WHY TODAY’S ARTISTS FAIL! A couple years back, I ended up sitting next to someone from Spotify on a flight to Austin for SxSW. I had no idea who she was at the time but decided to pick her brain for an article I was working on. Ironically, the article was about the possibility of streaming services replacing major labels. As we discussed the huge door that streaming services opened for independents, she made a statement that I totally agreed with but still found completely unnerving. Drawing from her years of experience dealing with talent, she pointed out how platforms like Instagram and YouTube now made it possible for anyone to build a personal brand around whatever they loved doing. She explained how people were entering six figure partnerships with major companies based on playing video games or doing makeup tutorials.
As she passionately proclaimed, “Everyone can become a millionaire!” I nodded my head in total agreement before feeling the hair on the back of my neck stand up. My inner economist had awoken.
While I totally agreed with her sentiment, a small syntactical error nagged me. EVERYONE cannot become a millionaire. It’s simply impossible due to the law of scarcity and inflation. If everyone was a millionaire, then a million dollars would no longer be worth a million dollars. Setting all that nerdiness aside, I nodded in agreement because I knew exactly what she was saying... ANYONE can become a millionaire. That’s a very small change in wording that produces a drastically different statement. It’s the difference between possibility and probability. If you buy a
“Success” is not “Stardom” If you achieve ANY level of stardom you’ve also achieved success, but you can reach great levels of success and never achieve stardom. By only acknowledging stardom, extreme cases of success, we falsely make it the ruler by which many artists measure themselves. Imagine measuring the size of a home in square miles instead of square feet. If I told you my house was 0.0002 Square miles, you would find that far less impressive than me saying it’s 5,000 square feet (even though it’s considerably larger).
Success is not Objective... A movie that makes $150 Million dollars at the box office seems like a big success until you discover it took $250 Million to make. Sadly few artists consider the costs of success when measuring themselves against others. They measure outputs (views, plays, followers) without considering the inputs they require (Budgets, Relationships, Time). Because the investments made don’t get advertised like the returns, many independents assume those investments didn’t happen. Consider this… ARTIST A will make it a point to promote his video reached one million views while concealing the fact he spent $45,000 to accomplish this. Meanwhile ARTIST B having generated only 10,000 views with $150 Facebook ad will feel insecure because ARTIST A’s video received 100x more views. However, that insecurity is completely unwarranted because Artist B is comparing returns instead of Return on Investment (ROI). If we compare the CPM for the two videos
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lottery ticket, you could possibly win a million dollars… but you probably won’t. Spending the next few days on 6th Street surrounded by thousands of aspiring artists and industry professionals, I couldn’t help but think about how such a small change in wording could produce such an enormous change in meaning, and how missing that subtle difference could lead to a lifetime of frustration and misery. Just like ‘everyone’ and ‘anyone’, the words ‘stardom’ and ‘success’ are not interchangeable, but are often used that way in the music industry. The terms have become so synonymous that many new artists now equate success as nothing short of stardom, even though nothing could be further from the truth.
(how much it cost per 1,000 viewers) we quickly find out ARTIST B was 3x more effective given his budget. A lack of fundamental business knowledge like this keeps many aspiring artists blind to their own successes. CPM CALCULATION ARTIST A: $45,000 Budget / 1,000,000 views = $45 per 1,000 views ARTIST B: $150 Budget / 10,000 views = $15 per 1,000 views
This inability to see their own progress is often the root of great frustration, disappointment and in extreme cases, depression. Too often I come across talented individuals who are making great strides given their circumstances, but because they haven’t attained this objective measure of success (Stardom), they feel they’ve accomplished nothing at all. If a successful video release is measured in millions of views, what kind of pride can one take in having a video with .01 Million views (10,000). To cope with this inadequacy, artists often attempt to buy success in order to mask their self perceived failings.
You Can’t Buy Real Results You can buy a Million Youtube views for around $3,000, but what is that really worth when those views aren’t attached to real people with an interest in your music? If I write you a check for $2 million but only have 48¢ in my account, what is the value of that check? Independents become so obsessed with the appearance of success that they spend the majority of their money, time and energy trying to LOOK successful instead of BEING successful. It’s impressive to say that
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