(Also going to ignore the elitist and gatekeeping tone of the comment you quoted regarding mainstream music.)
Since this is the second person to somehow misunderstand what I was saying, I think I'll clarify. I have nothing against mainstream music. The first albums I ever owned were from New Kids on the Block and Kriss Kross for god's sake. I am not making any statements about mainstream music at all. These are the key points I wanted to convey:
Creating something genuine that happens to go viral or trend is not a negative thing. That's how a lot of great music spreads. Creating something according to a trend in order to go viral is harmful to music as a whole, because it commodifies what is supposed to be artistic expression.
The vast majority of people, who have no idea how being a musician or the music industry itself works, believe that in order to make a living making music, you have to have a mainstream audience. This is untrue, and prejudices many people against exploring and finding new music from artists that aren't on the charts. If I had only listened to the radio or looked at what was trending in order to find new music, I wouldn't have found most of the incredibly talented artists I currently listen to, most of which do this as a job.
Ok last thing from my part too.
I didn’t say that to do music as a job you need to be mainstream (I didn’t use the word mainstream even) I said that social media is the tool nowadays to make yourself known. Social media, going viral and being trendy does not guarantee you a career or stability, but the opportunity exists and I think that many artists feel pressure and some are willing to trade music creativity for that opportunity.
I have different friends who do music, some are happy and some are stressed and want to quit because it is expensive, most of them have main jobs. The one friend I have that 100% lives from his music does Jazz but he is from the city, other friends are from the country-side and the panorama its very different. The others work as support in bands that aren’t music genres they like to pay other expensives, stuff like that. I am sure this also varies between countries.
Also, with going viral or stability, I don’t mean Budokan or sing a contract with Sony but being able to do a live and sell all the tickets (Most musicians I know see that as a stability goal)
A example of what I mean is that, a lot of fanartist don’t like doing fan art of trending anime, but the meme sticker sheet of Delicious in Dungeon gives them the income to do a little batch of fanmerch of series they love or to do some merch of their OC’s, and maybe with time they will stop doing fanart and start living only on their OC’s art.
I agree with your first point, and again sorry to have misunderstand you before.
.jpg?1672808675)
