The Concept of Selling Out: Part 1

One of the worst insults you can throw at an artist is to accuse them of “selling out”…the most basic definition is when the pursuit of money compromises, corrupts or otherwise interrupts the pursuit truth and beauty and all the purity and goodness that is supposed to flow from art…

But that’s an awfully broad definition which can be applied in a billion different highly subjective ways…at one extreme, some people believe that taking money for any kind of art is perverse…at the other, anything and everything has its price, high or low, depending on the circumstances…

And the world has changed…making any kind of art costs money…competition for attention among artists have never been greater…and we’d like to thing that great art inevitably and naturally rises to the top, but it just doesn’t…in a true meritocracy, it would…but we all know that’s not true…

And ever since the internet started shaping the way we find and consume music, the value ascribed to it—that is, how much we’re willing to pay for it—has dropped to near zero…thanks to streaming and YouTube, almost all the music ever created in the history of humankind is available for free…

But there are costs to making music…musicians (and those associated with its creation) have a right to make a living…where does the money come from?...

From a lot of different places, as it turns out…the sources of this working capital may be distasteful to some, but if you want to be a working musician these days, some creative and philosophical compromises need to be made…

What I’m trying to say is that “selling out” ain’t what it used to be….here…let me show you

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