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Selling out ain't easy - but somebody's gotta do it!

pklima

pklima

Commercial User
May 2, 2003
8,471
7,076
Kraków, Polska
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Karoryfer Samples
#1
I'm selling out! After years of playing mostly weird music for niche audiences (psychedelic folk, black metal covers of country songs, drone versions of jazz standards etc.) while talking about how I have nothing against mainstream music, am a sellout at heart, and mostly listen to Texas country. Now I'm finally actually doing it. I finally got into a normal cover band that's debuted live and looks like it'll get somewhere. Oh, and I'm also a rapper now - not quite as mainstream and commercial-sounding as I want yet, but I've only been at it since last September so I'm working on getting more "normal-sounding". I've finished with all my metal projects and quit my hippie-ish originals band, meaning the only band I was in a year ago that I still play for is a children's choir.

So I keep talking about what a commercial sellout I am, but then I realized I'm not actually walking the sellout walk. Two weeks ago I passed up a really well-paying gig with members of one of my old "weird" bands doing music for a theater play based on Slavic mythology so I could play mainstream covers for free at a school festival that evening.

D'oh! Looks like I'm still only "a sellout at heart"! This is harder than I thought!
 
#4
Selling out doesn't mean you start playing covers to make money. Thats called being a working musician, nothing wrong with that if you're happy playing someone else's tunes. Selling out means your original band stopped being weird music for niche audiences and switched to a radio-friendly format to appeal to the masses and sell records for a label.
 
#8
Sellout in the derogatory sense I think means something more like "Look at all these crappy teenage sensations that don't know a lick of music theory and took 3 months of vocal lessons before recording their debut album which sold 250,000 copies in the first week. Makes me sick!"

Sellout in the complimentary sense could be what you're talking about...capitalizing on the business with what everyone wants to hear!
 
#9
My sense of the term applies as follows.

A few artists had been doing the singer-songwriter folk-rock thing, doing fairly regular gigs at music-oriented places.

They get together, realize that if they wanted to, they could make a Country Music™ group that would sound good and be popular.

So they did, now are Sugarland. When it was just Kristin and Kristian, just didn't have the corporate appeal, and Jennifer Nettles Band was awesome but not commercial. Switch the marketing target (not the talent) and it was a no-brainer.

"sell-out" vs "too commercial" vs ... what? "Making music that people actually would want to pay to hear"

An opposite that came to mind recently -- I watched "Before the Music Dies" in which they featured Doyle Bramhall (guitar player) who had really big names supporting him, but wasn't flourishing. Perhaps he will yet. The trouble is he plays music that appeals to grey-haired people. Prob'ly even-footing with John Mayer, but Mayer took the strategy of going pop first, before playing decades-out-of-style.
 
#10
There is no reason to stay in only one genre. Play the covers AND play your psychadelic scene. Music is music, and making music is what you do. I play bluegrass, gospel, klezmer, blues and on occasion, human beat box. :)
 
#12
Dude, it's not really selling out if you like what you're doing.
As others in this thread said, selling out is when you do something you wouldn't normally agree with (musically) just to gain more fans/sales.
You're not selling out, man!
 
#14
caeman said:
There is no reason to stay in only one genre. Play the covers AND play your psychadelic scene.
Click to expand...
Well, I even like playing music I don't like. Seriously - I really enjoy playing with that children's choir, and that's not exactly music I'm interested in sitting down and listening to.

I really "went mainstream" for a bunch of boring practical reasons like "I don't want to tour this much and would rather play local clubs more". Still, it's a bit funny that I'd rather play "commercial" music for free than "artistic" music for good money, at least in this particular instance.
 
#15
Do both ..........play in your off the wall original groups and a good cover band. Cover bands are a great way to improve your chops and stagecraft. In my local music scene - the better musicians were in cover bands. I see alot of both and hard to determine if the original bands guys can "really play" or not.
 
#17
I'll play just about anything like I said above, and weird stuff has its advantages. Like that hippie pop band... I replaced a didgeridoo player so to replicate his parts I had to play one note per song. That meant I could start gigging with the band without knowing any of the songs!

Since I moved to Poland there's not much market for Texas country covers here, though... I do sneak some into my cover bands sometimes, and Goatbomb is mostly hip-hop covers of Texas country (though the link I posted in the OP is a Tom Jones song), but I couldn't just do a set of Guy Clark and Kevin Fowler songs, y'know.
 
#18
I used to work with a guy who happened to be a guitar player and Berklee grad. He was offered some gigs doing simple commercial stuff, and was telling me that he was afraid that it would be "selling out" to do them. We were in an office where he was doing accounting work, and I told him, "no, that's playing music. This job is selling out."

Not much later, he moved to another town with a better music scene. Last time I talked to him, he was doing commercials, doing studio work on albums, and helping produce in a friends studio. He seemed much happier than he had ever been since I'd known him.
 

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