Hunting The Muse

Those of you who

Those of you who have known me longer than three months know that I've had a sporadic obsession with online music and indy (especially web-based) artists. In addition to that weblog (which I don't update as often as I should), I also have a series of essays that was my attempt to pull together everything that was going on in online music and related areas, so I could get a handle on it and get a feel for what I felt was really needed next.

So I've been something of an activist about it. Thinking hard about it has definitely changed my musical dreams over the years. When I was in In The Buff, I wrote an original that was really my first successful song - we put it on a cd and sold over 1000 copies. I had all these dreams of being an active songwriter and making royalties, and I had a fairly tortured internal dialogue about what the most appropriate relationship would be between me and my singing group, given my songs. Since I was young and a bit clutchy I thought about getting royalties, perhaps even getting a portion of the cd sales from the group, and even though I never quite took a major stand and demanded that, it introduced some stress to the group. I felt really bad about it and ended up awkwardly apologizing.

My tension at the time was based on hoarding my creativity and trying to control money flow. I didn't want to just totally set any creativity free and let it exist under its own power, because that meant a loss of control - I had all these visions of sneaky pirates and producers coming in and claiming credit for my work.

I can feel kind of silly about it now - while my music is pretty good, it's not THAT great. The ensuing years of being able to find independent music online has shown me that there is a ton of really excellent music that isn't selling bajillions of copies, that my stuff doesn't really hold a candle too (yet). But at the time, all I was feeling was the rush of actually completing a couple of songs and being told by scores of people that my music was really excellent.

While I haven't quite figured out how to relinquish control of my creativity and just let it ride, all this musical-activism research has helped me change some thinking in other areas. For instance, I know there's value in giving hard work away for free. It took me a year to feel okay with putting my music up on mp3.com . Now I would love to just get my music played for free on a web radio station in return for a link to a mailing list. Just to feel the support, just to have that extra bit of fan-inspired motivation to write another song or (dare I say) actually put together a 12-song album of my own.

I'm totally rambling here, but that's okay, it's a blog. My initial point in starting this entry is that keeping track of all the political thinking while also understanding the complexities of the music business (which is harder than computer programming) is very difficult! For a long time I put off signing up with BMI/ASCAP for the same general emotional reason that I resisted having the dream of getting an (evil) record contract - because I wasn't sure if it meant something mephistepholian. (yay, pretentious me!) But the point of this entry is that today I finally asked around, and I learned that there isn't really any good activist or ethical reason (from a music-activist POV) to not sign up with BMI/ASCAP. So I'll be doing that soon. I still qualify, and maybe the exercise of signing up will help me feel more like a real songwriter again. Posted by Curt at April 30, 2002 01:28 PM