I recently came across a New York Times article entitled “The Entrepreneurial Generation”. The article, which was published last November, engages in a favorite Baby Boomer pastime: attempting to come up with a label for the current youth generation that’s as catchy as “Baby Boomers”.
Its author, the literary critic William Deresiewicz, argues that millennial youth culture is driven by commerce rather than idealism:
The millennial affect is the affect of the salesman. Consider the other side of the equation, the Millennials’ characteristic social form. Here’s what I see around me, in the city and the culture: food carts, 20-somethings selling wallets made from recycled plastic bags, boutique pickle companies, techie start-ups, Kickstarter, urban-farming supply stores and bottled water that wants to save the planet.
Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.
Call it Generation Sell.
I am not wholly convinced by Deresiewicz’s argument, partially because I think his claims are too sweeping, and partially because I don’t want him to be right. As a member of the generation he’s discussing, it’s hard for me not to take offense at his description of “the
bland, inoffensive, smile-and-a-shoeshine personality — the stay-positive, other-directed, I’ll-be-whoever-you-want-me-to-be personality — that everybody has today.”
But some of the piece is painfully on-point. One sentence in particular struck me: “Bands are still bands, but now they’re little businesses, as well: self-produced, self-published, self-managed.”
Somewhere, Greg Ginn and Ian MacKaye are smiling. DIY praxis, if not DIY ethics, has infiltrated every corner of the rock sphere.
Metal is no exception. Underground metal in particular has always placed considerable non-musical demands on its musicians, and the death of album sales has gutted the institutions that once lightened the load. Most of today’s metal musicians handle a huge list of
responsibilities:
- Writing music
- Recording/producing music
- Interacting with record labels
- Parsing contracts
- Promoting releases
- Booking tours
- Managing tours
- Driving vans
- Designing merchandise
- Manning merch tables
- Bookkeeping
- Arranging video shoots
- Operating social media
Some of these responsibilities clash with the grim aesthetic of blastbeats and trem-picking. Cosmo posted about the strangeness of metal-band overshare on occasion. I feel queasy when I overhear guys in black metal bands talk about the importance of networking. And since metal musicians are often strange or unreliable people, they don’t always deal with these mundane responsibilities well. But such is the world we live in now.
. . .
If metal bands are little businesses, they’re ignoring basic laws of supply and demand. They exist in numbers far too great for the market. Consequently, most of these band-businesses throw their time, effort, and capital into a hole from which naught returns.
This state of affairs exists for a variety of reasons. Popular wisdom says that kids who grew up during the touchy-feely ’90s have more self-esteem than sense. Since my generation believes that we’re all special snowflakes, we’re inclined to pursue futile artistic endeavors. Our selfishness is in turn reinforced by the Dunning-Kruger effect: the natural human tendency to overrate our competence in fields where we are the least competent. Thus your illiterate friend who thinks he’s a poet; thus the glut of mediocre metal bands who waste their own time and money.
A cheerier rationale might go like this: though most metal band-businesses lose money, cheap recording technology means that they lose less money than they otherwise might. And since the world economy has faltered in varying degrees over the past ten years, folks in my generation may be rationally choosing to defer their careers in favor of a costly, but emotionally satisfying, creative pursuit.
This last factor deserves special attention because it reveals a weakness in Deresiewicz’s bands-as-businesses notion. He is correct that bands handle their own operations, largely out of necessity. But at least in the metal world, the vast majority of bands have different incentives from actual businesses. Capital and revenue are means to an end rather than ends in themselves. Bands need money, but they usually aren’t trying to make money.
As I’ve said here before, metal has largely ceased to be a vocation and become an avocation. People pursue avocations for many reasons, but profit is rarely one of them. In this sense, metal bands couldn’t be further from the business world.
. . .
What do you think? Is Deresiewicz’s claim about bands accurate? Why do so many bands persist in their labors despite the rough market?
. . .
Generalized unemployment all over the world, I guess.
1st- this is a good write up. Thank you for bringing it to attention in an educated manner.
Regarding Deresiewicz’s claim, i think it’s just a symptom of the economy/society is right now. Older people are not coming off of their jobs because they’ve either spent or lost their pensions. With no real job openings (and im talking down to the fast food/minimum wage level), most young adults are trying to simply hustle and make money anyway they can (or know how), because they probably ARE working, but are relegated to a minimum wage job.
