Comments on: Music as if Culture Mattered

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:52:07 +0000

Hi Hattie, thanks so much for your comment. I’m definitely in favour of knowing more. It’s the disingenuous way that ‘the industry’ is so often taught in colleges that I object to. I’m making a living in music, from playing, recording, teaching, writing… I’m clearly all about people who make music making what they can from it, but the important lessons are the ones that teach us how to connect with an audience while doing what we love.

Learning how to play cover tunes and get wedding gigs is great – useful stuff to know, great fun to play those gigs and a cool way to pay the bills that beats doing something you hate – but it’s not the lifeblood of being a musician. I love playing corporate/function gigs, and am glad I know enough about how those things work to get them, but if I started to shape the music that is at the heart of what I do towards getting those gigs, my music life would be all the poorer for it.

Alternative Careers in the creative sector would be a great course module on any music course…

thanks!

By: Hattie Murdoch

Hattie Murdoch — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 09:57:45 +0000

Doing a music degree did not emphasise the need to make it big, but i feel that if you are in full time education, with a focus on music, then a certain amount of emphasis must be taken on how to be successful in other ways. Unfortunately, if you are a player rather than the theorist, or musicologist, or producer, then the most attractive and well known way to making money is to try and ‘break in’. After doing 4 years of a degree because you have an undeniable and unbreakable passion for its content, and then having to go from that creative environment to, for example, an admin job, is heart breaking and can only make that person want to have that ‘big break’ even more (gosh it sounds like a Leona Lewis biography..). Sometime’s it seems like the only viable way out. So my view is, of course music education needs to be as practical and creative and artistic as possible – that’s what we’re all here for, but this needs to be balanced with other options in case it you don’t end up as a professional musician. I finished a degree thinking I’m never going to be a lecturer, I don’t want to go back in to education to be a teacher, I’m not good enough to be a session player…what are my options? Of course wanting to make a living off doing gigs etc, but what are the chances? I know it’s a small part of this whole debate, but unless we are provided with an education that gives us a list of alternative careers in this creative sector…then trying to ‘break in’ is still looking like very attractive course of action.

By: Ben Godwin

Ben Godwin — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:17:46 +0000

Absolutely AWESOME post. I spent the best part of 20 years trying to ‘break in’, subsisting on whatever I could make, and I finally realized it’s such a waste to get music making confused with the pursuit of celebrity and money. Not only do you spend all your time promoting and hustling rather than making music, you are 99% likely to be living in misery, well below the poverty line, the whole time.

As soon as all of that clicked, I experienced a huge sense of relief and freedom. And I decided I’d become a music teacher. =)

By: Patrick Smith

Patrick Smith — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:24:39 +0000

I never went to music school per se, though I have spent many months over the past 20 years on Guitar Craft courses. I’ve always had a decent paying day job, so I make the music that moves me.

The trade off is not as much time to learn and make music, but I am comfortable. Now finding an audience is another story.