So you're a youngblood, you're living in the city. You play a weekly residency and some gigs here and there. You're not the first guy on the flyer but you're not the last. You've played some big clubs, more often in the smaller room of a large venue, and you've been invited to some cities and even had people pay to bring you there.
You usually open up for the big name DJ and you think it's about time that some of them start opening up for you.
So you fire up BitTorrent, find a copy of Ableton Live, Google your way through cracking the copy protection and get ready to launch the next phase in your career. It's not very intuitive at first, but after working with it for a few weeks you're able to put together some sounds that aren't altogether displeasing. You don't have a vocalist, you can't afford a band and your engineer is your roommate Clarence who used to do the sound at raves.
Listening to the finished product, it's not much of a "song" - but really who cares? Nobody makes any money off records in House Music anymore anyway. It's all promotion, baby! And you looked through Beatport and saw these guys who throw out dozens of these instrumental beat tracks a year. They're big names and they have fans and when you opened for them last month at Le Club, it didn't seem that attaching their name to unmitigated shit did their careers much harm.
So you post it up and wait for the marquee gigs to roll in. Your friends (you've been in the game for awhile now, so you've got lots of those) say it's the greatest fucking track since they first heard "Phreaky Muthafucka" on a big system. Or that's what they say, because the last four times you went to see them, they told you apologetically that your 6 minute piece of McHouse Music didn't fit with the "vibe" on the floor. It's "jackin'" but the crowd was more "laid back". You nod your veteran (some say "legendary" but you - humbly - wouldn't go that far) head, because man, you know the psychic connection between a DJ and his audience. It's tight like that, bro.
The funny thing is that your friends all love it, but no one else does. Or at least the sales suggest that this is the case. But it's not that bad for a first effort. For the next release, you'll budget free drink tickets to Clarence, who in addition to being your engineer and roommate also has a cracked copy of Photoshop and can do some flashy artwork. Something with a chick, like an Effen Vodka ad. And you already have your next 14 releases completed. You've really got the hang of jerking off Ableton now, and your loops are so mental, your beats so crunchy, so chunky, so funky, that you kick yourself for not getting in on this racket years ago.
Flash forward a couple of years. You've now got 20 releases on your label, which in a spark of enlightenment you decided to call DeepSoulGasm Records. You've made new friends, and now you trade gigs with these guys in other cities. They remix your records, you remix theirs and you both praise each other like you're giving an oration at a fucking funeral.
You keep thinking that you're just ONE record from really breaking through. On Twitter and Facebook, you're constantly hitting up the big boys with your tracks, hoping to wind up on some comp record from OM or Agave or whatever. Sometimes they throw you a bone and say it's "nice", which, with your years of hard-earned marketing savvy, you now put on all of your releases as:
"Nice."
-- Some Big Name Guy
And yet, when you look at it, nothing's really changed. The gigs you've gotten barely account for the massive timesink of sending a quota of 50,000 private messages a month on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to "promote" yourself. Your releases barely make a dent. Some publishing company (whatever the fuck that is) is sending you threatening letters about a 6 second sample off a disco record you found at a flea market. They don't get it: you're just trying to PROMOTE them. And fuck, it's not like you made more than a hundred bucks on any of these pieces of shit anyway.
For one month, you miss a release date (it's for your highly-anticipated opus called "FUCK ON THE DANCEFLOOR NAKED LIKE YOUR MOMMA SAID TO"). Surprisingly, nobody seems to notice. You read a site called House Music Daily and some fucking dork is criticizing "Ableton Masturbation" like he invented the term (holy shit, it looks like he did!) and you think, "That's not me. I've got a hundred quotes from legendary people saying it's 'nice' and 'great beat' and 'loved the energy!'"
But it IS you. YOU'RE the douche ruining this. Let's be charitable: most people's first attempts at something - whether it's building a birdfeeder or making music - sucks. It's terrible. But in the Good Ole Days, when this music was somewhat popular, there was a barrier to entry which prevented the Anti-Hero of our story from shoving his bullshit into the marketplace. Would he be willing to spend several hundred or several thousand dollars pressing vinyl in quantities large enough to stock the key dance music shops in the United States, plus promo copies to Big Name DJs who will say it's "nice"? Not unless he thought he could make it back, or come damn close.
Ultimately though - and this is the main point right here - those records shoved off this mortal coil into closets, attics or the trash, where bad music goes to die (and die quietly). They weren't preserved forever on a site, on someone's harddrive, and most importantly in the memory of those 50,000 people you spammed every month to promote this quick-and-dirty spit-lubed fit of Ableton Masturbation. It's an unwritten rule that self-promotion involves putting your best foot forward. Probably half of all releases every month (and that's a conservative estimate) are the equivalent of FedExing someone a box of dogshit.
Maybe you're really gifted and have a great song ready to burst forth after a few years of seasoning. Unfortunately, your name is now associated with the musical equivalent of a ricecake: totally lacking in substance, weight and good taste. And it's not even a heartfelt piece of garbage. You did it in 30 minutes. Anyone who knows music also knows this. DeepSoulGasm Records has anything but soul. It exists to shove crappy loops into a crappy market to make someone famous.
I sometimes wonder if this hasn't already happened - the final act of this era of McHouse Music and Ableton Masturbation, where anyone who ever had the misguided notion that "Hey, I could do that too!" went ahead and did (and had his friends proclaim it the best fucking record in the history of percussion). I have no doubt that sheer persistence and will can make someone a name, and repetition and effort can make even the unskilled competent craftsmen. But when they finally release their hit - when they finally got all their ducks in a row and wrote a real song, with real hooks, and real feeling rather than slamming some beats together in an afternoon and pushing it on to Beatport - will anyone notice? Will anyone other than their BFFs still care? Or will the promo sheet still be littered with big name DJs saying it's "nice"?
I Beat It shirt from cottonfactory; Happy Bunny from lovehappybunny.com.
