I feel you, bro! (and let us be careful to hide our new guitar/pedal/synth from their sight for some time!!!)

 

Add friends and family too and you have me on the same boat hahaha...

 

During the 90s I would regularly see a nice five figures for writing trax for singers & rappers.
Now today with all these so called Bedroom Producers have brought mad competition to the game & fucked it all up! What I call a track these new kids call them beats. In the beginning I was confused. "Son I'm not going to sell you just a damn drum beat, but a full production".
I had a package I used to offer 3-5 trax, mixed & mastered with their cover art completed (due to my Photoshop skills) and include 50 CDs for $5000.
Now today Fat Bobby sellin' 3 beats for $50
My clients were making progress because I would council them. Invest in yourself. If you only spend $50 that's nothing and you gets nowhere. Just 3 beats. Now you've got to go in the studio, re-record the trax if you can even get all the recorded tracks onto a format that a studio has, then you've got to record your Vox, mix it, get someone to do proper mastering, do your graphics & print out your covers & running off CDs. By then you've spent well over 10K. So now they just end up performing to an instrumental CD at the local rap battles or open mic night at the local bar/club and hope someone discovers you.
I had clients taking pride in learning this business.
But oh well. Now I've got to start releasing my own MixTapes to try & drum up business. Maybe I'll get a track on someone under a major.

 

It's been 9 months since I relocated back to my hometown. Back in my 20s, this town was all about questionable fashion choices and even more questionable life decisions. Now? It's all about my old friends running the show! They're big shots in government and public sector now. Basically, if there's a job I'm vaguely qualified for, it's magically appearing on my doorstep. I'm starting to feel a little guilty. I mean, I did ask for "help" but never thought of having the full force of nepotism handed to me like this.

 

It would be a lot more if you asked me a couple years ago.

 

I’m about $4000 dollars in the negative.

 

Im blessed to have been able to earn a living doing what i love for most of my adult life, but that is becoming harder and harder. Im still surviving for now, but it has taken a lot of evolutions. Figuring out the next move pretty much constantly.

In good news, my publisher, who is amongst the top level when it comes to pub houses, has informed me there is some serious rallying going on behind the scenes, in the fight against spotify etc. Some of the biggest in the game, universal, sony etc are teaming up to throw the books at these scummy companies. Will it change anything, who knows. Im a bit of a pessimist / realist, but you never know.

 

Never anything of note but every track I make I tell myself "We makin' out the hood with this one!" and then noone listens to it

 

Let's leave great artists out of this...
Nowadays, people (potential customers) think a song or other digital goods has no inner value anymore because you can download it from the internet for free. Or a AI may generate it for them.

So today, if someone with moderate to mediocre talent for music wants to make money, it's worth trying to combine the music with a larger package of services.
So, for example, producing an individual promotional video and a marketing concept for an exhibition and selling the accompanying music as part of it seems to me to make more sense than publishing a song on spotify.
So you get paid for you music. In a way.

OK, it's not what we may dream of, but it pays the rent

Spoiler: how to do ...

My son-in-law and my daughter are doing it in this manner for years: they are mediocre designers, mediocre musicians (guitar & singer), mediocre videographers, mediocre cook, mediocre vinologists ... but good sales persons. They sell their portfolio of mediocrity and make > $150K a year and their customers happy

 

Last edited: Feb 1, 2025 at 2:50 PM

Make money? From music?
What does that even mean?

 

I make 0 money with my music, but I do get an occasional live gig now as a mixer/recorder every couple of months. Not much money, but every euro counts these days. I make more money from computer maintenance and more regularly. Still not enough for a normal life so I'm going to have to apply for a disability allowance to make my life a little easier. EU is fkd... prices of food went through the roof in the last couple of years.

 

Last edited: Feb 1, 2025 at 7:19 PM

Today you are beginning to fully understand what Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber) was warning us about...

 

only fun thing about is that the chem/gmo food price is getting closer and closer to some organic stuff prices.
...if you have the budget buy a 1200 monez water filter,it filters 100% all shit out but with minerals and restructering so you end up having much better water than the only 3-4 distros of glass bottle water with good values ,which cost much more seen on the year than the 1200.if you get older you want your testo up and softeners in plastic bottles act as estrogen so...besides micro....bla this that
man this water topic is huge ,the cicles,structure,energizing(its proofen)bla
sorry just want spread some info majority isnt aware off

 

wtf mate didnt kno
searched up The Unabomber Trial: The Manifesto

 

Well if true from the percentage we can deduce there is about 5% of real rockstar among us (>10 000 can be 100 000 or 1 000 000).
"Who can it be now?"

 

basically zero, everything we get from shows is being consumed well-spent by recording and mixing engineers

 

Because they are not using enough notes in their music.

If you had the collegiate appropriate education, you would know about quantitative note analysis theory. This is why music is so bad these days. Not enough notey notes.

 

I make around minus 300 - 500 Euro per month making music ... depends on how much gear I buy, how much I'm paying uber coming home late night from rehearsals and how much I spend on naturalia. Last thing dropped drastically when I started being completely sober (despite little amounts of caffeine) a few month ago. Every few month I need to spend some money for my masseur because of carrying so much gear around, though.

 

Its Jaycen Joshua