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Weighing Decisions

Sometimes it can extremely difficult for me to make decisions. The idea that one choice could have an extremely long lasting consequences can be rather debilitating. Specifically, we've been looking at some recent record offers and it is really tough to make decisions. They all have their pluses and minuses, which makes it extremely difficult to decide the best course of action. I should mention that I'm extremely grateful to even have an option at all. I know we work pretty hard, but the music business is so subjective with talent being one of the major contributors to success, that I can't help but feel extremely lucky to have any options whatsoever.

No matter what stroke of luck we managed to catch, it still remains that if we make the wrong decisions now, it could effectively nullify any gains we have managed to make. This is an excruciating idea. Music is not like programming in that there is no concept of scaling. With music, you can try to become more prolific but very quickly quality suffers. If you create an application, that knowledge is usually directly applicable to some other application almost immediately. Whether that is a new web framework, programming language or library, you have new tools that can be extremely helpful in overcoming fields. If your album doesn't get enough attention, that is it. Those songs have been used and in some cases sold. There is no taking the lyrics and reusing them a few hundred times over or taking a riff and adding it to all the songs in the next record. Failure has a very deep permenance.

This makes decisions regarding your career very serious. If you choose incorrectly, you potentially lose time, creative output, money, control and the opportunity to succeed. At one point this gamble was very much worth it for bands because they could often get a big enough advance that if they were smart would help in setting up things to move on, even though a band might have failed. Now, labels d on't give you anything and yet still want to take everything. In some cases that might be OK. In the end fans drive everything, so if a label has a good route to helping you find fans, then it might be worth it. This might come in the form of paying for publicity (the bare minimum) to paying for things like videos, special projects and events. Having a backer in your corner can sometimes be worth giving up some "intellectual property" in order to get implementation support. Likewise, it can be just as beneficial to keep the ties as small as possible and hope that the label has the secret sauce to make the smaller mentions count enough that they reverberate through the industry and eventually land on the steps of fans. This is appealing because it is cheaper, which means who ever pays for it is not going to expect to gain control over large portions of the artist's career. The downside is you're rolling the dice in terms of the effectiveness of the resources. More money means you can cover all the bases, even if they may not be the most effecti ve. It is a classic breadth vs. depth problem.

The social media guru would most likely point out that you could do it all on your own using the power of the web. I consider it a given that bands try to utilize their abilities to create as large of an online presence as possible. With that in mind, you still can't dispute that with enough money you can do pretty much anything in terms of exposure. It doesn't necessarily always propagate to dedicated fans and it absolutely will require giving most freedoms as an artist, but nonetheless, it is important to realize that while the gatekeepers are changing and expanding, there is still quite a bit of the old system in place.

Getting back to making a decision, I hope it has become somewhat apparent that no matter what you do, you're effectively gambling. If you win and get fans, you might have sacrificed your ownership, in which case you don't get paid. If you win and get ownership, the number of fans might be limited t o the point you still don't paid. There is always the possibility tha t you simply choose incorrectly and you get nothing. The real kicker is that we're talking music. I enjoy hitting a jackpot on some video poker like anyone else, but betting my songs and a potential career as a musician makes it really tough to choose.

When it is all said and done, I do believe there is a right choice to be made. That choice will be the one that no matter the outcome, we'll feel we evaluated the pros and cons and developed our plan assuming the worst and the best. Even though the decision will be really hard, the up side is that it will just be the beginning of many more decisions exciting work.

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