LA producer Shlohmo has some ideas about the current scene that managers might not find too appealing. In a recent interview with Notion, when they got to talking about ways of acquiring music, Shlohmo basically encourages his fans to pirate his stuff.
I love illegal downloading! I fucking download everything for free. I don’t pay for anything. I will find a way to make money, download my music. My manager will fucking hate me for saying this, but for real, pirate shit. I don’t care. I do it.
And he didn’t stop there. He also had some very choice words for a lot of producers who spend all of their time promoting rather than producing.
Everybody is in it for the wrong reasons and there’s less and less people that are not. It’s really hard to find even musicians now that aren’t a suit. Every fucking musician nowadays is a suit. They’re on Soundcloud with their ties on, trying to advertise; paying for advertisements on Facebook, trying to get me to like their fucking page and download their EPs and shit. It’s rough and it’s hard to find new music like that.
I don’t completely disagree with Shlohmo, I can sort of see where he’s coming from. When a producer I’ve liked on Facebook is paying for sponsored ads about their upcoming singles and I’m getting bombarded by requests and alerts on social media, it can become a little overwhelming. Then again, artists like Skrillex who are big enough that their fanbase can do all the social promotion for them are on the whole other opposite side. It seems all too real that many small producers are forced to put an enormous amount of money into social media in order to get their presence noticed.
If not for social media, then an act of god might be necessary. I’ve seen, and tried to promote, producers with less than 500 likes and it’s difficult to see them at the same level for months despite a slew of releases. It’s all in the name of the game, and if the player has to play it, then don’t hate. For the time being, it seems that people like Shlohmo are going to be upset about the current state of affairs – it doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon.
Source: Notion
