The No Consistency Rule

Web forums are full of posts by people looking for answers to life's persistent questions about forming and running bands, and equally full of answers to those questions posited by people with more or less knowledge or experience. But if you read a bunch of them, it quickly becomes apparent that there is nowhere near a consensus on . . . well . . . anything. People have been forming rock bands and playing music in them for over fifty years at this point---you'd think by now Darwinism would have raised certain practices and procedures to prominence and stomped out other non-productive approaches. But there's almost no question you can ask that won't get at least two and maybe more contradictory answers, each backed up with anecdotal evidence establishing that it works.

When confronted with that kind of inconsistent advice, it is important to keep in mind a characteristic of the music world/industry/community. I had long had the idea drifting around sort of unformed in my head but musician Eugene Chadbourne, in his book I Hate the Man Who Runs This Bar, put it into words most succinctly: he calls it the No Consistency Rule.

The way the No Consistency Rule works is this: in the world of performing and recording music, there is an exception to EVERYTHING. You want to be a star? Pick just about any example of a route to stardom you can think of, and no matter how good it looks, I assure you there is somebody out there who achieved equal or greater success by doing things completely differently. Study diligently how to make a great recording, what equipment to use, how to use it, etc., and once you know (you think) what you need, some clown will point to a better record made using other equipment and other recording techniques---indeed, probably the "wrong" equipment and the "wrong" methods. No matter what you may want to do, somebody has failed at it using the "best" methods, and somebody has succeeded wildly using "bad" methods. There is NO CONSISTENCY. No one way/approach/piece of gear/strategy works for everybody, and what works for others may not work for you, and what works for you may not work for them.

This phenomenon, coupled with a lack of really good statistical data about the music business, especially at its lower levels where most of us toil, has several effects. Most obviously, it fuels pages and pages of internet maunderings in which zealots argue about the right way to [whatever]. It also can facilitate laziness on the part of musicians, because whenever the most likely path to success presents annoying and tedious work, they can cite somebody who achieved success by some other path, which does not require said annoying tedious work. E.g.: "Why should we pay for recording and play gigs? [Joe Schmoe] recorded his album on Garage Band in his bedroom and just posted it on his MySpace site and he became a big star." This type of reasoning tends to ignore the myriad substantive differences between the speaker and Joe Schmoe, first of all, but also ignores the numbers game aspect of things. The existence of one person who got successful through approach X means only that approach X worked for ONE PERSON. Could it also work for you? Not impossible. But is it likely? Probably not. Is following that approach the most productive use of your time and energy? Again, probably not.

So, as you seek information and knowledge about the music business, never forget the No Consistency Rule. There will always be somebody who did things a different way and succeeded. There will always be somebody who did everything the "right" way and failed.

There's lots of luck involved in doing well in music---even if you're not trying to become a pop star, which is very much about being in the right place at the right time, luck will still affect you: did you just happen to post an ad for a bass player at the very time that a great bass player found himself between bands? Did you just happen to call the booking guy from a top club right after somebody canceled on him? So the best thing you can do is get all your ducks in a row and be ready so that if/when opportunity knocks, you can open the door and invite it in. So when you're trying to figure out what to do, don't ask, "What did my favorite star do?" It is entirely possible that whatever worked for your favorite star would only work for him or her---that he/she is the one person in a billion who could have done it that way. Rather, figure out what course is the most likely to position you for success. It may not be as exciting and it may require more work, but the only thing worse than never getting a break is getting the break but not being able to follow through on it.