How to Work With Difficult People in the Indie Music World

By Mika Libambu Schiller

I'm willing to bet that the most difficult thing in your life right now is working with and dealing with other people. It's a bet I think I would easily win because everybody has this problem. It's the bette noire of the human condition. A famous manic depressive French philosopher once said that "Hell is other people." Hey, maybe so, but sweet success is also other people. What I'm trying to say is that you need other people and other people need you. How you deal with them can either make your life a craphole or a smooth ride down Ventura Boulevard.

Do you remember that scene in the movie "School of Rock" where Jack Black's character gets kicked out of his rock band? He asks the other band members why they didn't talk to him beforehand and they all try to pass the the blame on each other.

In real life bands are always breaking up because of conflicts of interest. You can look at the biography of any music artist who's famous and the list of bands they've been through will read like a book. The Police broke up. Genesis broke up. No Doubt broke up. I don't know what the specific circumstances were in each of these cases. But even if they weren't acriminious, you know that somebody wanted to do something or didn't want to do something that somebody else didn't fully agree with. They may not have fought over it necessarily, but even a small crack in the tightness of a group can lead to a huge gaping hole over time.

Here's the bottom line. If you're in an indie band or starting up a record label or even just putting up a simple website, you just can't get around the fact that you have to work with other people. The most important thing that anybody who's starting anything ambitious needs to do is to make sure that everybody involved on any long or short term project is on the same page.

Now, this may sound like common sense, but a lot of people will make assumptions about what the other people in a group think and feel without really asking them. A lot of people do this because they're afraid that talking things through might lead to disagreements that may jeopardize their goals.

But disagreement is a part of progress. The question you have to ask yourself is do you want nasty disagreements way down the road when everyone's taking on big challenges and everyone's got a lot at stake ? Or do you want to tackle disagreements early on when everyone has much less at stake. It's much nastier breaking up a marriage after 10 years than it is after 6 months. Maybe the marriage would never have taken place had things been discussed thoroughly beforehand.

Another aspect of working with other people, which I'm sure you deal with regularly is the notion of trying out new things. How do you introduce new ideas so that people implement them? What if there's four of you running this new indie record label and you want to add a new blog to your website, but nobody else in the group is feeling it? How do you deal with something like that?

You deal with it by just doing it. Produce something. Churn out a few blog articles and see what everyone thinks. If the idea sucks, people will let you know pretty quick. But at least they won't be shooting down an idea that hasn't been tried. Usually, if what you produce is good enough to stand on its own two legs, people will consider it and maybe even get on board. It's easy to criticize just an idea, but once an idea is turned into something tangible, people will consider things that they wouldn't have were it just an idea. They will see things that wouldn't be there were it just a concept.That's how you introduce new ideas to people who don't want them. By just acting on them in some form.

An indie band or any similar grouping should be an open democracy where ideas fall or stand on their merit. If you have an idea, just act on it. The world will react.

Mika Schiller is a writer for the Indie music website MADE and he writes about where the music industry's headed and how it relates to the Independent Music artist. He gives irreverent career and personal development advice to the Indie music artist. For more great writing and irresistible advice, along with a free report on effective MySpace music marketing, please visit http://www.madepublishing.com

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