[TeMPOraL]

Disagree. I'd even say creatives are late to the party. Almost all products and services are now driven by marketing, which has little correlation with quality.

[yesenadam]

At the risk of being downvoted again (and I don't know why; they didn't say. Maybe for finding something appalling and saying so?), I didn't understand any of those 3 sentences. (1. What do you disagree with? 2. Not sure what that means. It seems more to support what I was saying. ...They're not internet marketers but should be, should realize their 'essential' selves? 3. 'Almost all products and services' is again a very wide net, which it seems you're including all the output of the arts in. Depends what you mean 'driven'; and the 2nd half was I think what I said.)

Maybe it's mainly a different of perspective; mine is a musician/artist/writer perspective, I feel like I'm talking to people in marketing. (Who else would describe everything turning to internet marketing as a party, even metaphorically..)

[disclosure: musician/artist who's 100% failed at self-marketing]

[SyneRyder]

> Who else would describe everything turning to internet marketing as a party

I think you've misunderstood - "late to the party" is a common English phrase, where late is the more important word, not so much party. Imagine arriving when everyone else has already gone home. The meaning here is that promoting your work online was profitable a decade ago, but authors & musicians are only discovering that now, when it has stopped being profitable.

People here agree with you - we want quality music and quality art! But we also need to hear about it & be inspired enough to even try listening to it. A musician or author has to learn "marketing" to be able to build an audience (unless they just want to make music for themselves, and that's fine too).

Don't think of it as "marketing", think of it as trying to find & make 1,000 friends. A lot of the music I buy is because the singer is actually a friend or someone I could email with a question. Marketing can also be writing about how you make your music, or being creative in how you distribute it (like Nine Inch Nails mailing their CDs out in bags of dirt that were stuck in customs, that gets people talking about it).

All people are saying here is that writing is important (it's the product being sold!), but if a writer wants to be profitable, finding an audience who will buy it now takes much more work & effort & time than the writing itself. And that's why authors are now marketers first, writers second. A bad song that people have heard about is more likely to get bought than an excellent song no one has heard.

(And for what it's worth, it's the same for indie software developers - I only spend a small part of my time making the software, most of my time is spent on customer support & talking to customers, accounting & tax compliance, administration and marketing.)