The 4D Songwriter — How To Dominate The New Music Industry
having completed this book, i can now safely say it’s a self-help book for musicians + reinforcements of things you’ve considered if you’re a creative type, especially about promotion. simple summary: if you consider yourself a musician, you’re not, you’re more than that. the way you get your music into every pair of ears it should reach is by focusing on 4 dimensions:
Music >
Personality > Story, Motivation, Connection
Branding >
Lifestyle >
for something that just fills the gaps, art is incredibly powerful.
in 2009, after the first year of college was complete, i spent 1.5 months of my first summer vacation in a new city in a new country, a time i should’ve been spending with all my friends returning from different parts of the world sharing stories of our first year as near-independent near-adults in college. i didn’t realise this back then, but the isolation broke me. i can draw a few key lines back to those 1.5 months. that’s when i can say my social anxiety solidified: the world will do just fine without me; everyone can have a good time without me. sadness really us everywhere. you can’t seek help from others because you will need to be able to solve your problems independently when you’re predictably left all alone. my grades in the one year before that summer and the three years after it tell two different stories: the first of a decent student bordering on becoming a good one, the second of a burnout. it’s also when i started to write: to let out the poison that was building up inside of me, to feel like at the very least i had some community, at the very least, i was communicating with somebody.
it’s nice to hear your ideas repeated by someone else. there’s far more supply of music than there’s demand for it. there is demand for other stuff, though, but not enough supply. you have to sell what people want to buy. man, marketing is everywhere. i make the mistake of assuming music is as important to everyone else as it is to me. i also make the mistake of assuming music is the most important thing on earth to me. it really isn’t. it’s just one of the things that’s important to me. one of the many many many things.
i think this is entirely fair: if you want people to understand you, you must speak as if you were talking to fifth graders.
i remember spending so much of that summer sad about my old friends meeting without me around, a blow doubled by having been abandoned by my friend circle from college for what i continue to perceive to be no fault of mine, i remember spending the whole summer attempting to master every guitar part on ...and justice for all, the album, on my squier stratocaster, god i must’ve annoyed my folks. i don’t know why i picked that album to master, maybe it represented one of my favourite albums from when i was younger and times were simpler (than when i was 18, mind you). i remember getting a lot of comfort from the music of the cure.
the most painful thing for me to figure out is self-promotion. i know there’s an audience for my music out there, but it feels. so. weird. reaching. out. i feel so much more comfortable presenting myself as akhil srivatsan, e-commerce professional, than akhil srivatsan, writer of interesting pieces on the music he loves. or akhil srivatsan, maker of music he loves. or akhil srivatsan, writer of novel. i don’t know why. or maybe i do. a horrible consequence of the stratification of indian society on arbitrary nonsense is that the arts are forever condemned to a lower stratum than engineering, the sciences, and business. i have inherited this view. it probably contributes to my tendency towards self-loathing. this self-loathing probably contributes to my inability to post anything meaningful on social media, because i keep thinking: why would anyone give two poopies what i think.
wise words: “most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten.” by william h. gates jr.
