 All too often, criticism is met with defensive statements like, Well, that's just your opinion, or your hate. In order to miss someone else's opinion, instead of evaluating what's actually behind the criticism, it's blocked and never considered for how it can help you grow as a creator. By firing back reactionary retorts to criticism, the ability to grow from even the most negative of criticisms is shut down. In this video, I'm going to talk about how you grow to be able to hear criticism to become a better creator. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, and this is MuseFormation. Instead of blindly defending yourself against every criticism, it's important to weigh the criticism against what you're trying to accomplish musically, and consider what can be learned from the critique. With practice, you could consider this criticism, gaining a healthy check on what you're trying to accomplish artistically, to give you perspective so you can make the right decisions for your work. Evaluating criticism brings you self-awareness, as well as gives you strength to handle the consideration that's needed to create. Taking every critique you receive as a chance to grow by gaining further objectivity not only builds your strength as a human, but it's one of the best devices for growth in your mind. One of the worst reactions artists can have is to dismiss all critics as haters. When there's a lot, you can learn from your critics. This approach to criticism is usually to protect ego out of fear with what would happen if you had to accept flaws that may be pointed out within yourself. While many criticisms are invalid or uneducated, it's important to evaluate them in order to grow your self-awareness. Oftentimes in life, we hit a frustrating place where we're looking for answers on how to make our lives better so we can further ourselves. Most of the time these answers lie in hearing a truth about ourselves we've yet to face. When you put your music out into the world, you open up an opportunity to hear both your strengths and your weaknesses. But this is the only opportunity if you allow yourself to give the comments on your music consideration. Since I work on so many records every year, there are constant tweets, album reviews, and social media comments about the work I've done. When I see a criticism of the production, I take it in while trying to consider what I can learn from it. Every project I do has a guiding idea, so I'm able to judge each criticism by whether that intent translates to outside ears. But I think of it this way, if someone called a production raw when I was going for a more polished production, I might have to rethink if I've lost touch with my production standards. Sometimes criticism may be intended to make fun of a song, but it's actually a compliment. It's always hilarious when I produce a record and someone says, It's too poppy. When that's exactly what the plan was, to make a record that was unashamed of how poppy it is. But hearing your record is sloppy or out of tune when you were going for a record that was meant to be precise and polished is helpful criticism that should lead you to reevaluate whether your standards are high enough. Throughout your creative existence, you'll be constantly inundated with unsolicited advice on how you can improve your music. It can be troubling to sort through leaving artists enraged at some of the ridiculous unsolicited comments made on the internet. Figuring out whether this criticism is someone pursuing an agenda makes it even tougher to figure out. There are a few rules, though, that I've learned to figure out how to consider criticism. The first is I ask how does this person benefit? Figure out if someone's pursuing an agenda that only benefits them can clue you into why they're giving this feedback. Consider if their feedback is only there to fuel a selfish gain for the critic which should be taken with a grain of salt. Then I ask myself, Is this person proficient in this subject? Producers and well-trained musicians are able to dissect small parts of sounds to tell you exactly why an element isn't working. They can also zoom in way too hard, getting too far into their own tastes to give you helpful advice for your own consideration. With that said, if you're looking for feedback from a respected expert you admire, it can be helpful to process their criticism to weigh against your intent. But uneducated ears can be great as well. Non-musician input is commonly written off when critiquing music, but I find the way non-musicians listen to music be much more emotional than those who are constantly dissecting it from the bias of musical proficiency. Hearing emotional feedback or when an element sounds off from those who are uneducated can be a great alert to a problem. With that said, those uneducated ears can try too hard to find errors resulting in the silliest feedback you've ever heard. Just because someone has no music education does not mean they can't feel the emotion of a song or tell you if your song feels as powerful as other songs they've felt in their past. But there is a thing to consider about confirmation bias. When I get lots of feedback on a subject, I try to make sure I'm not suffering from confirmation bias. All too often when we hear criticism, we try to use it to find whatever is easiest or most convenient for our present state. I try to ask myself what's the hardest truth I've ever considered from any criticism I receive about a song and make sure I'm looking into the eye and see if I really have weighed that I may need to consider that criticism and do something that's really hard for me to do. Usually the hardest truth is the one you have to face since our minds try to convince us the easiest truth to execute will work. But what about hearing criticism for your manager or label? Once you gain some success building a fanbase, suits will inevitably come knocking. These suits cannot help but comment on your music, so knowing when to take their comments to heart and when they're overstepping their bounds can be treacherous since