Why Boys Played Guitars (or DJ Now)

A while ago, someone was kind enough to leave me this comment on my Streaming Economics post...

"What's the point of providing music to people if the artists don't make money from it?" You are assuming the main reason people make music is money. It isn't. At least it isn't for men. Every teenage boy who ever picked up a guitar did it because he wanted to be cool and get all the girls. What would Mick Jagger's notch count be today if he'd continued studying accountancy as a young man? Of course, he enjoys his vast fortune now but that was never the original motivation.

Well, I picked up a guitar as a teenage boy, and it wasn't so I could be cool and get all the girls. I have no idea why I did it. I had played the descant and treble recorders at Junior School, and started on the guitar with lessons. Junior School. Boys aren't doing things to impress girls in Junior School. Well, not back then anyway. Why? Because 'Music' was a subject in Junior Schools at the time. We learned to sight-read, and we played the recorder. Perhaps at posher schools they had a wider range of instruments. 'Art' was a subject as well. I was terrible at it, but it was a subject. Music didn't happen in Secondary School, but Art did.

I think I picked up the guitar again when I was a teenage boy, and I did that because that's what I thought I should do to be whoever I had no idea I was at the time. My first goal was to play as fast as John McLaughin. I think for a single moment I might have managed it. I wasn't thinking of performing. I knew I wasn't good enough and I was way too self-conscious. And whatever it was I wanted to play, wasn't something many people would want to listen to.

A lot of my generation played music because school and parents pushed them that way. They dropped it pretty much on leaving for university or work.

Music is hard work. You cannot learn to play-in-a-day because it takes a month for the blisters to heal (stringed instruments), or to form your embouchure (wind), and it take months to learn where the damn notes are and how to play scales and chords and arpeggios. When you see players in full flight with their eyes closed, it's not them showing off, it's because playing with your eyes closed is an actual technical exercise. You should know where you are on the piano, guitar or any other instrument, from the position of your body. It's a kinaesthetic sense. You can't play confidently unless you do.

Yes, that applies to guys saying they only knew three chords. Malcolm McLaren was hyping when he said about the Sex Pistols that the band couldn't play. That was part of the punk culture: nothing complicated, anyone could do it. Don't spoil the illusion.

I play music now for myself. Playing helps me listen and understand what I'm hearing better.

So much for teenage boys.

Girls? Groupies don't care about the music. They care that it's a famous / hot band with hot / sexy boys in it. Whether those guys could play is irrelevant. It's not being in a band that gets the girls, it's being a hot guy and being in a band. Those Sixties pop stars were hot / pretty by the standards of the day. A young man who picks up, these days it would be a mixing deck, a laptop and a Korg (or whatever), in the hope that a hot dance floor track will get him girls is in for a disappointment. Unless he's hot, when he needs to be a DJ up front and centre.

Making and performing music is for nerds, with exceptions from time to time. Rock 'n Roll, Rap. Do DJ's get laid? It's a nerdy occupation, but I've no doubt the hot ones who know how to work the scene do.

So. Money.

Nobody but a fool, to paraphrase Dr Johnson, ever played an instrument, except for money. Johnson said that about writing. He meant that the process was so painful and so demanding, that nobody would choose to do it over, say, hanging out with their bros, or watching football, or whatever they did back then. It's almost the same with music, though there is some satisfaction in playing for your own pleasure, which there isn't in writing.

I used to go to the Bulls Head in Barnes when it was, unbelievably, one of the foremost jazz venues in the country. The back room was generally half-full, you could make eye-contact with the musicians, and nobody sold CDs afterwards. That was jazz then and possibly still now. They were doing it for the practice, and to play with other people on the scene, as a form of networking. But they didn't do it for free. Even if it amounted to petrol money.

Why? Because getting paid is what makes the difference between a professional and an amateur. It's a confirmation that a complete stranger values what they do enough to part with money for it. As soon as musicians could make a CD without silly costs, they were selling the things at their gigs. For the same reason. And in the hope they might be able to make a living playing music.

The complaint about streaming revenues is that they are so low for most artists that it doesn't count as "making money". Pennies a month are insulting, and that's all many acts are making.

Streaming is the ultimate in deflation: the marginal cost of music falls from the price of a ticket or a drink or a disc, to zero. Streaming lets everyone hear an artist's music for free. So did the radio, but radio didn't have 70,000,000 tracks to play on demand. Radio validated because the gate-keepers had chosen you (payola aside). Spotify has minimal gatekeeping: there's no validation. It looks like an opportunity to be heard, but so is the back room of a pub and a small ad in a music paper. It wouldn't be so bad if streaming lead to people showing up at live gigs, but, wait, live what?

So I'm going back to "What's the point of providing music to people if the artists don't make money from it?". Money is proof that what you are doing is valued by someone (*). Girls are proof that you are hot or meet some other mysterious and changeable girl criterion that has nothing to do with your ability to construct a guitar solo. Don't let either of those comments stop you making music for your own enjoyment. If you can upload it to Soundcloud at minimal cost, sure, why not? But marketing is expensive and can be time-consuming. To paraphrase Dr Johnson again, nobody but a fool marketed anything, except for money.

Which is perhaps what I really meant to say.



(*) OK. Not all the time. Quota hires, for instance.