Eric Jensen

OK, let’s face it. It’s not easy mak­ing money as a jazz musi­cian. As a mat­ter of fact, today it is prob­a­bly more dif­fi­cult than it has ever been. The audi­ence is under­stand­ably small because the music is sophis­ti­cated. It requires the listener’s com­plete atten­tion and an inher­ent inter­est in the for­mat. Nonethe­less there are two things the main­stream music indus­try can learn from jazz: The artist and the music are the cen­tral focus rather than the par­tic­u­lar rev­enue stream or dis­tri­b­u­tion vehi­cle. The music has to be truly extra­or­di­nary to dif­fer­en­ti­ate the artist and attract an audi­ence. Look at the big guys. I’m sure Keith Jar­rett has done very well sell­ing CDs over the course of his career yet there are myr­iad ways he can make money because it’s all about who he is and what hap­pens when he sits down at the piano. No one else can offer the world what he can. Ask your­self, how many main­stream pop artists pass that test? There are entire gen­res of music that are inten­tion­ally imi­ta­tive and mediocre; trendy, light­weight, styl­ized fluff.  Let’s get our per­spec­tive straight. Sure, if the sugar water indus­try sud­denly col­lapsed it would be a huge finan­cial adjust­ment for many peo­ple, but let’s not for­get, this stuff is not actual food. It’s unhealthy for reg­u­lar human con­sump­tion. Since the tra­di­tional record indus­try is col­laps­ing why don’t we think about rebuild­ing our busi­ness mod­els on some­thing sub­stan­tial, some­thing that really mat­ters and adds value to the world. 

Read­ing Paul Resnikoff’s essay this morn­ing it occurred to me that the ‘vehi­cle’ for the future of the music busi­ness will be a com­pletely indi­vid­u­al­ized start-up men­tal­ity. Every­thing has changed; what it means to be a per­former, a record­ing artist, a song­writer, an instru­men­tal­ist, a com­poser, a music pub­lisher, a record label… As long as we hang on to the old par­a­digms we won’t see oppor­tu­ni­ties for the future. Apple dropped Com­puter from their name because they’re about some­thing big­ger; chal­leng­ing the sta­tus quo and and build­ing things that empower indi­vid­u­als. They prac­ti­cally own the word, “i”. Com­put­ers, smart-phones and music down­loads are man­i­fes­ta­tions of their larger iden­tity. Think like a start up or a game-changing com­pany. Why do you do what you do, how do you add value to the world, and how can you make money with the gifts you give? Pro­fes­sional musi­cians have always worn mul­ti­ple hats and been less depen­dent on CD sales as their pri­mary source of rev­enue. Ask your­self what your favorite musi­cians stand for. What is their vision of music and how have they orga­nized their lives around that com­mit­ment? CDs are a by-product of some­thing much big­ger. If we con­tinue to focus on the rapidly shrink­ing ‘what’ and ‘how’ of the past we’ll miss the oppor­tu­nity to do some­thing excep­tional today. Get back to why you make music. For­get about how the music busi­ness is sup­posed to work and visu­al­ize cre­at­ing some­thing unique, pow­er­ful, and profitable.