Why Your Music is Worthless

That’s definitely a harsh headline, but it’s the title of an article from Indelicates that actually seeks to help musicians sell their music.

As a rule, I hate other bands.

Quite seriously.

It happens less often these days, but when people interview you because you’re in a band they always want to talk about other bands – what have I been listening to? what new bands are good? what’s your album of the year? I never know what to say because I hate other bands, new ones especially. My album of the year is always whichever album I have made that year and I haven’t been listening to anything except podcasts from America where one of them has a boring name and sounds like Randy Newman and the other one has a name like Grussbaum Snuzzibatch and sounds like a more sincere Chandler off Friends.

I hate other bands. If I liked other bands, I wouldn’t have had to form a band in the first place. That’s why you form a band – because all these other bands just don’t cut it and if no one else is going to make the records that need making it’ll just have to be you.

Music journalists don’t understand that about bands – they think bands share an interest with them. But we don’t. We hate other bands. We wish other bands would fuck right off.

It might seem odd then, that I’m writing this with the intention of helping other bands. I don’t know why I feel that I need to do this. What I ought to do is learn as much as I can about how to survive in music and then keep it all a secret until I’m about to die and then pull a Willy Wonka on whichever local poor child manages to circumnavigate my ingenious recording studio full of moral hazards.

But no. Instead I’m going to try and write some of it down now.

If I wasn’t a walking contradiction, I wouldn’t have formed a band.

I think it’s because, despite hating other bands (especially other bands that people who I know like my band say they like on the internet – those bands are the worst), I hate more the idea that being in a band is something for special people.

Keep reading. It gets better.