you make a really simple effort to make sure your record is actually something that people want to hold, there is the chance that people might really like the artwork and feel inclined to buy it. And I will say that at our shows luckily a lot of the people who come out to see us will buy the records, even if they’ve downloaded it, which is great. Luckily we have a fan base that is great about that.
But if you have something that the band just put a little bit of extra TLC and effort into, it makes all the difference. It helps you connect to your audience in a whole different way than if you mass produce something and then put it on your merch table to sell. Our old band Need New Body, we used to do things like this and it felt relevant then, but it feels even more relevant now, and you can see other labels making efforts to do that. You can see the whole thing shifting, and I think in a good way.
So that’s kind of my take on it. But it’s not great that you sell a lot less records. We definitely did miss a really golden era there of being able to make a lot of money selling records.
Ryan Kattner: Yeah, we missed the cut. On one hand we’re very fortunate because we have fanatic supporters, which is awesome. Kids will drive great distances to see us play and we’ve built up a reputation as a live band. So I mean that’s good.
The downside is that, in the past, people who got in in time, they could actually sell records and have a livelihood independent of having to tour all the time, which can be really grueling and also I think creatively stifling because you’re just trying to settle into touring and not losing your mind. That takes a lot of energy, I’m sure you know what it’s like.
Vice Cooler: I’m fortunate enough that I started doing a lot of this stuff before Internet era, so I have this history people are aware of to enough of an extent where I can get work. I wouldn’t want to be a band coming up now. I feel like now is a hard time to get noticed at all, for anything, even though there are things that are instantly accessible. But because of things being instantly accessible, everything’s over flooded. More competition.
Jamey Robinson: That’s all starving musicians need is another {laugh} Yeah, everybody who’s stealing music, you are stealing music. No, I do it too.
But there is an incredible amount of work that goes into trying to get some of this stuff. On the other hand, it’s a totally different story now. I don’t have any kids, but with this digital media explosion I feel like kids are on their iPads experiencing things through the Internet or through cable TV and it’s almost not worthwhile for them to actually go to a show and stand in front of a bunch of people who are pulling off some magic that they don’t know how they could’ve done it in front of them.
And even if they do go to the show, they’re trying to record it on their cell phones and still not experiencing the live show. Let yourself go and dance or do whatever you do, just enjoy the fact that there’s actually a moment happening. I think some of that is lost and it’s a shame. I think that the communication awakening of information in the digital world is definitely a plus and it’s definitely happening, so might as well use it for good and not evil.
I didn’t really mean to say that I didn’t like making records before, I just mean that in some ways it’s almost anti-climactic as opposed to in the older days.
Chris Powell: It’s definitely anti-climactic these days.
Jamey Robinson: Especially now that a record can come out and people can just download it, it’s not the same significance as, say, opening a Led Zeppelin record that you’ve been waiting two years to come out. It’s on vinyl and it has moving parts on the record. It’s like, “Oh, your song’s for free on this thing,” and I’m like, “Man, we spent a year and a half trying to make those songs" and people just download them. And they’ll say it on their Facebook.
Chris Powell: It definitely makes everything feel expendable, which as an artist is a really awful feeling.
Jamey Robinson: It’s almost a toss away.
Chris Powell: Of course then getting back to stressing how you actually release it and what you do to make it special. Because it is in the artist’s hands. It’s just ideas and concepts, you just have to see those through. You just make that little bit of extra effort and it goes a long way.
Vice Cooler: One really interesting thing I’ve noticed about the Internet changing things with music is that it’s created the physical creation of music as an art piece in a way. It started with the Wolf Eyes stuff where things were handmade. We were touring with them when they were starting to blow up and people would just go buy everything. Some of the stuff was limited to like twenty copies or something; people would be buying five copies of it, ten dollars for a cassette. Just totally ridiculous.
Then you’d get off tour and go on eBay and see all those copies up. You start to wonder, “Do these people even listen to it?” And I don’t think most people do. Mainly because being on tour I’ve stayed with a lot of these people or talked to them at shows. You buy stuff with the intent of selling it on eBay. I’ve done it, even.
That makes it in a way more of an art piece than something to listen to, because you don’t want to scrape it up or get fingerprints on it so you don’t listen to it, because you buy it as an investment. I don’t know if this is a good or a bad thing but the Internet—eBay in particular, or Viva la Vinyl—have made records no longer a musical product but a physical art piece, an investment.
So that’s interesting because it existed in a way then, you’d go into a record store and a Raincoats record would be twenty-five dollars or something, but you would buy that Raincoats and listen to it. Now people are buying a Waves seven inch, never listening. Or, “A Vivian Girls seven inch, it’s only fifty copies. I’m gonna buy five of those and then put them up on eBay over six months, never listen to them.” Or, “Wolf Eyes, this is hand-painted.”
It’s also changed the way the musician thinks about the product. [When bands say] “First fifty copies are on yellow vinyl,” “First hundred copies are silkscreened,” they’re not making those because they think that looks cool, they’re doing those as a mini marketing ploy. Which is interesting. I don’t think it’s good or bad, it’s just funny.
Steve Touchton: I do feel like with the physical versus digital thing with music and print, because I was on the cusp of experiencing the transition that happened, and I think there is a loss of intimacy with whatever magazines or physical records provided. You really got to know every nook and cranny of what it was.
And with the Internet, because of the quantity of things that’s coming at you all the time and the ease with which you can transition between things, you get to know more things but not as well.
Vice Cooler: Also there’s the thing of like you would hunt for a single. There’d only be five hundred copies and you’d be like, “I gotta find it. I really want to hear what it sounds like.” But in a way that’s being exclusive. Everyone deserves to hear it. But there’s the mental aspect of you had to really want to know about it.
So that’s the debate. I don’t really know if one’s better than the other. I see cons to both sides of it.
Steve Touchton: There is a certain nostalgia about ordering a record that you had only heard about but never actually heard. You wait two weeks for it to arrive in the mail and then when it arrives if you don’t like it at first you get to know it so well that you learn to love it in a way. But now I will listen to something for five seconds and then just stop playing it and never listen to it again; it’s really bizarre.
Greg Jamie: I think it changes the way people listen to music. I still prefer listening to full albums all the way through. I’ve been making more playlists for this room than I ever have before, but usually if I’m just listening to music I want to hear an entire album. Unless it’s not that good.
Everything digital is making people a little crazy, I think. It’s definitely making me a little crazy. Less focused.
I don’t know if it’s helped us or hurt us. I feel like it’s impossible to say. We started in a transition period into there being more of that kind of thing, but I guess everything is always transitioning. It does feel more solidly like this very fast mp3 single, “go go go” thing.
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