Doing the hard yards
Overnight success stories often face into significant cynicism - could we see this cynicism bleed into the workplace?
In Pavement’s 1994 single ‘Range Life’, Stephen Malkmus sings:
After the glow, the scene, the stage
The sad talk becomes slow but there's one thing I'll never forget
Hey, you gotta pay your dues before you pay the rent
A defining feature of 90s guitar music was that bands and artists were expected to put in the hard yards before achieving any fame. Singles on independent labels, low-budget tours playing to handfuls of people, sleeping in the van, etc.
This rite of passage lent a comforting narrative to bands who did hit the mainstream. These guys (and the bands who “earned it” tended to be male) could have their cake and eat it: popularity and indie credibility.
Bands and artists who didn’t pay their dues, who appeared fully formed in the mainstream, carried a whiff of being “manufactured” by the major label machine. In Range Life, Malkmus mentions Stone Temple Pilots, who were accused of being grunge bandwagon jumpers (the shame!). In the Britpop scene, Menswear appeared on Top of the Pops despite not having released any music (the horror!). The NME would cop regular flak for putting bands like Gay Dad or Tetra Splendour on the front cover, with accusations of major labels wielding undue influence in attempting to accelerate their artists’ rise to fame (won’t someone think of the children!).
The music industry is entirely unrecognisable from those times, but still, accusations of shady insider plots pushing particular artists to the top accompany breakthrough hit songs. These days, the language that surrounds these musicians is that they are “industry plants”. Notably, this kind of language is most often applied to female musicians (sexism is still alive and well in the music industry) whose fame takes people on Twitter by surprise. Chappell Roan and Gracie Abrams are just two of the names that have been on the receiving end of such accusations this year.
The narrative seems to be: “I have not heard of [insert new artist] before; how did they get so big so quickly? It must be shady record company antics”. Ryan Broderick in Garbage Day is excellent on this topic, highlighting how the death of a monoculture (in this instance, the music press) combines with a burgeoning desire among young people to bring back “niche coolness” (like the 90s alternative underground scene) to create a world where fame is somehow unacceptable if you’re not perceived to have done the hard yards.
This narrative suggests that all record companies have to do is chuck money at Spotify to get their artists featured on influential playlists and that, therefore, success is somehow pre-ordained.
It adds up to a sense that, as
highlights in , being famous online (particularly on TikTok) isn’t the same as achieving ‘real’ fame. Getting TikTok famous is about luck, not hard work - REAL artists pay their dues in public before paying their rent (completely ignoring that TikTok culture is popular culture).This narrative conveniently ignores the fact that building up online fandoms and using platforms like Spotify and TikTok are the only ways to make it as a musician in the 2020s. This is the pathway - Twitter and the music press don’t break artists anymore; the old gatekeepers of the music industry have no clout. There’s no other way to pay your dues; it’s not the artists’ fault if you’ve not been privy to their journey so far.
And if it really was that easy for record labels to throw money at their artists and “plant” them into the charts, they’d all be doing it with much more regularity. The truth is, only a vanishingly small number of musicians can any kind of mass popularity. As The Pudding highlights in one of their excellent data visualisations, the odds of “making it” as a musician are tiny.
And while musical fame may seem random, like winning a lottery, we tend to overlook that those few artists who do break through are already part of a tiny elite. It’s hard to be a professional musician, requiring years of dedication to your craft. It’s not that different from elite sportspeople putting in the hard yards to get to the point where they sign for a Premier League club or an NBA team. Being a professional musician or songwriter requires the same level of application. But you very rarely hear of any sportspeople on the end of accusations of being “plants” or “sell-outs” or “manufactured”.
In the world of advertising and communications, you do sometimes see this kind of cynicism. In my experience, it’s generally reserved for people who appear to have been promoted quickly and fast-tracked to a particular level or role. Plenty of agencies and businesses place importance on being at a level for a particular length of time in order to earn a promotion.
We like to see people do the hard yards and earn those steps up the ladder. It’s a rite of passage in many ways - putting together monitoring, research reports and handling community management (or whatever you did as a junior). It’s also arguable that doing the less glamorous but still vital tasks provides a firm grounding in the fundamentals, helping build an understanding of the comms landscape.
But it’s undisputable that many of these tasks are boring and repetitive, like learning musical scales. Many agencies and companies are looking at automating those tedious and repetitive tasks with the help of GenAI tools. We all know the sell of this process of automation—freeing up time for our junior people to focus on more valuable and rewarding tasks.
But it does beg the question - are they missing out by not doing the hard yards? Monitoring may be dull, but it’s often a vital source of information for big businesses. Knowing what the media covers and what generates social conversation is a valuable skill. By automating chunks of the process, we need to consider whether there’s an inherent risk in not building this kind of muscle memory among junior staff.
There’s also a risk with this kind of conversation that we (and I very much include myself) come across as decidedly out of touch. “Back in my day, we used to have physically mount coverage into books, didn’t do me any harm”, etc. Technology improves, we adapt it to our workflows, it makes our lives easier, and we don’t think about it. GenAI is simply an extension of Microsoft Office, Google and Photoshop. Eventually, it will lose its novelty and become just another piece of software we don’t even notice.
And right now, the automation of workflows like media monitoring requires so much human oversight that there’s zero risk of anyone completely outsourcing the task to a machine.
However, just as today’s musicians face the same cyclical criticisms that indie/alternative bands faced in the 90s, so senior folks in the comms world should prepare for discussions around “paying your dues”. Yes, it might not be fair that the new trainee intake doesn’t have to do the same six weeks of trawling MySpace to find creators willing to try out a new dancing MP3 player I did in 2008, but that doesn’t make their experience any less valid. Learning your craft can take many forms - if we can make it more interesting and exciting, perhaps we can convert even more people into our future breakout stars.