I got into a pretty heavy “discussion” with a friend the other day. He works in content marketing, and his job is to create content around a brand that helps drive focus and awareness. Ultimately it’s what all marketers do, but his specialty is in content creation. Sometimes it’s good content and other times, the cause of my distress, it’s just noise wrapped around a thin layer of applicability.
Another scenario. Monday night I watched someone crash a party and act as if they belonged there. They didn’t. They were ignored. They were oblivious to the fact that the crowd around them wasn’t paying any attention. Instead, this person focused on broadcasting to their friends where they were. Does this ever end well?
In both cases, you’re building up bullshit around something legitimate and doing nothing to add to your own credibility. You’re not creating authenticity. You’re not being real. You’re making noise for the sake of having to make more noise later. Think of all the wanna-be’s in YouTube and the online ads you sit through and the insincere companies posting on Twitter and Facebook and the canned emails and robocalls, and you’ll quickly see happens. The next one has to be even louder than the one before, and as a result it just makes more noise, annoys you more, and accomplishes nothing unless it registers a click for the marketing guy. Then he’s got incentive to do it again.
In the music world, authenticity is what builds careers. When you believe that the song is coming from the singer’s own experience and validating your own emotion, there’s success. And when that singer gets up on stage and does it in front of you — when they validate what they’ve done — you’ll keep coming back for more.
Authenticity arrives from building a career over time with valid, credible assets. If you’re a musician, it’s built around great music. It’s built around fan engagement. It’s built around performance. It’s not built with shortcuts. And it’s built mostly upon your own deep, real belief that you’re a musician with the knowledge that you simply can’t be anything else and be happy.
When you want to survive in an industry that has a roughly 90% failure rate because it’s truly the only avenue you have for personal fulfillment and happiness, then you’re a musician. But if you’re not authentic, if you’re not believable, my advice: give up now.
