Craig Bickhardt – HuffPost 7.11.14
Mike Ragogna: What is your advice for new artists?
Craig Bickhardt: I think there’s a real interest in acoustic singer-songwriters. For me, I can only speak about that. But it’s due in part to a rejection that the public has to the limited choices that audiences have found in the mainstream. I hear things all the time like, “It’s great to hear people who can really sing and play their instruments again.” We would never have heard that in the sixties or seventies. Pretty much everyone who was playing live could play live. Now we have people singing and dancing to recorded tracks and auto tuning and all that stuff. People are dancing and singing but they don’t play an instrument. They’ve never written a song or maybe they’ve written a lyric but they’ve never composed anything. I think getting back to that thing where it’s just you and your instrument and the song. That’s what I would say has a big future. Nobody’s getting rich off this anymore — well, most people aren’t, there are a handful of people now — but there’s potential for reasonable blue collar wage if you have genuine talent and if you work hard. The performing musician’s pay has been stagnant for a long time but it’s possible for a young singer-songwriter to make a day’s wage or a weekend’s wage playing a couple of nights now that’s somewhat sustainable because they can sell CDs and they have other merchandise and it’s not expensive to create that stuff. This is not necessarily full-time sustainable for a lot of young artists but there’s a decent amount of support from the audiences I think, at least the ones that I play for. Younger artists, younger singer-songwriters might only break even when they’re first building a following because it’s really tough but the cream eventually rises. I think, at least with most people I talk to, there’s no doubt in their minds that there’s a glut in the sheer number of musicians out there, but the consumer will do the weeding. They’ll find the good stuff. If I were a young artist these days, I would focus on the skill of playing and singing and writing a song with yourself. You can tour, you can perform alone, the market will sustain that kind of money, you can make five or six hundred dollars a night playing some of those places and that’s a little bit more of a realistic goal for the musicians these days rather than the model of selling a million downloads or whatever.
MR: What advice would you give to Craig Bickhardt circa Wire & Wood?
CB: The only thing that I would really tell myself at that age is to stick with it, don’t let the negativity and the rejection put you down. You’ve got to be able to build on the rejection and the negativity. I think there’s a tendency for a lot of young artists to become very discouraged just by the sheer amount of rejection, especially now, I think it’s worse than ever. There are so many people trying to do this, the labels have gotten smaller and smaller, they’ve signed less and less artists and you’ve got to be a bigger and bigger artist through American Idol or what have you to be signed, so you’ve got to be able to cope with that kind of rejection or set your sights on smaller goals. I think the main message for myself at a younger age would be, “Don’t be discouraged, don’t give up, don’t quit.” You’ve got to believe in it. You’ve got to almost take a do or die attitude. That’s the way it was with me. Had I known forty years ago how hard it was going to be I still would’ve done it. If you can feel that way at any age, then you’re doing the right thing.