Are Music Hustlers Missing the Point?
Have you met a true music hustler? They offer you a follow for a follow, they would love to have you listen to their music and give feedback, even if it’s negative. The more attention, the better. It’s a phenomenon that has exploded with social media. Who hasn’t been spammed by attention-hungry musicians who boost their metrics by sliding into your DMs (or more likely, your Message Request tab).
I can appreciate the hustle, but music hustlers always leave me a little depleted. I admire their stamina, but I think they’re missing the point. We all have a different conception of success. For some it’s making a living with creation, for others, it’s creating a really impactful work of art…
If you take a step back and see the bigger picture, the point of life is to come in contact with like-minded people. If you manage to do that, the rest will follow, including riches and fame, but not limited to them.
The music hustler can’t see the forest for the tree, though. It always bums me out when I try to get to know someone who hits me up to collaborate. I ask them genuine questions and they don’t get back to me. They’re thinking in terms of quantity, but they forgot (or never knew) that what really counts is actually specificity.
Who cares if you have a million fair-weather fans. What you really want are the proverbial 1000 true fans. The author Kevin Kelly defined that concept as a tribe of fans that will follow you wherever you go, buy everything you sell. The people that can truly relate to your work.
The little asterisk I’d put there is that you don’t need 1000 to be successful. You don’t even need a 1000 to make a living, but that’s beside the point.
If you’re truly connecting with your fans, you’ll simply have many personal relationships with each and everyone of them. That’s hard to scale up, but art isn’t a startup. It doesn’t need to be as big as it can get. It just need to be as small as it can be and still survive.
I wish the music hustlers out there would realize work is a reward in and of itself. I wish the people who were spamming me were actually trying to get to know me, and in turn would let me get to know them.
Everyone I know feels lonelier since social media came along. A lot of people are complaining that it's hard to make friends.
It’s time we let go of the media side of things and focus on the “social” part.
They say it’s lonely at the top, so let’s bring as many people with us as we can on our way there.