The indie music industry is so fucking toxic.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you're me. You spent 3 years producing music until your computer broke, and suddenly, accessing your music production software got a whole lot harder. During those three years, you learned a hell of a lot. Your songs went from thinly-produced, repetitive trash heaps to massive, excellently-produced EDM anthems. And you studied music, too, learning what made a song good and what didn't.
By those standards, one could say that you're not a beginner. You're certainly an amateur, if not an expert, at determining if a song is good. I mean, you know why songs hit or not, and why they resonate with various types of people. You've studied it for years.
So then you release your track. And you have to lie and say it's bad.
Here's why. If you say that your music is good (which it is, you can tell), then people think you're pretentious. They look for ways to disprove it. A lot of times, if you send someone a song you wrote and say "this is a good song," then they will be hesitant to listen, because it's not a real, record-label-induced song.
Furthermore, most normal people don't listen to new artists. They'll scroll through Instagram looking at indie cartoonists, and they'll scour AO3 and Wattpad looking for indie authors. They take it because it's free. But if I make a free song, I have to beg people to listen to it. Even though it's free. It costs as much to listen to my song as it does to read a fanfic--and unlike a fanfic, my song won't take two hours to consume. Only three minutes.
Because of this, usually my listeners are fellow producers who are looking to make it. You tell a producer that your song is good, they will attack you with information about how you should've used a Korg kick, and your song is too generic, and it could use a little more in the 5KHz section. It's nauseating.
I can't say my song is bad, either, because then no one will listen to it. If I go up to you and say "hey, listen to this awful song," you'd say "no!"
So I have to ask for feedback. I don't want feedback. I want people to do what they do with my fanfiction and my YouTube comedy videos and my drawings and my Tumblr analyses and tell me that I did a good fucking job. Instead, I have to invite people to give me feedback. It's begging. If you spare me three fucking minutes to take advantage of my free art, then I will let you shit all over it and insult it.
I just don't understand why people aren't sympathetic about music. Why can't they listen to my song and think "Wow, this is pretty impressive for an indie artist"? Why can't they look at a free song and think "well, it doesn't hurt to listen"? Why is it that, when people find a new artist, they're already prepared to either idolize the creator or hate them? Why can't we just support all artists, instead of just visual artists and writers and video editors?
Anyways, that's why I've been doing a lot more drawing and crack videos and Tumblr analyses. Because people are actually fucking nice. I'm shocked when I send my art to a group of people and they thank me for creating it, for sharing it. I'm so used to people trying to reject my art, art which I know is good, just because it's music.
