Unpopular Music History with The Anti-Academic Music Professor

There’s room for both styles! But it’s important that both types of musicians understand each other.Each musician has a different audience who they are most readily able to attract. Some of us have been conditioned to see that as limiting, but it’s actually incredibly freeing!You will be most inspired by a different musician than your friends– or if you have the same top inspiration, your top 5 will differ. So if you both make music, why pretend that you have the same audience?Scenes were once an important way of differentiating subcultures through adherence to elements of a collective identity. This remains true to some extent, but it’s a double-edged sword; all groups are inherently susceptible to in-group/out-group mentality, and no individual is immune from the gradual erosion of themselves to fit in– even when the goal of fitting in to one group is to signal that you DON’T fit in to another.This episode discusses the two styles of music that have brought me to where I am today as a musician: music that Convinces, and music that Reinforces.First, the style that changes your mind without you realizing it by opening you up to new beliefs, perhaps even flying under the radar of conflicting beliefs and supplanting outdated ideas with ones that feel more true. Then there’s the style that reinforces your beliefs by diving deep into complex topics using specific language, which can resonate with the right audience member just as much as it can immediately deflect off the wrong one.Here’s what you may not expect: there’s absolutely no reason to pretend that one is better than the other. Individuals may have preferences, but to prescribe a single, necessary, highly-defined path to reaching people can be just as restrictive to some musicians as it can be liberating to others.All musicians act as arrows, pointing listeners who like them towards the musicians who influenced them. It’s not always active, but it’s always there. What if there was an informal where some artists could inspire listeners to change their mind for the better, and then poin them towards artists that can teach them even more?United we stand, divided we fall. Some folks learned this lesson in the 60s, and others got so scared at what they could accomplish that we’ve been living in the active aftermath ever since. But this time? There’s way more of us.

Music doesn’t just "happen". I mean it does, but not the music you listen to. I mean it does, but that’s not why you listen to it.Early independent recording started with word of mouth, until the opportunity arose to outsource audience-building to the growing recording industry. Much of what you listen to would never have crossed your ears if it weren’t for the connections it created to labels, studios, producers, publishers, television, radio, magazines, and a dozen other adjacent industries besides– and the profit that it was able to generate for every one of them.Nobody cares until everyone cares. But why did everyone start caring?