I remember a simpler time, when it was easy to identify the genre of the song streaming through my iPod. When a friend said they liked pop, I knew that meant Madonna and Michael Jackson. Classic rock meant Steve Miller Band or the Cars. In my small world, taste was polarized and listeners less likely to wander outside their listening genre to include other kinds of music. Jazzers were deep into jazz, classical was classical, singer-songwriter was pop and there was no such thing as EDM. 

Today, there are so many categories of music, even trained musicians out themselves accidentally labeling an artist with the wrong nuanced style. Wikipedia credits internet sharing and the ease and availability of technology for fusing bits of one style with another, resulting in a detailed landscape filled with terms like "contemporary", "nu", "revival", "alternative", and “post”. The beauty of this development these past few decades is that listeners and artists alike are exposed to an ever-widening palette of styles. What may have never harnessed the marketing budget of Warner in 1986 due to it being a bit fringe, now finds a home in the niche listener market, and with a bit of persistence and ingenuity on the part of the artist making it, a sustainable income.

Like it or not, the variety of music out there is endless, and it makes me wonder how important it is as artists to know where exactly we fit. The pursuit of being an artist is a kind of chicken and egg thing, whereas we may not know what our style is until we hear it, but we also are encouraged to find our sound before becoming it. 

I was recently talking with Michael Kaminsky, founder of KMGMT management, about his experiences grooming artists over the past 40 years. Artists he’s developed over the years have gone on to be some of the biggest household band names in the business, and I asked him how he has that kind of clairvoyance to scoop up talent early on when no one else can see his vision. 

Michael talked about looking for bands who carry something unique in their sound. If they’re just recreating what others have made before them, even if that sound is highly marketable, he’s not interested. “If you sound like Limp Bizkit, that’s really hard. Your job becomes to try to outmaneuver Limp Bizkit. That’s a losing game. You need to be different.”

If his job is to see what others don’t, how do we artists grow something within our music for others to see? 

Michael hits it at the core. To this he says “Even if your music is eclectic, there’s commonality to you as a person, as an artist, as an individual. You can’t help but have consistency in some parts of what you do and how you create as long as your music is an honest extension or reflection of that personhood.”

The style of music to which you belong may characterize your listening audience and the appropriate playlists, but how you appear to your listeners is what they connect with. They don’t listen to your music because it’s metal. They listen because they like your personality through the lens of the metal style. If you were making synth pop, they may not find you. But then again, if you were making synth pop, a very different personality than metal, you wouldn’t have found yourself either.

The music we make is a beautiful expression of who we are. Not all genres are so different that we don’t overlap. Sometimes our country and our pop and our rock blend a bit in our artistry. That’s an example of genre being less tied to our identity as a person and more tied to the personality traits that are similar between country, pop and rock. It’s where we are distinct within these intersections that make us essential in filling a small gap other artists can’t fill.

We may not all have managers to help us see what is unique about our music. But we do have some tools at our disposal towards a music career or strong hobby we enjoy. Michael describes the path to becoming a substantial music artist as “a battle of attrition over time.” This is to say that the slow rise is healthy growth, and artists who suddenly seem to take over the market will often fall as fast as they peak. Instead, let listeners into your story and your background, opening a channel for personal connection. Don’t abandon your sound after a year or two of receiving critical feedback or no feedback at all, but lean in and concentrate it further. Learn about your strengths and get clear about your weaknesses. Build a team around you to support the areas of your musicality and your marketing that stall progress. And above all, get clear on your vision for your music. From that vision, intention and the steps to getting where you want your music to go, will grow.

Stay Creative,