How to Be Artistically Competitive: Part 1

Competing sucks. Let’s just get that out there. I don’t like competition, but it is necessary to what we do. Just don’t try to convince me that you actually enjoy competing. If you try to convince me of that, I’ll call you a liar. And I’d be right.

I’d be right because nobody likes to compete against others. Even the most competitive people in the world (likely, highly driven and conditioned athletes), if given the choice, would rather compete against themselves than compete against other athletes. In fact, if you ask around, most of them will talk about competition in self-reflective terms. They’ll speak from the perspective of self-improvement. Why? Because competing against other people is never a real competition. It can’t be. You are you and not them, and therefore there are no absolutes from which you can draw perfect conclusions. Because of that, you are left competing against unknowns. Essentially, you are fishing in the dark.

It is far more effective to compete against one’s self than it ever is to compete against someone else. If you compete against yourself, you can draw plenty of conclusions because you are your own nemesis. You know your own strengths and weaknesses. You know your tendencies and you know your vulnerabilities. You know, from harsh personal experience, where your secret kill-shot zone is—and only you know about it. All of the doors and windows are open and you can clearly see what needs to be made better in the practice and rehearsal of your craft. With only yourself as your competitor, it’s easy to pin-point the action steps toward improving before you compete again.

A Running Start

At the beginning stages of a creative career, you are at a disadvantage because you are up against a bunch of other beginners. As a veteran, you don’t have that problem. Sure, you have competitors, but the field narrows greatly the longer you play the game. In the beginning stages, you are forced to do battle against hordes of other beginners. I use the term horde, because it fits: Legions of unruly, unseasoned, and untested dreamers all angrily (and in an unorganized fashion) surging forth toward available projects or customers like a dark army of goblin warriors. There aren’t many people vying for jobs at the A-list level, but many folks are banging on the doors of the A-list hideout. There are even more people than that scratching and clawing to get meetings with managers agents and lawyers whom they believe can help break them into the B-list level. More C-listers than D-listers, and so on. So, if you use my business of film music as the example, the number of people targeting that $5,000 indie film is actually greater than the number shooting for the multiple million-dollar blockbuster. Tentpole studio features is a higher-stakes game, but it’s a table that has fewer players… especially considering that many of the filmmakers who work at that level already have their composer.

The truth to all this is that there are factors of competition that are determinable, and then there are factors that aren’t. Said another way, there are a few things you can control… and a ton of shit you can’t. Since the topic of competition is deep and wide, I’m going to break this up into parts. The first part I think we should discuss is the things that you have little or no control of. Then we’ll bring it all together by observing the things you do have control over, and how you can sharpen those things to be as competitive as you can be in your particular field.

Non-Determining Factors of Competition

Palatability

Whether your art (music, painting, acting, directing, songwriting, fashion design, sculpture, etc.) is artistically palatable to the masses or not is impossible for you to determine. You’ll simply never know until you release it into the wild. Some people try to come to a conclusion on this using tactics that are better saved for physical shippable products in the retail chain, but those devices cannot predict how people are going to react to art in terms of taste and/or appreciation. That’s just not possible because the appreciation of art is completely subjective. It cannot be measured, and therefore, it cannot be computed through market research.

People’s opinions and tastes are informed by a number of outside influences, all of which you have zero say in. People base their “taste” choices on emotion. You can’t control other people’s emotions. When Bruce Springsteen releases a record, if people don’t dig it, he loses a little of what makes him “Bruce Springsteen”. He might make it back up on the next release. He might turn it around on tour and make people forget about that “one little slip up”. He might do something amazing to take people’s focus off of it and fix it on something else. But he can never go back in time and fix that moment, when all the stars aligned against him, and people thought that “one record he had really sucked the big one.” That he can’t fix. He just has to move on, and keep doing what he thinks the next right move might be.

In an artistic career, all you can do is all you can do, and all you can do has to be good enough. You cannot control what people are going to like anymore than you can control what they are going to hate. Great art, unfortunately, is as much about timing as it is about the actual expression. If you look back in history, the “greatest artists” are debatable. What’s not debatable is that their art happened to hit at a time when their audience was absolutely ready to receive it. Not a moment too soon, and not a moment too late. If Nirvana would have released Nevermind only one year earlier — about the time Bon Jovi were wrapping up their “New Jersey” World Tour — Kurt and the boys would have been screwed. But when the album came out, people had grown pretty tired of slickly produced hairband rock n’ roll, and that raw, raged-induced, unproduced sound coming out of Seattle was the perfect antidote.

Viability

The same concept goes for what is going to sell. You cannot control what happens to be going on in the economy of which you make your living. Customers that you might have had under better economic circumstances might come around when times are looking up for them, but you’ll never get back “the one that got away”. It’s gone. There’s nothing you can do about patrons not having money or studios not having budget. Those things are either a result of financial mismanagement (which you also have no control over) or the economic realities of the time. What it really boils down to is what people decide to “value”. In the simplest of terms, if your art is more valuable to them than water, sugar, or flour, then guess who gets the sale? You do.

People make their “value” choices based on a number of outside variables, none of which you have any control over. Some of those variables include (but aren’t limited to) their friends’ choices, scarcity, price, geographical limitations, socio-economic restrictions, and so on and so forth. You have to come to an understanding that no matter how great your stuff is, if people can’t afford it, they aren’t going to buy it.

How does this all play into your art? Well, you have to define that for yourself. If you charge an exorbitant amount for what you do, it better be damned-well worth it.On the other hand, if you aren’t charging enough, people could react emotionally to that as well and perceive you as someone of plebeian value. Believe me, better people than you have ruined their careers by not charging enough for their work.

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So, what IS the answer, then?

Well, we can’t talk about that until we talk about what you can control and what you can master.

We’ll save that for next time…

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