On principle I agree with this. Tracks made following a tick list of successful tropes with an eye on getting released are liable to be highly forgettable.
Having said that, as someone who tinkered a bit with production some twenty many years ago before lapsing, and tinkering and lapsing once again a couple of years ago, I would argue that some form of shared community outlet is essential in persisting and making something of greater merit.
I tend to think that the best music is emergent from real-life communities: people, time, place, culture, politics. That is, communities that have an aesthetic and reason for being that goes far beyond, say, craving new synths after watching youtube reviews.
Music that is not performed and shared, ever, is somehow stillborn. Fun and enjoyment come from the attribution of meaning, and to me, meaning ultimately comes from real human context. I feel that the lack of this killed my desire to keep making it and improving. It was just an expensive way of shouting into the void.
That being said it can also put pressure on you to the point where you also lose your joy due to stress.
I guess some middle ground can be found but as with everything that is easier said than done.
Still most of your time with music will be solitary. If you accept that, anything social is just a bonus.
> Music that is not performed and shared, ever, is somehow stillborn. Fun and enjoyment come from the attribution of meaning, and to me, meaning ultimately comes from real human context. I feel that the lack of this killed my desire to keep making it and improving. It was just an expensive way of shouting into the void.
Well you basically just proved my whole point here. You stopped making music because you weren't happy doing it alone. Learn to be totally content doing it alone, and you won't have this issue. It is possible, because I was stuck in your situation for a long time, and thought myself that music was pointless if not socially shared. I realise now that it just isn't true, and in fact that mindset puts huge pressure on yourself and indeed on the community around you. It is possible to enjoy making music without the need for social reinforcement.
Possibilities include: Playing in church (a huge portion of both amateur and commercial music is religious), entertaining oneself at home, jamming with friends, exploring and even performing esoteric music that can't be commercially viable. Even many otherwise successful professional musicians have noncommercial side projects that need volunteers. For instance if someone is willing to compose something new, or dig up something interesting and weird, I'm willing to chip in and help them try it out, just for the spirit of adventure. I'm satisfied to perform for just a small handful of people who share similar interests from the audience side.
It's not all that different than people who are into extreme sports, cooking, etc., without any expectations of ever being competitive at it.
However, I often think it's intended to mean "producing X so that other people can consume X, regardless of what results."
And I have frequently heard that it means "producing X so that other people can critique your work and tell you how to improve."
These interpretations seem to be at odds. I've had instructors in creative bootcamps tell me that the difference between the strugglers and the greats was that the greats released their work to the public, got critique on what to improve, and integrated that advice into their next work. In their minds, remaining solitary means you won't get that critique and will always lag behind someone who communicates with others to find better ideas and improve on their own.
So it really isn't as cut-and-dry as "screaming into the void is better", in terms of how I personally frame the distinction.
At an overarching level, my primary wish in life is to leave something in the world that serves as an artifact of what kind of person I was. Maybe this wish is at fault and I ought to get a better wish instead, or I'll be destroying my drive for creation at every turn. But in the present, this is how I honestly feel.
Put another way, if I were to write a thousand pages worth of novels over the course of my life, never releasing any of it, and just before I was about to kick the bucket I were to pour a bucket of gasoline on the entire pile of paper and burn it to ashes, I would probably feel the worst I'd ever felt about myself up to that point. I would have destroyed a significant product of my existence, and in a sense, destroyed a part of myself.
So maybe this way of thinking is flawed, and this clearly indicates that I am overly attached to my work, and perhaps to the idea of social acceptance as well. But this is why I cannot force myself to create if I know nobody is ever going to share a space with my work. Why would I be doing this if I was only going to keep all of it to myself?
And this doesn't even have much to do with the solitude that creating something necessitates - I am capable of weathering the darkest, loneliest storms alone, but only if I believe that there is someone at the end of the tunnel who would be able to see what came out of it all. Otherwise, the entire effort is nothing but toil with no sense of reward.
Yes, I'm saying you would be better off dropping that, and instead just engaging in pure creation without any dependencies.
> Why would I be doing this if I was only going to keep all of it to myself?
That's my whole point. You shouldn't need a reason beyond "fun" or "just because" or even "keeping the hands/ears busy".
People are unreliable, having reasons that depend on other people are unreliable. Letting go of that and having only reasons that depend on yourself is reliable.
> Otherwise, the entire effort is nothing but toil with no sense of reward.
Once again, it is entirely possible to just do it without any sense of reward. I know because I've developed this mindset, while I used to crave reward.
It's much like brain surgery. People assume you should start out treating people's illnesses and curing them, but the successful brain surgeons know that you should spend your early years just having fun and enjoy playing around inside people's skulls. It's such a rush the first time you probe someone's central gyrus and see their arms twich. Don't waste your time planning for "in network" glory and how to calculate billable hours, just power up that bonesaw and start shredding.