This Is Why You Can't Have Nice Things
Hey artists: You want people to care, don’t you?
I wanted to give Mark Zuckerberg £300.
My line of thinking: It would really make a difference to my music career.
Why? This guy on Instagram was telling me so! I trusted him: his curly floppy hair, his nonchalant, no-nonsense way of speaking. He was a musician, too. American. In the folk genre. Seemed realer than the rest of these ‘music promotion gurus’ you get our there. He actually knew what it was like to put your heart and soul into making an album. And he actually knew the endless struggle of promotion, just to get a fan to find your music and connect.
He had me convinced. That Instagram adverts were the best thing a musician could do to increase their Spotify numbers.
His course on Meta adverts for Spotify conversion was £150. Plus I’d have to have at least £10 a day to spend on adverts.
It’d be worth it, to get the numbers on Spotify up. Worth it, to get new ears on my songs. Worth it, to look credible to future bookers and collaborators.
It was a good investment into my art.
£300 to Zuck, £150 to this guy, and… minus £450 to me.
Worth it, right?
I’d be sending money to Mark Zuckerberg’s platform, to then drive engagement to Daniel Ek’s platform, so that I could receive…
£0.003 per play.
Worth it… right?
There was something else I could do with that money though. Would be risky, though. Definitely wouldn’t drive the numbers up. Might have no impact on my career whatsoever. But…
I could go to the Austrian alps.
Does it sound silly? That I was so torn between these two options? Advancing my music career, getting more credibility, upping my streams on Spotify versus…
…frolicking on a mountaintop?
🥅 Skin In The Game
Artists have stopped saying that we must suffer for our craft, but it still feels like an unspoken rule. We just don’t call it suffering anymore. We call it dedication. You have to have skin in the game — you have to want it that bad. Because making art isn’t easy. It’s worthy, but it’s often hard.
What keeps you going? Every action you take is fuelled by this inexplicable drive to make stuff. If questioned, you can’t pin it down any further than this:
“I just have to.”
Artists— of any medium— get it. You invest in your projects before anyone else does. You sacrifice time, friendships, hobbies, relationships, all at the altar of The Big Project. You burn the midnight oil at all hours of the day. Every spare pay check goes back into making art because, this is what you were made for.
This is who you are.
And once the art is out there, don’t you want somebody to see it?
Don’t you want somebody to see you?
This is why you can’t have nice things, Olivia.
AHH what was that!? Oh, yes. Ahem. The other part of my brain. The part that doesn’t want to spend my next tax break on a mixing engineer or a new plugin or another online course. The part that wants to sit in an Italian courtyard and drink wine next to a crumbling fountain.
This is why you can’t have nice things, she says, because you’ve wrapped your ego so tightly in your art that it’s all Playdoh’ed together into one amorphous blob and now you can’t separate them anymore. Any criticism or failure of The Big Project feels like a failure of You so you keep working harder, sacrificing more, giving away more of your life-force so you can push your art in front of more people, in the hopes that you’ll finally justify your existence. As if you are trapped in every song, every painting and every word that you create.
Taking holidays is for chumps.
Give Zuck the money. Justify your art. Justify your existence! Justify!!!
You want people to care, don’t you? You want people to see you, don’t you?
Don’t you?
👀 Read On…
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i'm so proud that you gave yourself a nice thing <3
Exactly why I left Instagram. Whether I make it or not as an artist is not as important as being an artist. There are so many examples of great artists who had zero success in their time. We've made it this weird monetary based value. Just be still, make our art, be thankful for the beautiful things in our lives. I love that you took the trip. And look, people are finding you anyway!