Standing Out
Interestingly, Seth Godin just talked about that yesterday - the importance of not wasting people's time, their attention, their contact. The cliche is you only get one chance to make a first impression, right? Make sure you don't blow it.
A couple days ago Godin also talked something similar - the erosion in the paid media pyramid - the point being that in the old model, almost everybody "in the media" was part of the machine of "mass media" production. The future, he posits, is more like a patronage model. You pay more for what you like - but you only buy what YOU like, you don't just choose from the limited array of what's available. Sounds a bit like what Derek Webb was saying, doesn't it?
But...how do you stand out? How do you make it? It's no magic formula. It's vision, creativity and hard work. For every one artist who was "accidently" discovered by some freak conjoining of circumstances, hundreds of others worked hard, never strayed from their vision, and succeeded in getting their vision of their art to connect with people.
Now...here's the rub. Not everybody's art connects with "the masses." Get it? That's "mass media." That's what network TV is for (which, if you read the internet gurus is nearly dead, though my sources say not for a while yet) - that's what facebook is for, that's what MTV and the radio (does anybody listen anymore?) is for. That which "most people" or at least "many people" will like, watch, consume. And if you can make there, good for you. Enjoy your fifteen minutes. 'Cause that's what you get. Burn bright and burn out and then become a punchline. 90% of mass media, anyway.
Your art connects with your people. It may be a very small group of people. The songs that I have written will never sell. Never. Nobody wants to buy them. But I have a core group of friends who would listen to them, who would, I don't doubt, pay me money if I ever recorded them.* Might actually listen to them on occasion and appreciate them. But it's a small group. A micro group. My songs will never stand out enough to be mass media. I'm okay with that. I'd probably give them away anyway.
Make your art. Do it for you. If you love it, you will be passionate about it. Maybe no one else will get it. That's okay. Nobody got Van Gogh, either. Just don't cut off your ear or anything.
Vision. It's easy to drift on vision. Stay laser focused on your vision. Don't let anything distract you from your goal, whatever it is. I don't know any success story that starts with, "I didn't have any idea what I was going to do, I just happened into this..." It's always, "I had this vision...and it became clearer..."
Work really hard. There are no part time artists. Sorry. That's the truth. You do it or you don't. You live and breathe it, or you fail. That's the hard truth.
Make your art. Stay true to your vision. And work really hard. That's the formula. That's it. I think every "failed artist" fails at either selling out the art, selling out the vision, or selling out the work.
Next time. What is success, anyway?
*Yes, I was in a band and we did record some of my songs and we did sell the CD to recoup the recording costs - this was before the digital world was flat...of course we gave a lot of those CDs away, too. But, and to the point of this post - it was mostly people who knew us and loved us who bought those CDs at way more than they were worth.
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