keeping relations with them is an important part of growing a fanbase. Suits often get a bad rap, though. Know whatever pats them on the back when they tell an artist they can do better and that criticism leads them to a successful record. Throughout my time engaging with suits and even being one. The best practice I've seen is giving an objective opinion about how the artist can be the best they can be. Instead of forcing creative direction on a musician, the suits give them feedback on how they can be the best version of who the creator themselves wants to be. Since musicians won't make good music if it's not emotionally resonant to them, suits' worst behavior is telling a musician to go in a direction they're not passionate towards like chasing a trend. Telling an emo band they need to listen to more trip-up when they don't like that type of music is not going to make music that helps the suit get success or the musician. It's just going to f*** up what they do. But there is a right way of doing this. It can be great to offer advice like, hey emo band, take a listen to Massive Attack and see if it influences what you do. But it's detrimental to their music to force an artistic agenda on a musician. A common trip of suits giving advice is to follow the latest trend. But if the musician doesn't like that trend, it always comes off as derivative, often leading to the death of that trend instead of helping the band. Nothing kills a trend faster than when a thousand inauthentic innovators rush in with generic drivel because a suit told them, this is the cool new trend, bro. While we've all heard the trials of art being shut down by a suit that don't hear a hit, there are cases where this has yielded great results as well as the often referenced utter failures. This advice has motivated many lazy musicians to exceed their artistic limits to craft a better song. But this advice also comes from a conformist know nothing suit that's chasing trends instead of making trends that wouldn't know innovation if a sentient robot smacked them in the face. There's no better evidence than the debacle Wilco went through in their movie I'm Trying to Break Your Heart when the same company which rejected their record later re-released it under a different imprint to much success. When you read stories of the great A&R people who developed amazing artists, they impart influences along with standards upon artists. They tell stories of successful examples, but they don't exert their tastes on the artists. Telling a musician they can push their boundaries or they haven't found the right collection of songs is an opinion that allows an artist to analyze against their intent. But often when a musician is less confident, they know that they can do better. So they'll take the comment to heart and try to do better. In fact, the best musicians take comments to heart that they know are inspiring them to be a better version of themselves that they would like to be. Just as the head and the heart are very different struggles for a musician, the suit and the artist are two different beasts that must coexist. Just like the head a suit often overthinks concepts that ruin an artist's vision. But the artist can have too much heart resulting in a loss of objectivity as they overly emote into a panic. Sadly, discussions of the struggle tend to be too black and white where they either dismiss all the advice from the suit or they trust the suit without sufficient consideration. But what about hearing feedback from your fans? The majority of listeners have a limited vision of musical potential and only know how to imitate others. Anyone who has graduated kindergarten gets that there are psychological profiles of those who are leaders and followers. You'll hear tons of advice on how to make your music more commercial or accessible all the time from fans. Most of this advice comes from those who don't get that simply imitating what has already been done will get you nowhere. The world wants artists who have a unique character to their work, not another copy of a copy. But the advice you usually get from fans is a coded message on how you can be a clone of another successful artist. Finance player Ramit Sethi puts it like this, The world wants you to be vanilla. They want you to be the same as everyone else, but the minute you are, they abandon you. This sentiment has been echoed by countless artists including Grimes multiple times. Most people are only able to tell you to imitate something else they enjoy or has received success. While this is great advice for athletes and those looking to figure out practices to get more successful in business, when it comes to your creative choices, this advice is largely useless. If your critics are telling you to get rid of an aspect of your personality that you enjoy since it'll help you get famous, you cannot give up on it. The characters and quirks you like about yourself are what others will criticize before you're successful and what they'll celebrate once you are successful. Thanks so much for watching. Am I missing anything? Is there any other way you would have done this? I need to know your questions and what no one else is telling you since I want to answer them, so leave them in the comments since I answer every comment in every post. I hope you liked this video and if you did, please like, subscribe, and get notified. And I'm going to be breaking down the concepts in this video along with how to promote your music and how to make songs you're happy with in the future. I have a Facebook group linked below that is only helpful information. No playlist or con artists, only artists having helpful discussions allowed. If you want to learn more about me, work on a record with me, or check out any of my books, podcasts, or anything else I do, go to jessicanon.com or at jessicanon.com on all the socials. One last thing, there's two playlists here. One is on how to grow your fan base from zero to 10,000 fans and the other is on how you make songs you're more happy with. 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