The dangers of being fungible
Why is being fungible so dangerous?
The problem is that if we are interchangeable with our competitors in the minds of our potential customers there is always a default criteria used when choosing who to hire: price point.
This is not just true of hiring musicians or artists. Humans default to price point when buying anything when there is no other discernible difference.
And once price point is the deciding factor in a customer’s eyes it is a race to the bottom.
Getting outbid in an ever descending bidding process is demoralizing but sometimes not as bad as actually winning. We then have to make our art for far less than what we think it is worth.
The only protection from entering into one of these bidding wars is to not be fungible, to be unique. Then if they want the art that you produce they only one place to get it: you.
So double down on whatever it is that makes you you.
“You are not fungible, Drew, because you are one of a kind and that’s exactly the opposite, the antonym, of fungible.
Fungible means when you can replace one thing with another. The classic example is a nail. If I have a nail and it falls on the ground, you may give me a nail and it’s just like the other nail. It’s fungible.
Now I’m not going to go so far as to say that musicians are fungible. But in jazz, as in classical, you really have to go a long way to persuade me why your Emperor Concerto, why your version of A Night in Tunisia is much greater than another person’s. And that’s musician to musician.
To the general public, sad but true, we are fungible. So you have to differentiate yourself.””