Every songwriter and producer I work with has to deal with the same reality I have to deal with as a songwriter/producer.

No one else will write my songs if I don’t write them.

No one else will make the recordings of those songs if I don’t make them (or at least organize the sessions).

No one else but me (or me and a collaborator) will finish the songs I start.

No one else will connect with other writers and producers for me if I don’t.

No one else will find an audience for me if I don’t get it started. Etc.

This doesn’t mean I have to do everything alone. Far from it. In fact – obviously – I can’t. But I have to get the ball rolling on my own behalf. Reach out to collaborators. Ask or hire musicians to play with me. Get better at the things I do and find people to do the things I don’t do well, or at all. And finish those songs!

When I started out in music, everyone had the dream of being discovered by ‘the business’. That a manager, record company, or publisher would take you under their wing and take care of everything for you.

That was a dream even then. Few artists were lucky enough to have a mutually beneficial relationship between skilled creators and skilled business people.

And even if you had that, you still had to be responsible for your own career. Things usually didn’t go well for people who weren’t paying attention to their own business. But that big old music business structure still existed and did enable many artists get from nowhere to somewhere.

There’s still somewhat of a structure that is in some ways similar… but everyone in the remaining music business towers is now looking for artists and writers who are self-starters, who already have an audience live, who already have a following on YouTube, Soundcloud, or other social media. Preferably all of the above.

They figure – correctly, in most cases – that this is the price of admission to the modern music business. They’re not going to help you make money, and take some of it for themselves, until you’re already making money.

The responsibility for generating at least the early stages of a career of any sort has landed fully on the creators. (it was always there… but now there’s no pretending.) And from what I observe this is true in the digital age for all areas of the arts and entertainment.

There’s a lot of freedom in this; that’s why I like this setup better than the old one. You can get your music out there, you can take a shot, without having to get past the gatekeepers. Also, you don’t have to attend to their ‘feedback’ and ‘direction’, which was sometimes helpful but more often, not.

It used to be about getting noticed by those gatekeepers. And that was hard. But there were a limited amount of them, and you knew where to find them – they tended to cluster. Now it’s about getting noticed from the millions and billions of pieces of music that are floating around on computers and phones.

Look… no one said it was going to be easy. But, to quote The Godfather, part 2, “This is the business we have chosen”. And all of these journeys start with taking those early steps ourselves. And then continuing to…

Take that step… then take the next step… then the next… and don’t quit.

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