Bassrazor
I have discovered that there are two types of musician:
1. The authentic musician who pursues music because he/she loves the craft… authentic meaning anything that is not devised or structured to make a profit or anything that exists for its own sake, that assumes its own shape.
2. The marketer who sees music as the vehicle of his/her opportunity, the garden where everything is strategically planted and arranged for effect.
No, no, no, you're seeing it within such limited constraints. Music and people are two things that, as a whole, have an incredible amount of diversity. So pigeonholing both simultaneously into two categories is an incredibly narrow way to perceive things.
For example, Victor Wooten is an incredible bassist, yet he's a session musician (read: plays music for other people to make music AND money), a teacher and puts out CDs/DVDs to make money from his talent. Which category would you put him into?
Mike Patton is one artist who is renowned for going against the grain and doing what is totally unconventional. When he joined Faith No More he did it only if Mr. Bungle would get signed to Warner Brothers. He runs his own record label (Ipecac Records). Where would you put him, seeing as most of what he does is so uncommercial it barely gets on radio, let alone any kind of significant media attention?
There are many differing shades of grey with the spectrum. I've met and know fantastic musicians who pursue it and can barely pay the rent with it, and others who have been quite successful because they honed their craft and developed business nouse for years and years because all they want to do is music and nothing else, and that includes giving up their day job. Why separate the two, if you can do both?
You mentioned the term authentic. What if you write such a brilliant piece of music that afterwards you want to get it out to as many people as possible, and (*gasp*) make a bit of money from such a thing?
What if you're consistently making music and start to develop a bit of a reputation, so that you get a few gigs? And people who go to these gigs love it and you think "hmmm, I'd love to make a CD, it's something I've always wanted to do". So you make a demo recording and people love it. You keep doing more of the same and your reputation widens and you're playing to more people and someone picks it up and asks to put it on local radio, which in turn gains more popularity. This gets the attention of people who run bigger gigs and festivals and soon they're asking you to play, then bigger radio asks to put your songs on their rotation, then record companies start asking if they can put you into a fantastic studio and you see this as an opportunity to really get those sounds out in such a way that you've never quite been able to, and then the CDs get out there and people are amazed and want to buy them, so then you're asked to tour and you see that as a great experience you can draw inspiration from for more music by seeing places and people you never would have otherwise, and you meet other musicians along the way who share a similar story and you learn some more about music from these people, and afterwards you get back home and think "Wow, this is amazing, but I want to write something a bit different now because through this I've explored one area and got all those sounds and ideas out, but I've got some new sounds and ideas to work on" and then you sit down in your own little studio and start working on some new stuff, and one day your band mates or such listen and go "hey that's cool man" and it gets more attention and pretty soon you're back in the studio, your song is on the radio and is bigger than before and you are making a lot of money. Where is the integrity lost in all of this? The one constant here is that you're doing what you've always done: had some sounds and ideas in your head and put them out there, because that's what you wanted to do (ie. made music). There doesn't need to be any artistic sacrifice made, if what you did to begin with was being true to your musical self. You just continue being true to your musical self and the music should always remain good.
