What does it mean to sell out?

I remember asking that question when I was in my teens, working for my uncle's construction company. The actual, adult employee I was working with had said that a band he used to like had “sold out,” and I'd never heard the term before. I didn't get a good answer. The best approximation was that a band that started small, dedicated to bucking the system and sticking it to the man, would lose its identity and make boring, corporate music in order to bring in a paycheck. And this process was inevitable. Everybody sold out. I don't think I liked that answer as a kid. I wanted to hope that some band could get famous without caving to the pressures of the market.

Almost twenty years later, here I am, with a band. This is an incredibly talented group of artists, and I feel so lucky to play with them. I can't pretend that those dreams of having a song take off aren't there. I'd love to fill a stadium, and, maybe even more, I'd love to be recognized by the bands I looked up to.

But all that time has brought a lot of perspective, as well as a lot of insight into how getting attention works. You have to market yourself aggressively. You have to constantly hype up your own work, intentionally using the right words that are going to show up in google searches. You have to hit exactly the right quirky tone to grab attention, but without sounding like a brand trying to meme. You have to enter into controversy to drive engagement, without alienating any potential new listeners. In a lot of ways, it seems worse than selling out for money. At least in that system, you got the money. Now you just work an extra part time job as an attention seeker, shouting into the void about music no one cares about.

And as a thirty-something Catholic priest, that kind of grind is not only absolutely unappealing; it's frightening. If each post sharing my music is an individual moral decision to market myself, what kind of habits am I building? What kind of life does that make for me?

And yet, here I am, making a website, making a youtube page, getting ready to play another show tomorrow night, and then, I guess, talking to the rest of the band about what kind of social media presence might work for us. It seems like I have to at least try some of this stuff. I'm the one who got the band together, and have organized our shows so far. If I don't make it work, it's not going to, and we've put too much effort in to just do a couple parish festivals before collapsing. There's really awesome music that could happen.

So, hopefully, this is not an exercise in futility. By the grace of God, I hope that there's a virtuous way to be a band in the digital age.