a question that i’m often asked is ‘why do you license your music to advertisements?’
which is a good question. i have numerous answers that are all relatively true:
1-it’s a good way to get music heard.
2-everybody does it.
3-it helps to generate revenue for the record companies to which i’m signed, mute and v2, who are both relatively independent.
and other answers that are all true and valid.
but there’s one answer to this question: ‘why do you license your music to advertisements?’ that just dawned on me recently, and the answer is ‘growing up in poverty’.
i know that i’m no longer poor, and i don’t mean this as a justification, for i’m still not sure if licensing music to advertisements is a good or bad thing, but i grew up very, very poor.
i know, a lot of people grew up poor. but i grew up really poor.
using food stamps to buy cigarettes and milk for my mother.
having to borrow money to eat.
buying .99 cent sneakers at the grocery store.
and so on.
i never starved, nor was i ever denied medical care because of my poverty, but i was very poor.
and i was very poor in a very wealthy town, which made my relative poverty seem even more shameful.
i’m not complaining, nor am i looking for sympathy.
i’m just trying to explain where the emotional logic behind some of my choices might come from.
anyone who grew up in poverty knows that growing up very poor means growing up very insecure and it also means growing up with a deep-seated and almost crippling aversion to needing money.
when i saw the pain and shame on my mothers face every sunday night when she needed to borrow money just to buy food, it scarred me.
at a very young age it made me see that the human face of poverty is not a happy thing.
people in the tropics who are poor and can catch fish and eat mangoes might be happy, but people in darien, connecticut who are dirt poor are not happy and carefree, they(we)are(were) miserable. and ashamed.
so when i’m offered work or licensing income i almost always accept it, because on some deep level i’m desperately afraid of going back to the poverty that i knew when i was growing up. i’m desperately afraid of sitting in a broken down car with my mother while she cries because she doesn’t have enough money to wash our clothes in the laundromat.
like i said, it scarred me.
so you can judge me for some of the career choices that i’ve made, but at least now you have a better understanding of why i’ve made some of these choices.
again, i’m not complaining or looking for sympathy, nor am i trying to justify any of my choices.
i’m just trying to explain.
thanks,
moby
