@NotJustBikes 9 months ago

I’m am not, and have never been a professional musician, but I was in the music scene in the 90s and was in a few bands, so I spent a lot of time with people who were trying to “make it”.

In those pre-internet days, the only way you were going to get anywhere as a musician was by getting signed to a label. Obviously everyone wanted the big labels that would have the most marking dollars, but there were smaller “indie” labels, too. It was very time consuming and expensive to record a demo tape, and the quality was pretty bad. A lot of your promotional work was about playing live shows. Then try to sell a handful of tapes while you were there to cover your costs.

Independently creating music was basically impossible. We booked studio time in the middle of the night with a college student who was studying audio engineering to record our demo. Our guitarist’s dad funded it, but most people didn’t have that luxury. Ultimately though, the end product (CD) sounded pretty bad.

Ultimately, everybody was trying to write a “radio-friendly” song that would get picked up by a label. But even if you did get signed, the deal you got was terrible. You weren’t making any money until your 3rd album, and I knew people who had signed with a label, but still made almost all of their money by selling T-shirts at live shows.

Ultimately, getting noticed as a musician has always been difficult. Before, the gatekeepers were the record labels and radio stations. Now it’s the record labels and streaming services.

I would argue though that the situation is way better today than it ever has been. You can record an effectively perfect-quality album on your home computer at relatively low cost. There are way more marketing opportunities with the Internet, like forums, YouTube, and Bandcamp. That does mean that a lot of people are competing with you, but at least you could conceivably have a music career now without ever signing a garbage deal with a record label, so I consider that a win.