A plea to artists

​A plea to artists to save humanity. Why and how we can do it.

It’s 2025, and we have a problem.  True art is dying and we need to revive it.

I guess you first have to agree with this premise.  One who creates something from nothing – a vision that they have in their mind or in their heart – has to display enormous courage to bring it out and unveil it to the world.  What drives them to do it?  Some inner need for validation.  Some Jungian psychological desire for ego and sense of contribution.  Maybe they just want to be seen or heard and garner attention.  Or maybe they just believe in their vision.

Here's the problem – if the reason to create something doesn’t involve risk and true originality, you are simply taking something that already existed and incrementing it.  Version 1.01 of art.  Nothing revolutionary.  If your audience loves a certain style of art, just create that style and slightly alter it, and you can have all the validation you want.  They won’t kick you out of the room, and you can easily fit within a box that the audience are not going to dismiss.  After all, ego validation is the reason.

There lies the problem.  Digitalization has meant that the ability to move something for free, all over the world and to most of the 8 billion people on this planet, has meant that the distribution supply chain denotes what fits on those rails.  The data centers become the source of digital content, and the distribution services such as YouTube, Spotify, TikTok, etc. denote how society absorbs content.  The data centers know that the greater volume of content, the more likely they can monetize it with advertising revenue.  So to them, it has nothing to do with any deep analysis of a piece of art.  It has to do with how many pieces they can fit on a hard drive and how they can monetize it with advertising revenue.

They have done an incredible job at hypnotizing society to become addicted and reliant on their distribution, so if any artistic creator wants to have their ego validated, they have to release on those platforms.  They look to all the other artists who release on those platforms for guidance as to the end product – how it is formed, what it looks like, the style and theme, etc.  And they create something akin to what already existed.

This is the antithesis of artistic courage and vision.  Society has become so accustomed to having everything available to them for a small monthly fee or even free, that they rely on the algorithms of the distribution software to suggest to them something.  They are bombarded with suggestions to the point where they can’t think.  They just swipe to the next thing. 

We live in a world where globalization has driven down pricing and manufacturing costs, so that anyone can afford anything.  That might seem disingenuous as there are 8 billion people on this planet, and half of them live in what the other half would consider poverty.  But I think our concept of wealth and prosperity needs to change.  The idea of resource constraints is foreign to anyone born after the Internet and high speed data became expected and normal.  Prior to that, humans had to make a conscious choice as to where they would spend their hard earned money.  The record one would buy in the record store, or the movie ticket one would pay to see that movie on its release.  The concert ticket one would pay for to see the artist who touched their spirit.  Things were not free and abundant.

But within that world, the money wasn’t limited.  Yes, our human species embraces greed and grasping for power, so there were trolls that controlled the dissemination of art by way of money.  However in their defense they did act as quality control agents as well.  In the world of music, the cost of producing a vinyl record 30 or 40 years ago was prohibitive, so artists had to partner with record companies to fund their recordings.  All artists hated their labels, but loved the marketing support they got by other parties.  They didn’t want to do that – they were busy creating their art.  And yes, many had to sacrifice their vision to what the labels said would sell, but sometimes they were able to be the genesis of change.

And they didn’t have digital audio workstations, terabytes of sample libraries and AI to help them.

If you have made it this far through my thesis, good job.  But let’s summarize the issues again:

• Artists are driven by ego & validation
• Distribution is available to them and to massive audiences
• No one is being incentivized to take risks
• The money has dried up so that the only ones making it are the data centers
• The cost & availability of technology means that artists spend more time engineering than inventing
• The audience is being told what they would like by algorithm so the only art that gets traction meets the predictable standard of meta data so it can be recommended – they don’t invest much time in the world of discovery
• The tools being used by the artists embrace incrementing what already existed (ie. AI, sampling, etc.)

And everything is predictable and sounds the same

I sit in a strange place in this supply chain.  I provide the service (in music) to take an artist’s vision and create something that sounds palatable to that audience.  I record it in some form that exists in the absence of the musician’s performance – something that can be consumed while the artist rests or works on something else.  A product, per se.  I was raised in an era where risks were rewarded and resources were constrained.  So I respect any artist with limited resources and try and bring those with said resources to the party so the artist can achieve their vision.  But I serve the art, first and foremost.

When the art isn’t new, visionary, unexpected, a little piece of all of us dies inside.  And when your job is to sit and listen and try and polish what is brought to you, you hope that the raw material is unexpected.  Otherwise what can you really do with it?  You can make it sound more palatable to the human ear, but is that what people really want?

You learn that in order for artists to create something truly remarkable, they have to confront their fears.  The fear that they might go against the very driver that made them want to do it – their ego and need for validation.  But here’s the challenge – if society is being fed predictable, repeatable art, is it really art?   

I think we are evolving to a place as a species where we will be forced to have to create from a vision things that are so different to what was there before.  Why?  Because our technologycan do a much better job at incrementing what was already there.   AI isn’t a threat to real artists – it is a threat to those that simply increment what was already there.  And that’s ok.  That is why everything has become predictable and boring.  We gave away what was truly in the human spirit for a fake sense of validation, by using the massive technological distribution systems we have at our fingertips, and we forgot what art is.

Nothing new and worthwhile comes without risk, struggle & toil.  Those that create new businesses know this.  Someone has to punt on something untested.  Otherwise everything is an increment of what already existed.  If you live in fear as a consumer and only wish to consume predictable things that you already know, then that works.  The cookie cutter houses, going to the same restaurants all the time, watching yet another sequel to an existing movie, or buying just another version of the phone you bought 2 years prior.  This predictability works great for the analysts with spreadsheets who become rich & wealthy based on predictability – like someone who can predict the next lottery numbers.

But little by little, humanity dies inside.  And art is the one thing that may save humanity.

So I am pleading to the artist.  In my world, that is the musician.  I can make you sound great, but that’s not really what I do.  I can be your muse, your quality control agent, your feedback loop if you want.  But since everything has to start from somewhere, that starts with you and your spirit and your courage to unveil it.  And you are failing if you are just incrementing what was already there.  You won’t be a legend doing that.  We all have limited time cycles available to us, and that goes both for you and your time to create, but also me for my time to engineer and polish it.  If you want to be independent and engineer your own product, I get it.  I understand the need to not rely on others, particularly if others have let you down before or took a large portion of the reward for what you do.  But big things typically need a team of people to make them happen.

If you wish to the truly epic, and do big things, then it starts with a vision to do something no one expects, and to surround yourself with a team that supports it.  I’d love to help, but I can’t do anything if you don’t have something truly original and visionary.  It starts with you.

If you do have something however, I would love to be a safe place for your art.  I won’t blow smoke up your ass to make you feel better if it isn’t warranted, but I also don’t see much value in making you feel bad either.  Just know that any rejection of art isn’t a rejection of the artist.  Maybe it is a message recognizing that you are just incrementing what was already there, and I can’t help with that.  I’m sure someone else can, but keep in mind what I do is take risks on things and I really only partner with others that do the same.

However if we do bring something to the 8 billion people on this planet that is truly visionary and creative, then we change the premise and we begin the process of reviving art.

And we desperately need to do that.  For humanity’s sake.