SOAPBOX: A Music Industry Forum

Do Musicians Have To Do Too Much?

The visual aspects of promoting music, predominantly video content, are becoming more and more important. Whether it be tour videos, general day to day vlogging or full-on music videos, video content is now expected, as standard, by music consumers.
For many self-supporting independent musicians and bands, taking the DIY approach is nothing new. But with visual media increasing in popularity and professional level technology and software everywhere around us (not to mention endless YouTube tutorials that can teach you literally anything you wanted to know about any subject ever), many musicians are starting to branch out from their audio based skill-set and experiment more with video, photography and various multi-media platforms. It is all part of the drive to be sustainable as a band. But is it a good thing?
Unlike many of the other roles frequently taken on by bands to get themselves by – tour management, booking, accounting, promotion and various other admin roles – at least experimenting with more visual based platforms is allowing creativity to find a new form of expression that may previously have lain dormant.
It helps that nothing seems out of reach. We live in a time where you can record 240fps slow-mo as standard on a flipping iPhone. You can even film 4K video on the iPhone by downloading an app for $100 – a far cry from the €15,000 you would have had to spend on a camera to do this, even last year. It won’t be long before we’re filming 6K/8K with our contact lenses! 
The tech world is hurtling us forward at such a phenomenal pace, however, that I must stop for a moment and ask, with the continuous pressure on bands to provide more and more visual content and the boundaries between the audio/visual platforms becoming increasingly blurred, are we going to be making better or worse art? 
This is where things get complicated. It’s understood that it takes around seven years of hard work to really master something. But how can this ever happen if we are shooting off in all directions at once? The craft of video, as with music, takes years of nurturing to truly develop – using the slow-mo app on your phone is not going to, all of a sudden, make you into a videographer extraordinaire, no matter how fricken cool it looks. 
Equally, if the amount of time we dedicate to developing our craft as musicians is getting less and less, due to all the other jobs that are expected of us, aren’t we kind of cutting ourselves off from reaching our true potential there too?
There is a temptation to see it as a Catch 22. But one thing that an independent musician can’t afford to do is to give up. We have to sell what we create. We have to see it as a business. To do so, it looks as if we may just have to become jacks of all trades. I only hope it won’t result in too many musicians becoming masters of none.
- Laura Sheeran, Nanu Nanu