The dark problem with music production 😬

howdy-duty buckaroons and welcome back to the feeling Zone while I realized the Dark Truth of X format is extremely played out on this platform this is a discussion I've wanted to have for a very long time my natural inclination would be to dress this video up with a bunch of humor and whatnot but I don't think this video is one of those videos and if you don't mind I'd really like to just sort of talk about this with you it's really no secret that the music industry is not all happy happy joy joy all the time in fact for a lot of us it's mostly a lot of the opposite despite the self-image we like to put forward on social media or the ideas that were constantly barraged with from our favorite YouTube personalities and artists at the end of the day A Creative life tends to be a vicious cycle of things like depression anxiety and endless self-doubt and second guessing unfortunately this means that much like my video on copyright and content ID or other videos like this where I've talked about some of these bigger picture mindset things this is not a situation where I'm able to provide a solution however I think this is still a discussion worth having and perhaps together we can all work towards one one of the things that irritates me most about the music industry is the idea of selling the dream and this is the Cornerstone of so much of what keeps the music industry machine churning when targeting the musicians that prop it up if you have this guitar you're finally going to be a big [ __ ] rock star and write that hit song If you buy this pedal your next chart topper is just one toe click away with this plugin you're finally going to mix like a pro and with this free goddamn PDF you're finally going to hack the algorithm and you're gonna make it this is the exact flavor of [ __ ] that a lot of companies in marketing love to exploit and it's what makes things like the midi pack or companies like Unison audio so unsettlingly effective it's an exploitation of that base level hack of our psychology of the fear of missing out if you don't take advantage of this amazing one-time offer you're out but I think there's a deeper and much darker layer to this onion and that's what I want to talk about in this video the reality of the current ERA of being a creator of any kind is that we live and survive on platforms driven by metrics likes and follows and shares and stupid little [ __ ] hearts and everything else the truth about these platforms is that they are precisely and exactingly engineered to make you miserable the most well-known example is probably something like the YouTube dashboard even when you're doing something right it's only going to show you how to improve or how you compare to your last success sure 50 000 views is great but sixty five thousand a week ago would probably be better if you could do that again this is exactly the thing that so much of the creative industry and especially the music industry survives on it's the idea that unless you're one of these seemingly worthy few then you're not worth anything at all artists always seem to live this life of constant struggle with anxiety self-doubt depression and criticism with the worst critics being themselves of course it goes without saying that the days of the internet and the droves of people with an internet connection a keyboard and an expert opinion have compounded the effects of what is already a pretty difficult Life opening up these deep parts of yourself for the world to see the stereotypical struggling tortured creative type doesn't exist without good reason a lot of creators come from a background marred with a difficult upbringing or struggles with bullying or something along those lines we're creating or writing music or whatever it may baby was used as a sort of coping mechanism this on its own is fine I guess but the real problem comes in with the societal fetishization of the struggling creative especially in the case of the music industry the idea of paying your dues is a badge of honor it's a privilege to play that shitty back bar gig while trying to find enough change between the van seats to get another crappy gas station coffee on your way to the next room of empty-eyed onlookers trying to hold a conversation over your set while you try to share your favorite works with them but this image is celebrated because one day you make it big and then big stars party hard trash hotel rooms do a ton of drugs drink themselves to sleep at night and struggle with the life on the road and the life of an artist and what an honor it is to Die Young either by accident or by your own hand although the studies and statistics I could find on this are a little bit blurry at best it's estimated that creative types and musicians especially are 15 times if not more likely to take their own lives than the average person and even this is celebrated in this weird Twisted way they go out on their own terms and they left us at their Peak they burn out rather than fade it away and we're left to pour over their works theorizing over all that could have been and celebrating this eternal greatness this is a subject I would really love to explore in another video on this channel but I don't think the YouTube gods are going to take too kindly to that kind of subject anytime soon I think part of the problem these days is that we don't really seem to openly discuss or be exactly told in the fine print of all the bullet being sold to us that becoming one of these worthy few is pretty much next to Impossible it's estimated that over a hundred thousand songs are uploaded every single day to streaming services given that there are over 80 million tracks on Spotify your chances of being heard are basically next to zero without the right level of promotional help and a lot of luck the reality