What Are The Rules?

By Kevin Phillips

 You don’t need to follow the rules! To be clear, I’m not advocating for anarchy… most of our lives are dictated by fairly useful rules that exist both legally and socially… but when it comes to your art, there will always be people clambering to pile more “rules” upon you.

Most of the time, the folks offering their advice have good intentions, and there may be very real reasons for their “rules”, but you need to figure out what their reasons are, and decide if they actually apply to you.  

What matters at the root is your own intentions. Why do you do what you do?  For example: If you play a certain type of music because you love it, and your intention is to promote that type of music and play it to the best of your abilities, then your focus is only to make the most authentic version of that type of music.

Now imagine somebody else says, “Songs need to be three minutes or shorter”, but your songs are usually six minutes or more.  You need to consider the reason for their rule. If the reason for their song length restriction is that radio rarely plays songs that are longer, then that is a reasonable parameter if your goal is to easily get lots of play on pop radio.  If you can change your stuff to fit the new rule, and you are still proud of what you are doing, then by all means follow that “rule”…  but if making that change is upsetting to you… then don’t do it!  

Art is a weird thing to try to make a living with, because you are always going to be walking a line between your creativity and marketing. No matter what you do, there is an audience for it… but the more removed it is from the mainstream, the longer it will take to find that audience.   There are “rules” meant to help you conform to mainstream parameters… it’s up to you to decide which ones you will or won’t follow. 

Kevin Phillips is a member of Redhead Mack Band

Website: www.redheadmack.com/