I've done many things in life to make a living, like consulting people as an IT architect, like editing film, and even investing in real estate and ensuring friends and associates make the right investments in it too...
Real estate can often be quite profitable compared to some of the other things I specialize in... A much better investment for money and time usually compared to posting on social media apps in my case... Where you can buy an old and dilapidated house (purely for example) for $100,000 and invest maybe $75,000 into materials and labor - Things like cleaning, hardwood flooring, painting, and appliances to make it look much better. Then you can turn around an re-sell the property at a higher price (hopefully) than what you originally bought it for, thus paying off the loan you originally took out for the effort and creating a profit after all costs are paid off. This is a great example of capitalism at work.... This is why many grew out of desperation into wealth as well, and why many immigrants came here with $10 in their pockets and now can proudly say "Get out of my country!" to those trying to do the very same thing now.
Increasingly, as the costs of living become higher rapidly, it's become more and more important to carefully evaluate and limit how much time I spend engaged in non-profit activity, as crashing and burning financially is not a good idea in any possible survival scenario in our expensive world...
I post here for non-profit purposes mostly, because I like to document my experiences and hopefully encourage positive change in technology and our world... I greatly appreciate when real people look into my music work (listed below) which is technically for profit, but only when people actually engage with it fully... These days, as most other honest musicians will tell you, I don't really profit off of my music at all, and that's why we as creators need to do so many other things to make ends meet because many of us don't have wealthy parents that can support us with real income, and that's somewhat fair, because the world doesn't run on IOUs, only governments can do that!
There is nothing wrong with making a profit, it's actually essential to survival in our world, where the cost of living continually rises, and where we're continually paying higher and higher taxes for everything we do to government agencies that seem to do less and less to help us thrive in safety, while navigating roads that don't have potholes in a neighborhood that never have crime...uh..
Since social media and marketing have taken over our world, the normal dynamic of making a living from scratch has changed dramatically... Suddenly everyone needs to portray themselves as a business, or brand, or company that needs to create a budget for marketing in order to promote their good and services online, even for real estate, before they can make their first sale. This cost of marketing is rising, and rapidly expanding over time mysteriously, and it's almost troublesome to consider how essential marketing has become in driving business as the Internet has shrunken from millions of independent web sites into just a few major social media platforms, online media services, and payment portals.
As cited before, I make music, and over the past 4 years I took a lot of time to study how the music business ecosystem works within the music industry, and let me tell you, boy am I glad that I do a lot more to earn a living than just making music, because the entire model of how the industry works is deeply convoluted and twisted into an almost impossible meat grinder when it comes to both the talent and profit involved, which got even worse when social media entered the picture... Even well known celebrities like Snoop Dogg have been vocal about how music proceeds and royalties have become mysteriously small during the tech era, despite huge expenses of producing physical media no longer being involved in the process.
Bear with me for a minute, I'll try to explain it as simply as possible moving forward...
There are many reasons why your favorite musicians don't put out music anymore, among the biggest of reasons is that social media has made it prohibitively discouraging, often embarrassing, and deeply expensive to reach people that support and listen to music.
If I create a new song, I put hours of work into it... I also need expensive equipment to compose and record it, and possibly studio time to work with vocalists and to record instrumentation. I also need to create artwork and supporting marketing materials, and then on top of that (which is often the biggest hurdle) I need to raise hundreds, and possibly even thousands of dollars to promote the album on every social media app possible, because these days, there is little to no way to reach an audience for free.
The stakes of investing money in business, within our current "creator economy" system, has become a gamble, as we pour our time, energy, and money into projects, there is no reassurance that we will properly recover value on all of our investment. There are few other industries in which you can work for free over years without gaining a meaningful foothold than working on social media... Social platforms often get shuttered, or completely change their business model, and even silently change the way in which they operate behind the scenes, suddenly making a once productive account (even with many followers on it) mostly useless and completely worthless without paying for ad boosting.
