Stop Listening to the Entertainment Industry

Almost every piece of advice an artist receives comes from the same place — the entertainment industry.

Managers, agents, labels, publishers, A&R reps, marketing consultants, the guy with the podcast about growing your fanbase. They’re all standing in the same building, looking out the same window. And most of them are genuinely excellent at what they do.

But notice what it is they do. It isn’t making art. It’s making money from art.

That’s not a judgment. It’s not an accusation. It’s a job description.

It’s right there in the name: entertainment industry. An industry, by definition, is a collection of businesses that produce goods and services. The professionals inside any industry are experts at making and selling that industry’s particular product. Steel people know steel. Insurance people know insurance. Entertainment people know how to package, distribute, and sell entertainment — and they are often extraordinary at it. That’s a real skill and a necessary one, and it’s worth remembering that entertainment and art are not the same thing, even when they arrive in the same package.

The problem isn’t that these people are wrong. The problem is that they’re answering a different question than the one you’re actually asking.

Artists don’t make art in order to sell it

Read that again, because everything else follows from it.

Selling art is one way you can make money. You have to make money, because the society we’ve built says you have to buy the things you need to live. That’s the arrangement. It isn’t going anywhere. And it’s a world you didn’t design.

In fact, artists I know do not really care about making money — they just want to make their art. The only reason they care about money is because they want to continue making art. They want to be able to afford being an artist.

That statement is saying two things. First, it is a direct acknowledgment that money is about survival in this world — again, that is the world we (not me or you, specifically, but the collective “we”) decided to build. Second, and more importantly, it recognizes that the goal for artists is actually having enough money, not necessarily more or the most.

The industry and artists have competing interests

A business can only be optimized for one thing at a time, and for an entertainment business, that thing is more. More streams, more tickets, more followers, more units, more reach. Not because the people running it are greedy or cynical — most of them aren’t — but because more is the only variable a business has access to. It’s the only thing that shows up on the spreadsheet. It is how the industry measures success. The idea of “enough” in industry does not exist — profits could always be higher, production can always be greater, margins can always be better.

So when you bring your art to an industry professional, you get advice optimized for more. Rewrite the bridge, it’s testing poorly. Post four times a day. Take the sync even though the ad is for something you find repulsive. Push the record back six months so it lands in a better window. Cut the eight-minute song.

In fact, the only time the industry cares about your art is when they decide that is what consumers want, that it is what will sell. The whole schtick around authenticity today is not because the industry cares about you being authentic — if dressing like a clown will sell more records, they will tell you to dress like a clown — it is because they believe that audiences want authenticity. That authenticity is what will sell.

Again, I am not second-guessing the quality of the advice entertainment industry advisors give artists. I am only pointing out the perspective and mindset it comes from. This matters, because you need to know when to listen to an industry advisor and when not to.

Your goal is to build a lifetime of making art, to have the freedom to wake up every day and create. Because of the world we live in, that translates into wanting to make enough money to wake up every day and create for the rest of your life.

The entertainment industry’s goal is to make as much money as possible, without any concern for the longevity of your career. If the industry can make the most money ushering in new artists for three-year cycles, it absolutely will — because that is what will accomplish its goals. That is what will maximize profits. If designing 50-year careers for artists will make the most money, then they will do that too, and your interests will align. But that is simply not the reality.

Here is the hard truth: in the eyes of the entertainment industry, you are a commodity, the product it is selling. Industries typically work on relatively short cycles when it comes to introducing new products — maybe three to five years or so on average. Long-term planning for big business is focused on the overall strength of the company and larger industry trends, not product development. What that means for you is that the industry is not planning for, nor does it expect, your long-term success. And its advice, whether they say it or not, whether intentional or not, is aimed at helping you achieve short-term success at its highest level.

What I am not saying

I am not saying the entertainment industry is evil. There is no judgment here. But I am being honest about what fuels the entertainment industry and what its priorities are. Those are money and selling, first. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with making money, having lots of it, or selling your art. The issue is when you put the money cart before the art horse.

I am also not saying the industry has not produced great art — we all know it has. Bach wrote on a deadline for a paycheck. Motown ran like a factory and produced some of the most transcendent recordings in American history. Shakespeare was filling seats. The idea that commerce automatically corrupts the work is nonsense.

Money isn’t the enemy. Refusing to learn the business isn’t rebellion — it’s surrender, and it hands every lever to the people who already hold them.

So the argument here isn’t don’t sell your art. It’s narrower and more important than that: don’t let the people whose job is selling your art be the only people advising your life.

What every artist truly needs

Every artist needs two kinds of counsel.

The first is the one you already have access to — people who know how to get your work in front of more people, the people who know how to monetize your art. Keep them. Pay them. Listen to them when it comes to how to sell your art.

The second — and I would argue the more important — is the one that determines whether you’re still making art in fifteen years. Someone oriented around your whole life instead of your next release. Someone who lives outside of the industry, who sits on the artist side of the fence. Someone solving for a different problem: not how do we make more money, but how do you make enough money to be an artist for the rest of your life? Because you never stop being an artist. Art is not what you do. It is who you are.

That number — the gap between what you need and what you earn — is what financial freedom actually is. It’s not a pile. It’s a gap. And it’s almost always a lower bar than artists think, which means most creatives are chasing more to solve a problem that a much smaller, much more boring set of decisions would have solved years ago. A lean cost structure. Real fans instead of vanity metrics. Diversified income that compounds quietly. Owning your work instead of renting your career to someone who will sell it out from under you at the first sign of fear. Once you have a plan for a lifetime of art, then — and only then — can you measure whether the entertainment industry’s plan to make more money helps or hurts your plan for longevity and sustainability.

Because an artist with a real financial floor is a better artist. Not metaphorically. Practically. The floor is what lets you say no. It’s what lets you keep the eight-minute song, sit on the record until it’s right, walk away from the sync that would have made you sick, turn down the tour that pays but costs you your marriage. Everything the industry tells you that you can’t afford to do, you can afford to do — once somebody helps you build the thing that makes it affordable.

The entertainment industry will help you sell what you make. That’s real value, and you should use it. But it will never once ask whether what you’re making is still the thing you meant to make. Somebody has to ask you that. And it probably shouldn’t be someone who gets paid on the answer.

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