I think music in general has always been oversaturated, not just in metal. There just never was such easy access to it all, so you would never be aware unless a band toured or word of mouth or it hit a main artery. Now, like above stated, you can show someone a video on your phone (even if they don’t want to see it lol). I actually find it amazing that there are some bands who are living off of band income alone, when (and this is most famous example i can think of), Obituary, top selling DM band of all time at one point (i think), would have to plan tours around their day jobs.
So i don’t think that this generation is a bunch of snake oil salesmen, i do think they are trying to supplement their income in a genuine form, but i also realize how this looks like everybody and their mother has a band or something artistic they’re pushing.
Hmm, I definitely enjoyed reading that. Short and well-thought out. Though I look forward to reading comments from all the detractors too.
I think there’s a fine line between bands “taking control of their merch…” etc, and bands who basically produce music in order to sell t-shirts. There’s a definite feeling for certain bands that every song is really just a 3-minute advertising jingle to sell the subsequent shirts that feature the chorus lyrics in bold.
Dersie’s article is a lot of lip-flapping hypocrisy and trolling. He makes a few points because he’s carpet bombing our generation, not because he has any real pointed insight. I’m going to leave that and his full article alone so as to avoid writing my own essay.
His claim about bands is accurate, but it’s no great insight, nor is it much of a criticism. It’s mostly trolling: how cynical do you have to be to criticize somebody for taking control of their financial situation? And that’s ignoring the whole “because we fucking have too” aspect of modern bands as self-run businesses. I note that he calls himself a critic, but not a problem solver or creative thinker. What’s his solution to bands as little businesses?
Bands have ALWAYS been little businesses. You don’t just gather 3-5 musicians in a room, name the band, and then have a manager, lawyer, and A&R rep walk through the door ready to treat the band like a professional endeavour. (Unless you are using at least one member of an existing and notable band) Until that point, you do stuff yourself, end of story. If operating a band as a business is a problem, well, Dersie’s a fool. You’d be hard-pressed to find a band so anti-commercial that they give away all of their music and merch for free and don’t charge for viewing live performances. Perhaps some anarchist bands fall into that category?
As for bands ignoring the realities of the market, that’s called “being in a band.” The market for rock bands, really for any kind of professional, make a living at it band, has always been and probably will always be oversaturated. all of these mediocre bands are just Sturgeon’s Law writ large because technology allows more of them to come out of the woodwork and annoy us.
Yeah, because anarchists get free t-shirts, studio time, and electricity!
This is a great article, and at least up until now the comments have been insightful too.
I’m not really sure what generation I’m supposed to fall into. I was born in ‘82, so I’m too young to be a Gen-Xer, but I’m almost too old to be a Millenial. When I read descriptions of the generations, I think to myself, “Yes, this applies perfectly to the people a little bit [older/younger] than me.”
As far as the entrepreneurial thing, I think the cited author has a point, but he’s missing the real point. There are many small-time entrepreneurs now not because of the business aspect, but because they realize that their career is going to be a huge part of their life and they want to enjoy that. They want creative control and fulfillment out of their occupation.
But to apply that to music as some kind of new development is asinine. As others have noted, it’s always been that way. The aberration that is the huge music star is becoming a thing of the past, and music will go back to the way it always has been–done on a small scale. Of course with more channels of communication, but nonetheless, the second half of the 20th Century will be remembered as a strange time in music–what’s happening now is a return, not something new.
Good write-up. Many bands now are as deluded as they are driven to pursue whatever goal – whether it will get them laid, recognized by their peers, or otherwise; but the old “we’ll land a record contract and we’ll get blown by 72 virgins in heaven” nonsense is more or less out the window – i don’t think anybody is that deluded.
Bands “create businesses” around themselves because they more or less have to – to achieve those aforementioned deluded goals.
I can only imagine the sneeringly self-serving, typically boomeresque tone of the original article, but you raise great points. As somebody in my mid-20s, I can only say that when one has a college degree and minimum-wage job prospects (if that) it doesn’t really feel like such an overly-confident leap to strike out on one’s own. In the face of declining opportunities, you have to expect creative and motivated people to make their own way. Some of these people will fail, but that doesn’t make us all entitled brats who don’t know their limitations. Sheesh.
