Cognitive Dissonance Between Capitalism and Creation

Ask yourself, how are you going to make your band feel more human? How are you going to continue to refuse to invest in AI?

2026 is in the second quarter, and no one knows whether it is more important to learn the inversions of a G chord or whether we should be managing all our documents in the G Drive. To be creative in today’s economy also means having a healthy knowledge of sales and digital marketing skills for your own brand, but what about the heart of the art?

I believe we all are experiencing a collective burn out between the expectations of platforms ( ie posting over 4x a day on Tik Tok, daily on Instagram, etc etc), while also trying to manage writing music of our own that we pour our souls into, and also trying to schedule shows that we hope people attend via the promotional advertisements of social media ( which also feel like talking to the void). I don’t want to expand more about the topic of burnout ( quite literally, you can Google musicians and burnout and find decades of articles on the topic), but I would rather talk more about the solution. What do I think the solution is? We decolonize and disempower the platforms. But how do we do it?

Musicians and listeners base value on things like follower/stream counts, but dismiss live and community-driven experiences. We overinvest in photography instead of the art of our music for the sake of a brand, but what is the return on investment? Enough time has passed to acknowledge the following.

1. Social media helps, but it is not the gospel.

2. Social media followers do not always correlate to in-person ticket sales.

3. The photos you post do not guarantee streams.

So why stress over engagement when your engagement is not leading to conversion? You are left to detach.

1. Detach from the idea that your social media metrics are the determinant of your goals and outcomes.

2. Detach from letting the comments impact your time to write music.

3. Set healthy schedules and boundaries between working on your music and getting on a screen.

I am a believer that to be anti-capitalist in a capitalist society means driving less of your time into billionaire products and more of your time into promoting yourself with a message of community, connection, and not comparison and isolation. How we approach community can be done through billionaire products, but it should not be the focus, for if it is, we only continue the status quo of allowing the rich to get richer. Musicians don’t need to monetize meet and greet at concerts. Musicians are storytellers who help others feel connected through human experiences through prose and arrangements, not “digital slop.”

Ask yourself, how are you going to make your band feel more human? How are you going to continue to refuse to invest in AI? How are you going to say thank you to the people who found you from a billionaire’s platform? Will you write letters to those who support you? Will you write emails? Or will you base your music career on the approval of brands that fund the war(i.e., Live Nation) or the people who empower you? Keep creating, my friends.

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Written by Brian Walker - A Day Without Love

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35mm photo by Filip