Maybe that's overdramatic. I know some people who genuinely like being curators; they enjoy sorting through oceans of music, picking out what they like best, and then helping it find its audience. Good curation is, in its own way, a kind of art, and I greatly admire its artists.
More power to them. Personally, I hate it.
I was a SubmitHub curator for a few years. It was like being ground into dust by an endless procession of steamrollers. It was like the opposite of a bad sales job, where instead of being a cold-calling telemarketer you had to answer all the cold calls from telemarketers and tell them all no. It was like when the cashier asks if you'd like to round up to help kids with cancer and you say, "Oh, that's such a great cause! Maybe next time." And then next time you press No again.
(None of this is a problem with SubmitHub specifically, by the way. SubmitHub is wonderful. It's my overall favorite curator platform and it's so much better than having to reject people via email. Please read the paragraph above not as a dig at a specific platform, but as the disclosure of a sad personal issue I have with rejection more generally, about which I'll explain a little more below.)
There were two main issues with curating for me:
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1) I hated rejecting people. And if you're going to be a good curator, you have to reject people.
Sure, there are some curation contexts in which you can reject less; playlists, for instance, tend to have higher approval rates than blogs, mostly because it's easier to add a song to a playlist than it is to write 500 meaningful words about it. (A blog editor might have five available spots per week; a playlist editor might have 500.)
But whenever you curate, you are, by definition, selecting some things and leaving other things out. Rejecting things is a curator's job. Turns out, I'm unable to do it without experiencing a gnawing feeling of guilt.
Relatedly...
2) I found myself devaluing music. This, ultimately, was the bigger issue for me: As I curated music, I became desensitized to its beauty – partly as a coping mechanism, since the less you care about something the easier that thing is to reject, but also as a consequence of sheer volume.
When you listen to a stack of 30 assorted songs¹ in one sitting, you can't really derive too much meaning from any one of them. You've got a job to do, and the nature of the job makes it harder to be cut to the quick by music.
This is why I don't want to be a curator:
I want to live in contexts where it's easier to value music.
Because then I get more out of it.
I think we have this fantasy that a song's quality is independent from the quality of attention the listener gives it: If your song is good enough, it'll pierce through playlists like a ray of light through fog, and all those curators, mid-scroll through their queues of 37 songs, will suddenly hear yours and be taken up into states of wondrous rapture, like how Ralphie figured Ms. Shields would react to his Christmas essay.
Yeah, doesn't happen.
There are times when music hits you, no doubt. But almost always, they're the times when you've been softened up for the punch.
I went to Sequoia National Park when I was a kid, and we drove through that huge tree and walked through the old woods and everything, but I was 12 and the whole time I was just mad that we weren't at an amusement park. I got nothing from it. Now, when I think about sequoias, I almost want to cry. I showed my wife a song the kids at my church like while we were stuck in traffic, and all she said was, "I'm in the mood for Rhianna and this is way less cool." But a week later, she was dancing in the living room and that song came up again on a playlist and now she loves Forrest Frank.
A song's quality isn't only some static, purely objective thing². It's proportional to the quality of attention it's given by the listener.
So where am I going with this?
What a great question. I wish I'd thought of it earlier.
Honestly, I've got no idea. I think I'd initially planned to write about how to make your music stand out in the crowd with marketing, but now it's past 4pm and I've written myself into a rabbit hole and I really need to get some other things done before dinner.
So I'll try to wrap this up here:
1) We make music, as my friend Andreas says, for the bliss: the glimpse of pure, living emotion, the feeling that simultaneously frees us and connects us, the connection that gives us life and kills us all at once. Basically we make music to get lost in it. And yet...
2) We often listen to music in (and make music for) contexts in which its value is dulled. We don't get lost in the music; we lose the music.
3) There's some inevitability to this. That feeling of bliss, by its nature, can't be felt all the time. And also there's plenty of value in making music more accessible, even if more accessibility makes things cheaper.
4) But we should probably be proactive, as listeners of music, in finding contexts where we can pay proper attention to music. I'm not sure what this means, exactly, but I'll hazard a guess it probably involves more live music.
5) We should also, as makers of music, be conscious of the contexts into which we put our music. Streaming is a great way to get music heard by new people, but it's not always a great way to get music heard deeply. So you may want to think about making your music available in other contexts, as well (and again, I'm not sure what that looks like, but it probably involves more live music).
6) I'm not a good curator.
All right, that's it, I really do have to go. If you read this far – thanks. And if you're a good curator, thank you even more. It's hard work, but someone's gotta do it. I'm glad it's you.
– Jon
Jon Anderson
Founder @ Two Story Media
Surprisingly Bad @ Catching Chickens
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100% Human Guarantee
I wrote this, not AI.
Today's random photo: That building in the distance is a milk factory, believe it or not. I'm not sure I believe it, but that's what it says on the signs.
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P.S. – Last week's newsletter was about how I'm always running around like a bothered chicken. You can read it here.
¹Listening to 30 unrelated songs is a totally different experience from sitting and listening to a cohesive album or concert, btw. In the latter, the songs build upon and relate to each other, so that the whole listening experience is really just one unified experience, a journey with peaks and valleys. Curating 30 songs is basically 30 different experiences. I.e., it's a TikTok feed vs. a movie.
²I've written before that I think the quality of art is objective – and I still think that, in the sense that there are standards of Beauty that exist outside of the viewer. But I might modify my position now to say that the quality of art isn't objective or subjective but relational: There's a standard of beauty outside of and independent from the viewer, but the viewer also actively participates in revealing that beauty. It's not that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; it's that beauty is uncovered by the beholder. Idk, that's not as catchy, though.