Thinking Local, Acting Global
June, 2001

Dana Detrick Clark's most recent column, "Outrageous Struggle," does a great job using one specific experience to illustrate the fundamental problems virtually all musicians face when it comes to promoting and distributing their work. Folks generally hit their market immediately, and sales dwindle long before supply.

Someone on the Zone Forum recently asked if it was the general consensus around here that music is only a hobby, not a way to make money? If this is true, not only is he depressed by that reality but so is every musician who has to work hard all day to make ends meet. The energy that goes into making music becomes harder and harder to sustain with no hope for a change in one's ability to thrive and do what he or she does best.

Yet another forum writer, responding to the indie rockers who argue you are selling out if you make money, said that he was more than happy to make money from his music. He plays for pleasure, and a little money wouldn't corrupt that one bit.

I don't think anyone is really against making money. The postpunk ethos that good art shouldn't be commercial is pretty shallow considering the fact that all of the artists who influenced you did their best to get their music distributed one way or another. That process takes money all by itself. Those who don't want to make money have what would seem to most of us a very privileged stripe of idealism. Others know their chances of making money with music are little better than winning the lottery, and their ethics spring from living with that reality.

The real question, I think, is how do you motivate yourself to be your best when you know, chances are, your music will not be heard outside of a relatively small local audience, or even a perhaps slightly larger Internet-linked audience? How do you keep growing when the music industry that could hand you a future is actually hostile to your existence, trying to control the market and overwhelm competition? How do you justify what Dana calls the "Outrageous Struggle" when no one wants to pay you even to play in their clubs?

I, of course, don't have the answer, but I do think there are some important questions being asked here about how we all reconcile our dreams with reality. How do we live with the fact that, out of every 100 musicians, 99 damned good ones are never going to make a living at it? Most won't break even. (I sympathize because most writers don't and won't either, although typing is certainly cheaper than playing a gig.)

Some will tell you to count your blessings. If you have a single fan for the music you make, that's more appreciation than most people receive for their creativity. If you have a core audience, that's a group of people your music has affected just as surely as your favorite artist has affected you. I know this is true. My Top Ten favorite artists would be both famous and virtually unknown. Both have influenced what I do in comparable ways. I keep this in mind on those rare occasions when I meet someone who's read my stuff over the years. That makes it all worthwhile. Quality, not quantity, is crucial to finding satisfaction in what you do.

But quantity is important, particularly when you are investing energy in creating something that could reach a broad audience and simply isn't rising to its level. That ability to be received far beyond the bounds of our circles of friends is a quality that music has that demands dissatisfaction with the status quo. It's something like a sin when a great song gets played in the forest and doesn't make a sound in the outside world. That sense of music's potential is one reason musicians can never really settle for the status quo.

Though I whole-heartedly endorse the Zone's motto, "Support Local Music," that step by itself doesn't solve the problems faced by local musicians. Local audiences have limited budgets (the dollar never having gone less far than it does today), and an artist gigging often enough to pay for studio time or produce and distribute a CD is also an artist pushing the limits of its audience's bank account. I don't know how much spending money others have, but I live on about $10 a day, including food and gas (when I am following my budget), and an evening out at a club can wipe out three or four days finances in a couple of hours.

Of course much can be done to build a local fan base, but that fan base will only take your music so far and support your work so long. If there is one big fan for every 100 people in Kansas City, that's a huge artist. That's an artist that could bring 150,000 fans to a stadium. If you can count on 50 people coming out to see you at a local gig, then it might be reasonable to think there should be a way to develop a solid fan base of 400 someplace the size of New York City. To make a living with music, you just about have to have a national or international audience, or else a real steady gig with a well-heeled crowd, like the Bon Ton Band maintains.

The fundamental thing that I think all of us who care about music are being asked to do is think bigger. That old expression, "think global, act local" is a decent idea, but it can be interpreted in contradictory ways. Since that expression is usually attached to environmental concerns, let's suppose someone is worried about, on a global scale, the declining breathability of the world's air. That person's local action may be to not drive an SUV and any number of other things that reduce individual output of air pollutants.

By itself, though, that self control is not an action that's going to change the global condition unless everyone in the world hears about what you're doing and decides to copy your efforts. The idea that taking care of the "man in the mirror" alone is going to change the world does not reflect what I would call true global thinking. Most preaching to other people about how they should do things the way you do does not reflect particularly effective global thinking either. How many people are going to respond well to your self-righteousness?

Truly thinking global and acting local means searching for a connection between your local actions and some potential for those actions to help shape a global reality. Making a difference requires strategic thinking. In the case of local music, truly supporting local music would also mean supporting "local" bands from other areas who are touring on a shoestring budget. It would mean networking local support groups nationally and internationally so that "local" musicians everywhere could reach the widest audience possible.

One reason I write so often about the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (see just about any column in 1999) is that organization's inspiring strategic thinking. Strategic planning is crucial to this group of poor families keeping themselves and others alive and thriving in the face of the largest cuts in social spending this century. This group toured all over the country networking with others fighting poverty so that all such groups could lift and climb together.

Recognizing that musicians (who are mostly poor already) are about benefited to death, KWRU also reached out to musicians, not asking them to throw benefits but asking them to join hands as allies in the fight against poverty. The benefits of this alliance for musicians are boundless . . . in terms of material alone! But no one benefit is more fundamental than the model KWRU can become for the kinds of collective action musicians need to take themselves.

See KWRU's webpage at www.kwru.org.

--Danny Alexander
danny@thezone.org