By Rogerio Peixoto
As a new decade begins, we are often surprised by how fast everything is changing. Times are confusing, but also exciting! In a world where technology has allowed us musicians to communicate directly with our listeners, there is more access to diversity than ever before.
While that sounds great (and it is, or at least can be) it poses a challenge: how do we stand out and attract attention to our music when there’s so much to listen out there?
Most of us are looking for answers, but we might be forgetting to ask some important questions first. Musicians have a tendency to overlook a specific period in our lives that might hold some of the most important information we can get: the time between our first inspiring listening experience and the day we decided to become musicians.
In those days we were the listener paying attention to an artist. What happened then? How, and why did that happen? Who were we then? Of all the degrees of answers, I can identify one constant: resonance. We felt something that was true, yet it couldn’t be properly described in words. It made sense to such a degree that at some point we decided to dedicate our lives to it.
Perhaps a source of answers is to remember that, though we are now in the giving side of art, every listener we encounter is, potentially, the same as we were.
Because Resonance with the listener is what can make our music matter to them (making us stand out) it pays to think about it: it’s a response phenomenon, it’s affinity, synthony between different entities, where one produces a frequency and the other vibrates along.
Resonance is a natural occurrence, thus spontaneous and involuntary. As listeners, we didn’t have to think about the music to respond to it. It simply rang true, or it didn’t. And I ask: was that an individual experience between you and the music/artist, or was it a collective event where you bonded with your social group or generation? Was it both? How much of each?
Music has been increasingly becoming less important as a group bonding element since the rise of social media. What we achieved through a certain dress code, hairstyle, and going to certain clubs as a social statement can more and more be accomplished by a selfie with a few hashtags or a post share on our platform of choice (is there real choice?).
Are you making music for an individual, or a social group? And who is that person, or what’s that tribe? If you want your music to matter to them, you best know them well. What do they want?
By becoming musicians we learned to create music that vibrates in different “frequencies”. From joyful to reflective, bright to dark and so on.
While we are capable of doing that, are we being true to our own frequency when we create or perform? What are we trying to achieve? Is it an artistic statement? Is it sales? Is it both? In other words, what is our personal definition for standing out?
There are great performers and creators who have answered these questions very differently and achieved their goals.
I hope each of us can find our own answers, and as this brand new decade develops, I wish you all the best on your way.
Learn more about Rogerio Peixoto here: https://rogeriopeixoto.com
