Thursday, October 29, 2015

A Brief Statement

A few days ago I ran into a local guy...a nice guy...a guy I like...who told me that he follows my posts on Facebook regularly and that he generally gets something out of what I say, but that I piss him off quite frequently.
Well...good.
I am an artist. That is what I do. I call things as I see them and I am not here on this earth to make people happy...I am here to make people think (and laugh on occasion). If you want to be happy, Oxycodone may do that for you...John Ludi will not.
As an artist I speak the unspoken and say things that make people uncomfortable...things they may be thinking in the back of their minds, but refuse to articulate as those in their circles may think poorly of them if they did so. They may be shunned or ostracized, oh my...
For myself, I find that the risk of being thought poorly of is worth my being honest and calling out the naked emperors. That is my job. That is just who I am. People have loved me AND hated me for it for all of my life. In the end, whenever it comes, I will be able to say (as a friend recently pointed out) that I was unafraid to speak my own truth and stand my ground and not bow to peer pressure just to make my life easier. I am an artist...my life was not MEANT to be easy. I have accepted the slings and arrows as part and parcel of who I am and what I do. I am a lightning rod by my very nature, and though the lightning hurts at times I deal with it and march on: I have strength and a sense of purpose and a calling that says that people like myself are here to be the vocal conscience of a world gravely out of balance...and if WE are not here to do it...if the people who dare to speak out quit, then as bad as things are now they could get all the more worse.
So I question the group-think and dominant mores when I am moved to do so...whenever they make no sense to me...and much of what we do as a species makes little sense to me...so I question often...sometimes loudly. If you are timid by nature you may not want to stand too close to me: there IS that lightning and all.

And if any of THAT makes people uncomfortable, then I am happy to have done my job.

Friday, July 31, 2015

Pay for play?

It's been 7 years since I've promoted an album.  Things have really changed.

There are now a bunch of sites that you have to PAY to get a review from...and some artists are actually using them.  Wow.

How do you even have the pretense of objectivity with such an arrangement?  And how, once the source of such a review becomes known, does anyone in the industry take such a review seriously?

What used to be called payola is pretty rampant too: paying for spins on online stations...yet all the while the opportunities for revenue for independent artists are vanishing.  There are even sites where you can register your songs as Creative Commons with no limits on licensing so, in theory, PepsiCo could use one of your tunes in an ad and never pay you any royalties.  And those services, too, have a ton of artists on them giving it all away.

So sad that the arts have become so undervalued, so cheap...so disposable.

I suppose against the larger backdrop of a planet whose biosphere is spiraling out of control, it's a minor little concern, but it still saddens me to see artists willing to pay large sums of money to give their work away for free, essentially.

I really feel sorry for younger acts who are trying to make any sort of living at this...for a time, it was different.  Me, I'm old and my material is out of step with the times...so I know that I have to make my income via non-musical means...and I mostly always have...but what a massive set of disincentives for anyone getting into this field.  Frankly, if my muse was not screaming at me and had I not had the desire to leave a more expanded musical legacy than what I would have left otherwise, I would not have recorded the two new albums...but I have and it means I have to have at least a minor go at promoting them to do them justice...but what a weird little world for indie artists it's become.