Music Talent Search Contests Are A Waste of Everyone’s Time

Photo courtesy of Matt Carman

Sherman Downey and the Ambiguous Case, Melissa O’Neil, Lauren Mann and the Fairly Odd Folk, Theo Tams—do any of these names sound vaguely familiar to you? According to the folks running Canadian talent search contests like CBC’s Searchlight contest or the now defunct Canadian Idol, they should. But there’s a weird disconnect when it comes to talent contests—after they’re over, no one really cares. The dust settles, and all the drama and excitement withers away, and what you’re left with is a bunch of generic music that would be in the dollar CD bin in a two months—if discount CD bins were still a thing.

The main problem with talent contests like these and the countless others that run rampant in Canada—from the small, city-wide battle of the bands contests to giant national searches—is that it’s all about the lead-up. It’s all about the chase, and that’s why all of these contests are inherently flawed and terrible yardsticks by which to measure talent. With the latest instalment of CBC’s Searchlight contest running to a close, and our Facebook newsfeed slowly becoming less and less clogged with pleas of “vote for me!” it seems like a good time to examine just why these contests are ultimately so damn useless.

There’s a futility to the contests who assume that popularity translates into longevity. These companies and corporations are placing bets on these artists to do well—and if they do well in a popularity contest, surely they’ll sell well. Sadly, those two things aren’t necessarily interchangeable. The music industry right now is a hell of a lot more fickle than winning votes on the internet, or having people phone in and press a button is. Labels are still—by and large, stupidly—trying to navigate the internet profitably, and they’re not going to do any more work than they have to. So, if one of these contest winners gets signed and in a couple of months, their popularity is nonexistent and it doesn’t look like they can hack it, that label’s going to drop them faster than you can say, “Ben Mulroney.”

Photo via CBC

These bands are a commodity, that’s what it comes down to. These contests are essentially big-name distributors that are focus-grouping a bunch of independent bands, using the public as a sort of barometer to see what they should pounce on. The problem with this is that public opinion and musical originality and creativity share very few similarities. What’s entertaining to a bunch of people who half care about music when it comes on the television or radio is wildly different from a musical artist that can sustain a career and actually be of some benefit to the musical climate and musical economy.

Bands that do what they’re doing purely for the love of doing it will stick around for years and tour, helping venues stay open, helping small labels and pressing plants stay open, and helping keep the independent musical economy moving. Silly, generic overblown rock bands with no real substance who just want their big break to be rock stars will just be flashes in the pan, and a complete waste of opportunity and money. Sure they might be your Aunt’s favourite band right now, but the taste of people who aren’t totally invested in finding and supporting music is extremely fickle. Once there’s a new flash in that pan, the reality of their slowly dwindling 15 minutes of fame will hit them like a ton of bricks.

These contests are generally out of touch with the state of the music industry. While there are definitely some exceptions to this rule, the world of music right now has two tiers: independent bands who are busting their asses, touring all the time, have maybe signed to an indie label, and are just barely making a go of it; and gigantic pop mega stars. Gigantic pop acts are big because the labels know they can be big, and they funnel a ton of money into them to make sure they stay big. If you’re Joe Nobody who just won a national battle of the bands and you get signed to someone like Universal, you can bet you’re on the very bottom of their “give a shit about” list.

Photo courtesy of Flickr

This, however, is something that these contests either don’t know or just never let on to knowing to the hopeful masses. Just because you end up signed to a major and get a huge recording advance to track a single does not mean you’ll be successful. Quite the contrary, as there are barrels and barrels of stories about bands getting absolutely screwed over by these kind of situations, ending up owing the label a bunch of money from their advance that they couldn’t recoup because, well, they just weren’t that good!

The prizes are likewise lackluster, because they prove just how out of date these contests are with the actuality of the music industry. Do you think that a band really needs $20,000 in new equipment? Wouldn’t that money be better in the form of a grant so bands could actually tour without going broke? So a band could maybe actually could afford to put out their albums on vinyl, the medium that’s supposedly making a huge comeback yet is now way too expensive for independent bands? Wouldn’t helping a band that could be sustainable over time, and actually have longevity do what they need to do be more beneficial than some superficial, surface level prize of a music video and some brand spankin’ new Fender Telecasters?

It’s a wasted opportunity and it proves that the people behind the scene either know absolutely nothing about how being a musician works in this cultural and economic climate—or worse, it means that they don’t care. Bands don’t need a bunch of money or cool equipment to make a music video. They need money so they can tour, they need more opportunities to be heard, and they need better access to arts grants and government funding. These kinds of prizes are not only a band-aid solution to a huge problem in our musical climate, but they just seem so anachronistic and cartoonishly stereotypical. “You get all this gnarly new gear, bro!”. It’s so heavy-handedly employing the use of “musician” or “band” tropes that it’s borderline insulting.

Photo courtesy of Much

“But wait,” you may be saying to yourself as you begin to agree with me. “Aren’t you forgetting about Hedley and Carly Rae Jepsen?” I am not. On the surface, the success stories of these two fresh-faced Canadian Idol pop darlings seem to contradict the so-called futility and uselessness of these contests, because these two have achieved a fairly large amount of both national and international success. However, hilariously enough, their fame actually serves to further hammer home the uselessness of these kind of contests, as these two weren’t even the ones who won on their respective seasons of the show.

The fact that an artist who didn’t win the contest can go on to outshine those who did by a stupidly wide margin clearly demonstrates the disconnect between succeeding in these contests and succeeding in music. These artists didn’t win these contests, and that was actually what made their careers. These two became popular in spite of Canadian Idol—leveraging their popularity in tandem with the shocking nature of them not winning when everyone expected them to, becoming the underdogs in a way.

This allowed them to transcend the idea of being a reality talent show winner, and they became actual personalities. This is the problem with being the winner of a talent search contest like Canadian Idol or CBC’s Searchlight—you’re just that year’s winner, you’re not a personality. You’re part of a brand, a placeholder temporarily on the pedestal. People are invested in the process—the drama, the anxiety of voting, the magical spell of people working together to give one person more votes, but when all is said and done, you’re really just a means to an end.

Things don’t just fall into your lap as a musician. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and though these contests may seem like the golden ticket, they’re fraught with complicated business talks, contracts, and the promise of something that’s too good to be true.

You want to make a living playing music? Play shows, meet bands, play more shows, meet more bands, meet cool people who like your music, play even more shows. Don’t just sit on your ass hoping someday someone will realize your amazing, one-of-a-kind potential and give you a blank cheque. You’re talented? So is everyone else. Too bad. You actually have to work at this, so if all of you bands are really serious about making it, stop worrying about a popularity contest.

Nick Laugher won a talent contest in order to write this - @largiantribune