Moby — the popular songwriter, producer, DJ, remixer, scorer of film music, singer, guitarist, keyboardist, drummer, photographer, founder of music festivals, restauranteur, and activist — has sold over 20 million records in his lifetime.
His success has enabled him to further pursue a number of those passions, but it’s also true that the diversity of Moby’s skills and interests is what helped him achieve that level of success in the first place.
In the above video clip, Moby tells younger musicians that they need to do just that: diversify! Musicians are making money in wildly different ways than they did fifteen years ago, and it’s more important than ever that artists have a number of different music-related skills so they’ll have an easier time piecing together a good living.
In this clip, Moby gives some very sensible advice to younger musicians: do what you love!
Here’s his reasoning; if you do something you hate and have success, you’ll still hate it; if you do something you hate and fail, all the worse; if you do something you love and fail, at least you did something you loved; if you do something you love and succeed, double win.
What advice would you give to a young musician that’s just getting started in the music world? Let us know in the comments below.
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Chris Robley is an acclaimed singer-songwriter and award-winning poet from Maine.
His Beatlesque indie-pop and milltown Americana songs have been praised by The Associated Press, No Depression, KCRW, The LA Times, Boston Globe, NPR, American Songwriter, and others.
His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Review, and more.
Robley has received a Maine Literary Award in Poetry, Boulevard’s Emerging Writers Prize for Poetry, and in 2016 was selected by former US-poet laureate Robert Pinsky as a finalist for the Dorset Prize.