Social media kind of started like a communal watering hole, where everyone brought buckets of their cleanest filtered water to pour in to each community hole so that everyone could drink for free... Over time, the people that owned the land the watering holes were located upon began to limit and control how much each community member could pour in and drink, also they began to control the "quality" of water carefully, and some of that control was necessary to prevent contamination and to preserve quality, but the tone changed further towards creating different levels/tiers of water quality... Eventually, the watering hole controllers decided to start charging for water services, and that too was based on tiers, which delineated a class system of elites that could drink whenever and however much water they wanted, while less elite members found themselves struggling to find water at all unless they could manage to pay to skip the line each time they became parched... Meanwhile, owners of the watering holes became extremely rich without anyone knowing, to the point where they controlled whether entire towns could fail and wither from drought based on their whims and who served their interests best.
If you can imagine the above example in relation to how most of the prominent social media apps that have been dominant evolved to now work, it's the beginning of understanding that the "magical algorithms" that determine what's best are in reality the same old forces at work, with new ways of reinforcing class-ism applied behind the scenes. It's a bastardization of crowd sourcing, which once used to be for communal good... There are literally tons of people creating their best water to share, but no way to contribute it unless they pay.
We used to have record shops, bowling alleys, drive-in theatres, many diners & different bars, small music venues, and many other significant culture spots around the world that often worked as unique tourist destinations all fueled by music, but if you look at the world now, a lot of our experience is traveling to other places just to see the very same Chipotle, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Buc-ees, and Chick-Fil-A "strip mall" setup, while listening to the very same highly-manufactured-pop hit songs played everywhere from supermarkets to gas stations. I believe it's mostly because profit and visibility has been isolated from independent individuals with alternative ideas, and held onto tightly by controllers at the top of the profit pyramid (or watering holes)...
"Mom & Pop" operations and stores that once used to compete with large industry operations are now quite rare in many cases, they've been snuffed out or are barely hanging on as they once ranged in everything from unique record shops, to clothing stores, to independent hardware shops, to even pet stores... Sure it's nice to buy a tennis racket and orange juice in one giant mega-store, but it comes at the price of no longer having an accountable Mom & Pop shop, that actually sells RELIABLE products that don't break down every year, lie the last fan I bought at target which only has 3 speeds- Too Fast, Violently Shaking Fast, and Burnout Fast.
If you create any product that costs you $8, your expectation (from a business perspective) should be to recoup at least $10 (purely for example once again) where $8 of the proceeds goes to paying off the costs to build your products and related marketing and the (additional) $2 you create on each sale goes towards building your business further and to supporting your costs of living and survival. With the rising costs of marketing that social media has created as a gateway to building an audience now, Marketing costs for business have soared well beyond that budget model, and it regularly exceeds profitability...
Marketing for music is an up-front expense, which must be paid before making a dime, while music royalty payments are often delayed well after releases (despite most other things being able to work in real time over the internet somehow... Hrmmm). If you're independent (not able to borrow loads of start-up money from banks or Mommy & Daddy) you're more often than not completely priced out of being able to run a business by the marketing expenses alone, no matter how good your product or service is, and bound to working for someone else that has the capital to fund marketing and drive their sales instead. There is often an opportunistic market for funding and investment in independents as well now, as the value of individual creators and individual labor is taken for granted more 7 more...
The above example highlights why I need to do many different things in my own life to succeed, other than making music, and I often need to do those things on top of working for someone else, just like so many others. The things I do that escape the control of social media gatekeeping (especially development and technology) are often the most profitable to me in some strange way... Almost like once social media can glamorize a profession and promote "influencers" behind the profession, it suddenly makes everyone else who isn't prominent and popular worthless... For example, think celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsey, Tony Bourdain, Guy Fieri, versus the "normal average" (not on TV) guy running an Instagram page about his Peruvian chicken spot down the street form your house... The metrics -- Likes, followers, comments, play so much into public conscience now, even though it's the very same thing that may defeat us when we launch our own ideas.
