By Mason Rosse
In a day and age of easily accessible music making and music sharing programs, there is a lot more competition within the industry. With more music being released, it is a lot harder to get your music heard. To become successful in the music industry, it takes talent, hard work, and a lot of luck. According to T. Perry Bowers of Taylor Sound and Video, underground artists tend to think that “all you have to do is make a quality piece of music and you’ll be ok. Unfortunately that’s totally false.” Quality music is lost in the oversaturation of the music industry. Some of the best music has only been heard by few people. The pure ease of making and releasing music makes it almost impossible for good underground artists to be found in the mix. The competition is intense: in 2014, Soundcloud had about 12 hours of music released every minute, and as of April 2020 there were 200 million tracks on the website in total.
All the music that is being released makes it even harder for aspiring artists to be discovered in the music industry. Beyond the challenges, however, there are ways artists can promote their music, and give themselves the best chance to be discovered. Russ is a great example of an artist who was discovered in the jam-packed music industry. The best thing to do, as an artist, is release as much music as possible, and promote it anywhere you can, that way you start to build a core fanbase that will grow through word of mouth. Russ is a great example of this, he is a fully independent artist that has sold platinum records, and it is almost all due to his insane relentlessness (and way over confidence). Russ just released music constantly, and kept doing it until his songs started getting recognized.
The music industry isn’t just artists and producers, as Keith Hatschek says it: “music careers are oftentimes not straight lines — there are detours, and that’s OK, it’s healthy.” (Hatschek is the author of How to Get a Job in the Music Industry, and is a professor at University of the Pacific). His reasoning is that even if you fail at becoming the next superstar singer, you can find other jobs in the music industry: teacher, engineer, artist management, etc. If you want to be in the music industry, go for it, and keep on working until something works out. I have read a lot about this topic, and every expert, every successful musician says that when you’re young, practice practice practice. For the high school years of your life, you have time to work on music without having to worry about a lot of the things that adult musicians do. It’s incredibly difficult to make it in the music industry, but it’s nothing impossible. Afterall, In this day and age of technology, it is incredibly easy to make and release music.