‘My goal is for the up and coming artists to get a taste of a pressure free environment , where musicians can relax without time or money constraints and really focus on the music. It’s all about the music. Something I want to get through to younger musicians too. Leave your f*cking ego at the door and do what’s best for the music’ Mike Hyland believes that the music industry consists of too many pressures which restrict artists from producing the good music we seldom hear nowadays.
‘To be a successful musician, artist, music label – you need money, influence and respect. That’s the nature of this industry. Respect is relative to genre I suppose but there are enough people to reach if you have all of the above.’
‘In South Africa it’s pretty impossible unless you want to do bad Afrikaans music, kwaito, sell out to KFC or immigrate overseas, of which I choose none. So that leaves me pretty f*cked.’
He is currently working on a concept that strives to re-educate people to support the types of music they love, as well as the artist(s) who created it.
Nobody’s Music, the name of his idea currently in motion, is striving to ‘build a central point for artists to release their work under a new paradigm in the music industry’.
He believes that the money needs to come directly from the people, instead of playing ‘some shitty pub gigs’. He is striving to set up a venue where the artist truly benefits from his/her work.
Mike is in the process of setting up a production house which musicians can use, free of charge in order to record and promote their work.
‘It’s in its early stages, but I have already found loads of talent to work with. The genres vary which is cool because there is a potential for a variety of audiences. ‘
Mike believes that to get this project going, willing musicians would be needed to jump on board the project. He hopes that three or four newly composed and written tracks will be accomplished in order to form part of the final compilation.
‘Possibly the most difficult thing, initially, would be how to deal with the concept’ he believes. ‘In a marketing perspective, I suppose it’s kind of like viral marketing. Anyone involved in the project would have the responsibility to drive the concept until it hits mainstream. “Driving the concept” literally means letting your friends, fans and family know what you are up to’.
The idea of Nobody’s Music is that it doesn’t belong to any one individual artist or band but it belongs to all the artists involved in the project.
He believes that through this process, it should gather enough people to the portal to listen to the music, with a better chance of it being purchased.
The money made from the first 2000 copies sold will be put towards creating a better space for the artists to let their creativity ooze without any pressure. Afterwards, all proceeds made from the project will be evenly distributed between all the artists involved.
Recording wise, the catch would be that each musician or band that contributes will have to write their material from scratch, with the intention of getting the latest work from each entity in order to display and to represent.
Another possible concept that Mike has in mind would be for the bands to put up pre-production or unfinished tracks for people to listen to and to watch develop as they grow. ‘This will encourage an interactive element’ he believes.
On Nobody’s Music’s side, the music will be recorded in decent demo quality with the intention of marketing the band’s music through the company, keeping track of fans and friends of each particular band and taking the responsibility of updating them when new music is uploaded.
‘The nature of a musician is that of displaying his/her art for free, just because they enjoy doing it. ..That kind of attitude opens itself up to abuse, which inevitably happens. I have seen so many talented artists used and abused by promoters and record labels. My frustration here is that it is killing the industry, musician by musician’
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