My philosophy towards business is defiantly resistant to this imposed tech model though, as it's easily corruptible and pliable to even absurdity when money is dropped into the mix... These days even celebrities and major businesses run and hire networks of bots to like posts, leave boilerplate comments on every post, and to drive views up... There are countless tricks, methods, and hacks that can make social media visibly look like anyone is favorable and/or popular. The quality ratings of almost anything can be manipulated with money, and there is far too much temptation for celebrities to look superior and most popular to others, that on top of "nobodies" working hard to emulate that celebrity image out of nowhere as well. The Internet now is a place of wildly varied statistics that serve image more than truths. Conversely, this creates a hype economy where a lot of people are working at a loss or free, while promoting lies about profit, and making companies at the hilt of the pyramid even more wealthy.
just 10 years ago, it would have been unfathomable, and very exploitative, and a failure for social media to tell independent creators (musicians, artists, and business owners of all kinds) that a post they make on a platform of millions of people would only garner under 10 or even 400 views from other users on platforms before it disappears (within seconds each time) but somehow, that has become our reality, and far too often a normalized expectation. That's because visibility of each post has become a carefully controlled commodity on these platforms, which once promised unlimited and free visibility to all that joined... Now these platforms harvest and sell highly personal user data, use posts to generate Ai output, market ad-boosting to users to help them break the limitations on visibility, and pretty much do everything other than helping the best creators to succeed, despite all that labor of independent creators being the very thing driving massive profits for the largest of celebrities, industries, and brands on the platforms.
Music making and promotion of music and art on social media in turn has become a haven for scammers that sell services to artificially boost their image, and to even generate and promote fake "Ai-based" music for people that don't even know how many strings a guitar has over that of authentic musicians... Authentic musicians and many other creators are now buried in a sea of illegitimate work by others that aren't authentic on social media, and on top of that, are often limited heavily in terms of reaching an audience behind the scenes because they don't have the ability to pay to get ahead with advertising and marketing teams like already popular and highly profitable artists do. Audiences want to hear new and different things, but most of exactly that is held out of their view exactly because of the limits of visibility that platforms impose on independent creators... The platforms have no incentive to let anyone who doesn't pay be visible at all, because that would mean they're sacrificing their profit generated by ad revenue they dictate... It's a defeating and highly destructive cycle.
I don't believe that music and content creation should be an unrewarding and unprofitable free-work hobby, but now somehow it is an expectation for many on social media. I don't believe that it should be taken for granted, and I don't believe that compositions only have value if they are widely liked by massive amounts of people and played in major venues and films.
In many ways, our current technology-based economy thrives on free labor from creators which it heavily de-values... Just as countries did in prior eras of slave and indentured labor, where a "ruling class" captures the majority of profit first and foremost, even deeply influencing lawmaking that governs business rules, opportunity, and personal rights and freedoms heavily.
As wealth inequality increases, we've all got to be aware that the more we contribute to, support, and codify this model of elitist tech control, capture and resale of crowdsource-contributed work, covert algorithmic inequality & subversion, dishonest financial opportunism, undermining the value of individual contribution, devaluation of music and other creative skills, and public deception of perception, the more it will eventually imprison, enslave, devalue, and indenture us in making a living for ourselves and in everything we have to offer the world.
Be aware of how contributing volumes & years of work and your knowledge to firewalled apps undermines our future and perhaps launch a personal web site instead that is a far more open and attributable resource. This site gets indexed regularly by Ai and others that may plagiarize it, even without permission, but it's far better than making a post on social media that only garners 100 views and surrendering my consent for them to re-use what I've invested my time in... If you're not working for profit, the least you can do is retain ownership of your own voice and content by self publishing.
We can take steps towards save the music world, for starters, by cancelling all of those monthly streaming subscriptions, by buying a new hard drive (or the phone with extra storage space) and by starting to build our individual music libraries locally again... Maybe if we do it for long enough, the Mom & Pop shops, music stores, and other culture spots we all say that we miss might one day make a return.
Moe @RUFFANDTUFF
Our Sound Is Unlike Anything Else. We Strive To Be Original.
We Work With and Publish Unique Artists That Go Against the Grain.
FOLLOW US ON:
SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1PNp925Bg8dCTiIzxY4NVc
https://open.spotify.com/artist/213dCOTf6hXx3Lqc5wE6U5
META THREADS @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
TWITTER @RUFFANDTUFF
IG @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
TIKTOK @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
YOUTUBE @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
FACEBOOK @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
BUSINESS: RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS@GMAIL.COM
The modern tech economy is based far too heavily on making creators work for free
-
circuitbored
- Site Admin
- Posts: 101
- Joined: Fri Aug 18, 2017 9:03 pm