Don’t compare yourself, it’s a stairway to despair.

Posted in Music

I am not going to name names, hate naming names. But this week I’ve been working with two new unsigned band blogs and I advertised on my twitter about people who would like to write for an unsigned music blog, you can see the tweet down below:

This had such an amazing reception from bloggers and musicians and I’ve been near flooded with emails and direct messages which is also great, but I’ve come across one thing when I was advertising these volunteer positions.

I’m not picking on anyone in this blog, so any reference to anything is not directed at anyone, let me clear that up. When I look at bands I think “They look good, I wonder what they sound like”, my first thought isn’t, who they sound like. I don’t care who they sound like, that’s not what I’ve wanted to listen to them.

I’ll be honest, if you’re going to compare your band to someone like Lostprophets and you sound like a cheap knock off of Coldplay, I’m going to be incredibly disappointed in what you’ve come out with and probably not listen to you again, or even bother recommending you to a friend. That is just the way it is.

I want to know what happened to good old fashioned, myspace style pinning yourself into a genre, that was good, band profiles had to sit there and they had three genres to pick from, I met so many bands using that feature, tons of unsigned a few of which are huge popular bands now, I won’t name names but I grew up listening to a few of those “before they were famous” bands!

Myspace was the key to a bands success.

This is why I miss Myspace, I miss it. I really do. I’m going slightly off topic here, but the topic still stands, Myspace made you pick these genres, it defines you, it gave you an immediate fan base of people who would like your music, who would become your fans and people who would pass you on to your friends – that’s how bands were made, if Lily Allen had started now she would have compared herself to popular bands I don’t think she would have got as far as she did, Myspace is the band maker, a better band maker than Simon Cowell.

To do a quick sum up of this terribly put together piece of writing, everyone wants to sound like someone, everyone wants to look like someone and everyone wants to be someone, but it’s the person who makes their own way, it’s the people that say we’re new we’re cool listen to us, much like Jack Kerouac did when he wrote his book “On the Road” on when Nirvana and their front man Kurt Cobain coined their first song, the non-conformist, the difference.

The people that really stand out are the people that stand up, the people that step forward and the people that look, feel, sound and act different, that’s who you want to be.

Keep going guys!
MattDSGNS.