How many times have you heard musicians or people who works in the musical field complaining about the fact that “they are not taken seriously” in their work? I work in this field since many years and now, after a long experience, I think that I have understood the reasons of this complaint: musicians and musical workers are not taking seriously their job; the fact that people does it too is only a consequence.
Always more frequently I find myself working in a very unprofessional background. When I talk about professionality I mean the attitude to work as best as you can, offering to your client your knowledge, your passion and your expertise. It could sound arrogant, but in my opinion, the most part of the musical world is dramatically lacking in professionality.
This situation is caused by the fact that in the collective unconscious the musical world is made up of lazy people, especially if we are talking about rock music. In this unconscious, there are some fake beliefs like the conviction that if you want to be a good musician you just have to be talented or that if you are a musical genius you have to be also somewhat laid-down and spoiled.
As the “classical” musical business world created in the 60’s and surviving until the 00’s, the one in which every problematic issue was managed by the label and musicians only had to play, is progressively dying, nowadays musicians have to be their own promoters, technicians, event managers.
To do successfully all of these things you have not only to be skilled but you also have to be able to stay humble and always learn new things to keep up with the times. There is who finds himself working as a musician, a sound technician, a promoter or every other profession of the musical field because he wants to reach the highest results with the minimum effort, who improvise because he’s not enough focused to reach a personal goal, who wants to make easy money with a low quality product and ends up fooling his clients and disrespecting music.
This unprofessional way of working in the musical field is so well established that even the listeners are unable to recognize a good quality product from a low quality one. This vicious circle only strengthens this habit to create shitty products, which are sold anyway, because there is not any motivation to raise quality standards.
For these reasons, we always chose very accurately our coworkers because we are working for a quality product and the only way to reach our standards is working with professionality.