On the one hand, I tend to dismiss any Boomer commentary on current culture because it almost always seems to come back to “we were the only generation to do it right”, and that obsession with the perpetual adolescence of the Sixties and the endless self-absorption just gets more pathetic the older that generation gets. The Viagra commercial with the gray-haired man riding his Harley sums up the whole noxious thing for me,
On the other, Millenials at their worst do seem to suffer from an excess of self-esteem, and the Internet has made it easier to advertise and sell creative products. I think this is good for the reasons outlined in this article because I think DIY praxis was the point – you can never guarantee DIY ethics, there are as many examples of shitty indie label dealings as shitty major label ones, the major labels just have their game sewn up tight with lawyers. I am willing to put up with an avalanche of shitty bands if it means more good bands get heard who wouldn’t have otherwise. Of course, I say this as someone who doesn’t have to listen to all of those shitty bands as part of working for a music blog.
I think what gets missed in the whole “why, bands are just businesses now!” pearl-clutching is that they always were. Most of the bands we recognize from that era had ambition, and with ambition comes a certain amount of businesslike calculation, and that’s what separates household names like the Rolling Stones (Mick Jagger’s economics degree, anyone?) from music-blog curiosities like Coven or Aphrodite’s Child. Putting more control over the means of production and distribution in the hands of the artists is a good thing, full stop.
If you want to see what the intersection of this new accessibility and the worst examples of Millenial entitlement look like, though, here are a couple of examples…
http://tinyurl.com/indiewhine
http://www.cracked.com/blog/an-apology-to-hipsters-whose-lives-ive-ruined/
I love the indiewhine story so much. Ignore the fact that they’re non-metal, they’re just fucking retarded.
Having been in bands since the 80s, my take is that there are simply lots more opportunities now than there used to be. In the old days, you marketed your amateur band with fliers and battle of the bands contests. If you were lucky, you got played on a radio segment highlighting local acts.
Nowadays there’s YouTube, Facebook, Bandcamp, etc. It doesn’t take hundreds or thousands of dollars to create high quality recordings and you don’t need to be discovered by an A&R rep and score a development deal to have a shot at finding a significant audience.
The upside for a young band is that you can make the music you want to make without compromises, which is great if you have a unique perspective. The downside is that you’re missing out on the mentorship and editorial guidance you get from working with more seasoned veterans who can help you develop and differentiate if you DON’T have a unique perspective.
I also want to add that the whole “too much self-esteem” thing isn’t anything new. It’s almost a pre-requisite if you want to be a serious musician.
Very interesting article! And one I’ve been thinking about lately, but from a different perspective.
I was wondering how the hell semi-popular metal bands do make a living? I just saw the Goatwhore/3 Inches of Blood tour play in front of maybe 80 people. And while it’s cool to get to chat with the guys from Goatwhore behind the merch table it just shows that after all those years of touring they’re still in complete DIY mode. And they were just on the Decible cover.
If music is a business, what would be their career path? Where do metal guys go once they’ve passed 40 or even 50? How much do they make in a typical year of releasing an album and touring pretty much non stop?
If music is a business I guess they would have to have some kind of business case and if so what would that be?
I guess it’s fairly easy roughing it for a few years if you’re in your early 20s, but what if you’ve got family back home and need to support them?
yeah, my parents are on the level and realize that I devote huge chunks of time and effort towards making music/recording/promoting/and playing shows for my own satisfaction…. but my grandparents and other family members often say things like “so your making good money doing this?” and of course, this is all a giant money hole…. when they ask that kind of thing, i wonder – am i supposed to be making money having sex? Cuzz its the same kind of question…… the whole point is that i manage to keep surviving and doing what i want to do, and most musicians i know seem to feel the same way.
Great thought provoking article–more of this kind of stuff please.
