Let’s Invest in Great Art: Modern Kin’s Jeremiah Hayden

In the new year, I’m going to do my best to maintain a positive attitude about music. My relationship with music has degraded significantly over the last few years, a downward trend that likely lines up exactly with my begrudging interest in the modern music technologies that artists, labels and fans are required to keep up with to survive in the current age.

Last year I would have told you about how I feel music is becoming less meaningful as we sync it with everything we do. I would have told you that the robotic nature of a service like Pandora radio causes us to make little distinction between what is artful and what is lazy plagiarism. I would have said that our obsession with being “liked” rarely gives us anything more than a surface relationship with everything we take in, and that that degradation is why artists don’t create valuable music and why fans no longer value music; or that artists have lost their ability to communicate because the listeners have lost their ability to understand. I imagine that last year you could have overheard me talking about blogs and my belief that the lack of very knowledgeable gatekeepers in the music industry is why the music industry is dying.

But this is a new year and with a new year comes new thoughts and changes in perspective.

In the new age of music, artists are able to do so many things for themselves that were previously impossible without the help of a label or manager. The benefit of this is clear, but the difficulty comes when trying to manage time between honing the most important skills, and leaving alone the skills that are secondary.

As a musician, it’s easy to get caught up in the music industry and less in the music. This year I resolve to spend far more time in the latter while maintaining a healthy relationship with the former. The tools at our disposal are great for musicians. We can write a song and let our friends hear it in a matter of minutes and get paid for it right away if the stars are aligned. We have an instant platform for our friends and fans to respond to what we made and in this new year I hope that we as a music community would spend much less energy concerning ourselves with whether or not our friends “like” what we do and more of our time focused on what we craft in the first place. Are we content with it? Is it right and ready? Can we be proud of what we’ve made, regardless of how others receive it?

I think that music matters this year. I think it matters what we say and how we say it. It matters that we double check our work and give our friends something to sink their teeth into – but the onus is on us. The technology and the networking will keep on and so will the music if we put in the effort.

Let’s invest in great art this year.

Jeremiah is 1/3 of the Portland-based band Modern Kin, whose live-streamed album release “Hello, World” can be found on the Lively app. He also runs the independent label, Amigo/Amiga Records, and can grow a killer beard.