Mind the gap!

 So, it happens again. It is funny how I see this happening from time to time with cycles. This time I’m a bit concerned since it’s worse than before.

I’m talking about the gap between amateur artists and the professional industry. Time to time the knowledge and the information seem to just be for a couple of few people at the really top of the industry. Usually, also information is critical for an artist's career. I remember the last time I really saw this was when Spotify started to hit off in 2009. All info pointed out that we where going into streaming. The artist was still on the level of printing CD:s and barely understood download.

Oh I also need to clarify that when I talk amateur that contains quite many people that runs smaller independent labels, and a lot of people that just work locally in one country.

I remember also the shit you had to take when you explained to all these people that what they were doing was yesterday's news. They were laughing at me and made fun when you spoke on panels. Of course the same people then after being out of the loop then adapted and came closer to the reality and after five years they stopped laughing at panels about what you were speaking about.

The tragic part here is that is the time where we started to develop the new stuff. So what was new for them was starting to be kind of old to us.

Right now, I feel that is happening again. I looked into the situation and I guess it has to do with several things. Most of the time it's triggered by a crisis. Yes, if you remember there was an economic crisis around the time Spotify came around. These crises tend to make people getting laid off and change their normal behavior. Suddenly they can do arts again and suddenly we have doubled the people that want to have a career in music. Of course, the opportunities are usually less when the crises hit so the timing is not that perfect.

Now we have the COVID and suddenly you have all these people that want or need to change their career. The problem is that the industry has just begun a new journey that we are looking for. At the same time there people were in the industry like six years ago. All this just gets me artists that think that they can get a career on Spotify streams. That really doesn’t understand how social media is working in the new world.

What I see this time it’s going deeper? I can see the local record labels are in the same low knowledge as the artists. Even a lot of the people on the bigger labels have been switch out and have really not the knowledge left. And this is a basic knowledge of how contracts, rights, and other things work so it’s not really any strange things. It’s things you need to know to be able to work or continue working in this business.

Of course for the people that are designing the new industry, this is a golden opportunity. My worries are that we will lose quite much of the business because people are going nowhere and in the end, they just will quit and end up in a fast-food joint somewhere. The whole place also crawls with prophets that really has no knowledge whatsoever. For an artist, it’s really hard to separate who is who. I just hope that the gap isn’t growing bigger. If so then we won’t have any platforms to grow new artists that can make a career fast enough.