The dilemma of an indie artist

As if things aren't hard enough for the indies already. We gotta post an endless amount of music every month to keep people drawn in due to the market being flooded with mediocre music. The majority of us have to do all of our own promo, find shows, network... the whole 9. Most of what i named off  are things we all should be doing anyways, whether we have managers, promo/street teams or not.

But what makes it all just a bit harder and at times extremely deflating is when you have vultures in the mist..... you know... the promo teams all over twitter with the "if ur serious about your music career" messages, or the "i can get your song to 64,000 dj's" messages... or even better the internet radio stations that act like they are in love with your music, tell you to click a link and sign up for an interview, come to find out...there's a fee for the interview!

Then you have these artists that aren't in the big leagues just yet.... but bigger then most of the indies in the crab bucket. They want money for web services that they can't even prove to be effective.... and have the nerve to talk bad about indies who don't jump on board. You see them out there... they talk shit about the indies.. "if ur too cheap to pay this or that to further ur career as an artist...blah blah" ive heard and read tons of posts that start out just like that..lol. The thing is, there are way too many snakes in the game right now.

 A lot of these sites that give opportunities for top ranking artists have stat sheets that can be tweaked. You pay some person to give you 20,000 facebook likes or a million friends on myspace, or a billion twitter followers and your rank shoots thru the roof. Why work hard for followers like i do when you can just pay for them...smh.

This is a small portion of the dilemma we face as an indie artist. Not all of us are drug dealing trap rappers like what they want you to believe. We may very well have kicked out thousands of dollars to get an album recorded,  mixed, and mastered that we saved up from a hard job workin over 40 hrs a week. Not all of us have the ability to pass out hundreds of cds because we live in a smaller city, so it costs more because we have to travel just to get our music out there. The last thing we need is a bunch of snakes taking money from people that are trying by all means to live out their dreams. They prey on the hungry artists... because established artists already know the ins and outs, who to deal with, and the best route to take.

Spend your money wisely, make good music, and do as much as you can by yourself. You can pay for it... or you can hold your head up high knowing that you earned the support and fans from doing things the honest way. Quite often what you pay for...will be to learn a lesson on who to trust. Spend your money wisely, make sure you get what you are paying for when it comes to radio play, website showcase packages.... you name it. PEACE!!