Is Being a Musician Still About Music? DEVIN TOWNSEND Weighs In

If you’re a musician, you’re totally conscious that these days meaning juggling extra than simply notes and melodies. In an period dominated by social media, artists are anticipated to put on a number of hats, from advertising gurus to full-time content material creators. Music, it appears, is only one a part of the equation in a profession that now calls for digital savvy.

Devin Townsend highlighted this shift in a latest interview with Steel Blast. For him, the truth of recent musicianship was startling. “90 %” of the job, he says, revolves round creating content material, not music — a indisputable fact that he discovered “very jarring” early in his profession.

Townsend mirrored on how his youthful, romanticized imaginative and prescient of the music business shortly light (through Guitar.com). “I really like and beloved music a lot that I assume that clearly the inspiration for being concerned with the music business is artwork and feelings and music,” he explains. “It was naive, you recognize, as a child. After which after I get down, I understand, ‘oh no, it is an business. It is like the rest.'”

The cutthroat nature of the enterprise grew to become evident as Townsend realized that a lot of a musician’s position at the moment has little to do with making music. “Now, greater than ever, I understand that 90% of the job is to be a content material creator fairly than write any music,” he continued. “And these are the types of realizations that I discovered to be very jarring after I was a child… I used to be made painfully conscious of what the character of the business is.”

Regardless of the disillusionment, Townsend would not maintain any bitterness. “I do not resent it, or consider it as being one thing that should change. It is simply what it’s,” he says, acknowledging that his youthful self needed to regulate to the practicalities of a musician’s life. “The transition between the idealistic model of what I assumed it was versus the practicalities of what it takes to be a musician was, I assume, upsetting as a child.”

As content material creation takes middle stage in sustaining viewers engagement, particularly in a world crammed with distractions, the stress might be overwhelming for some. 30-years-old guitarist Mateus Asato, one in every of Instagram’s greatest guitar neighborhood stars, give up social media in January 2021, admitting he “bought misplaced contained in the containers of the 15s-60s movies.”

Nonetheless, in some methods, there’s an upside. Herman Li of Dragonforce factors out that getting concerned in content material creation may give musicians extra management over their artwork and enterprise. “Understanding the enterprise [lets you] management your music and your artwork,” stated Li. “Or else another person goes to return in and do it for you, they usually all the time know higher than you as a result of their proportion is basically what they care about essentially the most.”

Balancing artistry and content material creation stays a problem, one which at the moment’s musicians should navigate to thrive within the digital age. As Townsend and others have discovered, it is not simply concerning the music; it is concerning the full bundle.