Sort by Price: The Value of Artistic Expression
An inability to assess the real value of something leaves us with no other recourse but to evaluate it against something more familiar. And in a world where speed is a virtue, the idea of stopping to smell the roses (long enough to assess value) sounds more like a cliché than a practical habit. Therefore, when you can’t ascertain the value of one thing over another, a race to the bottom where the lowest price wins ends up being the deciding factor.
One of the realities of freelancers is that we don’t scale, as only we can do the work that we do. Therefore, we must either trade a ton of time servicing lots of clients/customers, or we must work to obtain a smaller number of better clients/customers who have more income and a palette for the work we do. And the most tried and true way to cross this chasm has always been to market what you do for the smallest viable audience you can, as they’ll distribute all the heavy lifting among themselves to connect you to others that share their aesthetic. What’s great about this is that you don’t have to over commit both your time and resources to mass marketing strategies, as that would negate the idea of reaching the smallest viable audience. So once you determine who your audience is (i.e. people who share your beliefs), then you go all-in on talking to these people about what you do, and why they might care. Now I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight this one extra perspective, as I think it’s one that’s often overlooked.
When you think about the popularity of sports over the arts, it’s because there are a number of media outlets where practitioners of a sport have been allowed to control the narrative of their sport. And even if someone has never played a sport, they can still learn to interpret the game in a way that connects them in an authentic way to the tribes of people who actually play those sports, due to their understanding having been informed by credible sources. But when it comes to something like music, most people’s understanding of it is informed by people whose insights aren’t as well developed as that of a professional athlete giving commentary on the sport that they play. So when you compound the obscurity of this type of analysis towards music, coupled with the lack of exposure that people have to watching and hearing world-class musicians (which isn’t always synonymous with being world famous), there should be no wonder as to why there’s such a giant discrepancy between our collective imagination of what it even means to be a professional athlete versus a professional musician. So again, without the requisite understanding of what makes high level music what it is, why would the public have any other reason but to apply a sort-by-price metric to the music they choose to consume?
Suggested Takeaways…
a) It’s arguable that throughout the history of the world, all great civilizations have been weighed more by their artistic contributions as opposed to the strength of their military or GDP. So to increase the premium on our focus for high level forms of artistic expression could really shift the way we all connect to one another across cultural, political, and religious isles.
b) Developing a personal relationship with the smallest viable audience you can for your product and/or service, presupposes that that audience will tell others like themselves about you and what you do so that it gives them yet another reason to deepen their relationships to one another (i.e. tribalism).
c) If you don’t control your narrative, someone else will.