I haven’t read the New York times article yet, but each comment thus far has at least one salient point that I can fully agree with. I myself feel I have one foot in two generations–I just turned 40, yet my partner is a millennial. I remember the way it used to be, yet am surrounded for the most part by the younger crowd. It is both enlightening and, well…
I don’t blame any post boomer generation for hustling–when you have experienced what our parents have gone thru, i.e., multiple boom and bust bubble economies, you quickly learn there’s 2 ways to go: working some shit job (or 2, or 3) for someone else or taking destiny into your own hands. It’s probably the most common topic of conversation among people I know. I also lay alot of blame squarely on the shoulders of the boomers–they had a chance to really change the country, failed miserably, and are now obsessed with youth, holding on to their dwindling wealth and barely utering a whimper as the world economy privatizes. When there’s a pretty good chance you will never see a cent of social security when you retire, wtf are you supposed to do? What’s more, education is quickly becoming a dream, jobs are disappearing and the country slouches toward bankruptcy.
Making music is easy, making a living at it is hard. To me, making music is a joy, and I don’t think about making money. In fact, I don’t care. I also don’t tour, make merch or anything else. I can’t. That’s why most musicians’ I know have, or better have, some skill to pay the bills. Most also have multiple jobs.
In short, as jobs that pay a family wage with a high school education or little more have gone the way of the dinosaur, today’s young working people have no fucking choice. They fucking have to.
There’s a bit of a contradiction in what you said. There are only two ways to go: make money as, essentially, a whipping boy (or girl, obviously), or gamble on yourself. but alter you say your friends gambling on themselves are working multiple jobs (i assume as whipping boys). I struggle with this contradiction every day–some of my peers work int he metal industry full time, but probably make no health insurance or savings money. I work an office 9-5, get health insurance and save… but have no emotional connection to my work. In a way it’s superior this way: if a project at the office fails utterly, well, what do I care? I still got paid for it, and the nature of my work is such that I would need to make a COLOSSAL fuck-up to lose my job.
And yet i dedicate virtually all of my IQ to my personal creative pursuits. Why?
In the end, this is the conclusion I came to. I just thought to myself “all I see, hear, taste is doom and gloom, apocalyptic prophecy more or less.” So suppose the worst-case-scenario. In the end, if this is the end of mankind, I want to go down doing what I love, and preferably with who I love. Everything else is frosting. and if this is not the end? Fuck it, at least I will have done my best.
You’re probably pretty close. There’s no way I could possibly fit everything I wanted to say about this in this type of forum. I struggle mightily with the pessimist/optimist schism within myself. The pessimist often wins. Deep down, I think many of us realize what a dumb world we’ve created/live in–it could be so much better–and the reaction to that is what you called “dedicating virtually all my IQ to my creative pursuits.” Ironically, it’s also what pisses us off as well–watching someone else do it instead of yourself.
To support what others have already said in this thread – over many years I’ve come to feel that the best way to reconcile these issues is to see band-involvement and music-making as a hobby which happens to cost money rather than as a small business which happens to lose money.
Your grandparents or whoever will always struggle to understand why you devote so much effort to something that gives you nothing back except negative financial returns; but that’s because they’re seeing it as a career option. By contrast, if you promote your efforts as a fulfilling pastime, the money you spend on instruments and tours is really no more outrageous than what a retiree would spend fixing up his boat or restoring his Harley. Or, for that matter, what the average fashion-conscious woman spends on clothes in her lifetime.
What I really like about the comparison is that, akin to all those guys who enter amateur yacht races and lose year after year, most bands will never “win” either – but it’s the joy of preparation and competition that keeps them occupied. Any recognition or success beyond that is best thought of as a bonus.
Saying that, Doug’s list of skills and business-related things that ambitious musicians must learn are all transferable to “real” jobs. For example, like many others before me, I parlayed an interest in home-recording into a career as an audio engineer (not to say that’s necessarily a more lucrative career than music, but still.) Very often, people in bands use the experience to discover what they’re really good at instead of music – political activism, managing people, promoting events, performance art, soldering electronics, teaching drums, etc.
One point in favour of the “band-as-business-model” option, though: Here in Australia, any entity registered as a business is eligible for tax-concessions on operating costs, up to a point. Which means that, provided you can be bothered filing a separate tax return for your band every year, amplifier repairs, replacement snare skins and even fuel can cost alot less. I’m sure there must be similar laws in America.
That’s a good point about transferable skills, Max. Metal is almost totally non-remunerative in a direct sense, but you can still learn things that are useful in other areas of life. Performing onstage has helped me to overcome my fear of public speaking, for instance.
The New York Times is especially prone to spewing “generational” hooey. Plenty of people of all ages are making and selling stuff or exchanging services these days. Social Astrology sucks.