Avoid fame if you can

Avoid fame if you can
===

Justin: I think a lot about fame and success. So many people see fame as a way to get to success and I think musicians are such a great example of this.

There's this Fat Mike interview, he's from NOFX, and I quote it all the time. He's like, "In the nineties when punk rock was blowing up, we kept having the same shows, same venues, same amount of people, all that stuff. And he said some bands blew up and then they could never get that cat back in the bag.

And it was depressing for them. You know, they were playing casinos because the music wasn't trendy anymore. Fat Mike was like: "NOFX shows? We've been playing to the same size crowds our whole life. It's just enough for us to make a living. And what more could you ask for?

We're not mega famous, but that means that, you know, when the second album comes out and no one digs it, it doesn't matter for us cuz we've got fans that are just gonna dig this no matter what."

And, I think there's so many lessons for startup life.

You know, there's some people that think they need to be Twitter famous in order to start a business or whatever.

And fame really scares me. I think fame is, you do not want fame, if you can avoid it.

If you can be a line drive success and fill a room with a hundred people and play to those a hundred people in multiple cities around the globe, you've made it. That's perfect. You know?

And this desire to get insanely popular or get insanely big. Even with my business, like I'm happy for the podcast industry to grow 10, 15% a year, and the people that are like driving it, they want it to grow a thousand percent every year. I'm like, that's gonna destroy everything we like about this category in this industry, and what makes it great.

And there's no better examples of this than music. Like there's just some bands that just continue to play, continue to be great. And there's different levels of this obviously, but you know, Phish is a good example. I think Iron Maiden is a good example.

Brian: Iron Maiden is another one that kind of like Phish that that's like, has.

It seems, quote unquote, like niche following, but they're huge. Yeah, right. They're, but like, they're either, either you love 'em or, or you're not that. Yeah. Like another huge one for me is, is 311. Yeah. I've been a lifelong 311 fan, and, and they're one of these bands who's, they sort of just like stick to their formula.

They play small theaters, you know, they, they haven't grown larger than that. They've had like, I don't know, 15 albums. Mm-hmm. and just solid music for, for their fan base. They're not gonna get much bigger than that, and it's great.

Justin: And, what more could you want? You know, to have enough customers or enough fans that are with you for life, as opposed to they heard a catchy song on the radio and now they're like, "whatever. That music's lame now," you know?

This clip was taken from the Open Threads podcast. Listen to the full episode by going to openthreads.co/31