Consider how today, we tend to speak of well-known vocalists as “artists,” rather than simply calling them “singers,” as we once did.  Is this because the folks we hear on the radio are today geuninely more artistic than their forebears?  

Let’s be frank:  this use of “artist” has entered the popular vocabulary mainly as a kind of euphemism for other things we’re not particularly comfortable talking about.

From a purely utilitarian marketing perspective, a recording “artist” is simply a brand. Although nobody wants to call singers that (it would sound too crass), they serve the same function of focusing attention amid a bewildering array of consumer choices that brands of clothing or food products or cars do.  

Just as there are lots of people making socks out there, there are also lots of people singing songs—but only a few of them fill a particular demand niche with a distinctive enough image or “personality” to resonate among one more market segments with the power of full-on, viable brands.

A memorable musical persona can’t be just manufactured out of thin air, however.  To have street cred in today’s music business, singers need to have written at least one or two successful songs on their own before they can be taken seriously.  (After that, it’s fine for them to devote the rest of their careers to performing works written by other people.)

Now, from a purely logical and practical standpoint, this entry requirement is nearly as strange as it would be to require actors to write their own lines.  It’s perfectly possible to be good at one craft but not the other, and the two skills aren’t necessarily (or even often) found together in the same person.  It’s also an entirely recent development.  Did anybody expect Sinatra to have written his own stuff?  Why do we demand it now?

Well, for one thing, these days we yearn for compelling musical personas, who do more  than just sound nice.  Think voices crying out in the wilderness.  People today want singers who can not only speak to them, but speak for them, in the dwarfing vastness of our contemporary world.  They want larger-than-life proxies for their emotions.  

They’re also not content to feel just a silent, private connection with certain musicians. They want to put it out there for other people to take note of—on their T shirts, on their radios, everywhere. It’s become a modern ritual of getting to know someone to ask them about their favorite recording artists or bands, and tell them yours.  If you’re both into the same musicians, you tend to perceive a significant connection with each other. 

In this manner, the person whose music you listen to most can also become your identity proxy.  And just as nobody wants their voice to be weak, few people are interested in adopting an alter ego who nobody else has heard of.  What we demand more than anything else of our identity proxies is that they be highly visible—that they be noticed, rather than overlooked, the way the majority of us are in this era of Feeling Small and Insignificant.

Unfortunately, these current ways of coping with such cravings only fuel the prevailing culture of gigantism that made us feel inconsequential in the first place.  

Tsunamis of people flood into stadium concerts, where they and everyone else around them look like the tiniest of ants—as would the performers, if it weren’t for the omnipresent jumbo screens.  Meanwhile, live music performed in more human-scaled venues has become nearly as rare and quaint as playing the musical saw.  In these circumstances, reasonable hopes of making a living from music—or even a significant income supplement—fade ever farther from view for almost all musicians, even highly talented and skilled ones.