CHRIS BESTWICK

"What's your business model?" asked the bloke I'd just been introduced to in the bar, when it came up in conversation that I was a musician. The question took me a little by surprise, not because I didn't have a ready answer, but because I felt it was perhaps the least interesting thing he could have asked me.

I politely answered that my model was to make my music as widely and freely available as possible, to engage with people through online and face-to-face conversations, a side-effect of which might be to interest them in me and my music, and to make it clear how people could pay for the music if they wanted to.

As I said, it seemed an uninteresting question to me, and I doubt it would have been the first question he'd have asked a painter or a poet, a writer or a photographer. I don't say it's an uninteresting question because it's unimportant; I just don't feel it's anywhere near central to what being a musician is.

And yet, to those of us who read music blogs, and who may have perhaps exchanged our email addresses for one of those fatuous music business advice emails that seem to have been written by Sybil Fawlty (specialist subject, the bleedin' obvious), it's easy to see how a non-musician might get the idea that a business model is the modern musician's raison d'ëtre.

It seems like we've removed one unnecessary layer from the process of making and releasing music, namely the record companies, but another unnecessary layer, consisting of some of the same people, has tried to insert itself back into the process; namely the "advisors". You know the ones I mean; the kind that recently wrote an email advising musicians to support their main projects by working as session musicians. (Session musicians. In 2009. Yeah, good luck with that!) Or the kind that claim umpteen thousand downloads of an e-book, which when you come to look at it is so badly written that it's barely readable.

Again, I'm not saying we don't need some idea of a business model if we want to make money, but the one I described to the bloke in the bar seems to cover it, and outlining and implementing it is, to use a horrible cliché, not only not rocket science, it's barely even domestic science.

(At this point in the interests of fairness I should say that not everyone in this advisory position is so obviously unnecessary and self-serving. There are some very good people offering musicians intelligent and useful advice, but the ratio of mentors to charlatans seems very small.)

The reason there's so much fatuous bumf about the business side of the music business is that these advisors are desperate to say something to justify their expert-positions, and it's hard to for non-musicians to give advice about the central part of being a musician - the creativity.

I think it's far more important to have a creative or artistic model than a business one. I don't say this in a negative or defeatist way, but it's simply not possible that everyone who makes music is going to be able to make a career from it, in financial terms. That's not the same as saying that we can't make music that enriches our own and other people's lives, which is surely the main reason for being a musician. (That and the chicks, obviously.)

When we sit under the apple tree on a late summer's day at a ripe old age, we're not going to bore our grandchildren with stories of our successful business models, are we? No; we're going to bore them by playing them some old music we're proud of :)

So if someone wants to publish a monthly email advising me to try to make the best music I can, music that touches, resonates and has meaning, I'll happily give you my email address!

OK, I'm going to get back to Last.fm, twitter, facebook, ReverbNation, myspace, iLike, imeem...

Chris