of modern music is pretty depressing on Spotify it's estimated that nearly 80 percent of artists have less than 50 monthly listeners on Soundcloud there are only about a thousand accounts that ever exceeded 250 000 followers and the majority of these accounts belong to already massively successful major label artists and giant record labels on YouTube a whopping 91 percent of channels have fewer than 1 000 subscribers that number gets even more ridiculous if you raise the threshold to just ten thousand and going Beyond a hundred thousand is just pure Insanity for artists trying to break above that noise floor against already astronomical odds though the next Peak is even harder to make a pretty average wage of just forty thousand dollars per year in the us at the time of making this video you'd need about 10 million streams every year in an already extremely competitive and struggling industry charged by change with things like the internet and piracy a global pandemic wrecking the touring industry and an Ever smaller and smaller sliver of pie to compete over from a pie that only really exists from those competing over it in the first place it kind of just raises the question of what's the point in even trying and this is likely why through spotify's own loud and clear it's shown that about 70 percent of artists never upload more than 10 songs that's kind of sad I think the idea that these analytics driven platforms are trying to propagate and instill in our minds is ultimately pretty simple statistic-based productivity is equal to and truly indicative of real success which in turn means that the only real form of self-love and self-acceptance we can feel as creators is entirely conditional on these metrics constantly being met or exceeded Tyler Durden maybe said it best you're not your job you're not how much money you have in the bank you're not the car you drive you're not the contents of your wallet you are not you're [ __ ] khakis you are the all-singing all dancing crap of the world more simply put you're not your Spotify or Instagram following you're worth definition and purpose as a Creator can only be defined by you practicing unconditional self-love and acceptance can be pretty simple learning to love your own work is the most important part like most mixing Engineers will tell you if it sounds good it is good if whatever you created is a true form of what you wanted to put out into the world and it represents what you wanted to make then it's done and it's perfect and no amount of likes or follows or shares or retweets or whatever is ever going to make you feel more fulfilled than doing what you feel like you need to do if you're not making what you want to hear and what you want to put out into the world that's the first step to getting over the need for validation from vanity metrics after all it's not like these platforms are going to be around forever think about this for just a minute if you right now had a million monthly Spotify listeners because you set aside your maybe more natural artistic inclination of what you wanted to make and instead spent years grinding way making algorithm and playlist friendly music and then all of a sudden Spotify goes under are you still going to be happy with what you did learning to simply spend time alone with yourself and your own work and being happy with simply that action is the clearest way to not only Define your purpose and style as a Creator it's the best way to learn to start loving yourself Unconditionally by accepting what you are warts and all Outsourcing love and acceptance is probably the easiest way to set yourself up to watch your life fall apart around you and despite what the person trying to sell you their new PDF on the top 10 secrets of what makes a chart-topping hit might tell you it's not anyone else's job to love you or even like you maybe what we're all after here with this discussion is a new definition of success while I can't Define that for you I think what I've come down to after sitting on it for the last 29 years of my life is that a feeling of fulfillment of your creative mind by way of your enjoyment of your own work and your own effort is the only thing that will let you sleep at night and learn to unplug at the end of the day as much as I hate to bring this book up again because it's everywhere there is an art to learning to just not give a [ __ ] a very big thank you to all of my patrons and those of you who have supported the channel by buying my sample packs or instrument libraries or things like that to help make videos like this possible I hope that this kind of starts some wheels turning and whatnot so we can all open up and discuss these things a bit more openly with each other because I think that's something that's unfortunately really lacking from the modern creative industry and mindset if you have some other thoughts on overcoming these feelings or dealing with these sorts of things or whatever feel free to share that down in the comments especially those of you who are maybe a bit more silver and experienced to them those of us trying to figure out how to tie our shoes and pay a mortgage if you enjoyed this video and you'd like me to explore some other stuff like this in the future let me know I really love making these types of videos and I've got a lot of other ideas I would love to explore that I've been sitting on for a while until then though thank you for watching I hope you enjoyed it I hope you learned something and of course as always I hope this inspires you to get out there and make something awesome foreign [Music]

Channel: Venus Theory

Views: 223,014

Keywords: Venus Theory, sound design, bitwig, bitwig studio, fl studio, logic pro x, ableton, cubase

Id: S0sipnTNoIc

Length: 12min 10sec (730 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 01 2022