Sustaining Your Creative Practice (with Steve Lawson)
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Is the audience more than a gaggle of consumers? What role do they play in the creative process of an artist? Should they, as Rick Rubin says, “come last”? Are they always right? Or is there a more nuanced and sustaining way to approach this question?
In this episode of The Gentle Rebel, I explore this question with Steve Lawson.
I bumped into Steve towards the end of the summer at Greenbelt Festival. We rapidly got deep in conversation about his recently completed PhD, A Study Towards a New Model for Subscriber Audience Involvement in Improvised Music.
Steve’s approach to music-making and creative practice has always resonated with me. Over the past twenty-five years, he has carved out a living as a solo improvisational bass player, developing a thoughtful and sustainable model for art that resists the common assumptions that drive an obsession with numbers and scale. His thesis turns that lived experience into a lens for questioning many of the assumptions baked into how we think about creativity today.
Notes from our conversation…
The Audience Comes With
What happens if we treat the audience as part of the story that shapes and sustains our practice?
A way of looking at the influential relationship between artist and audience is to create spaces where the rationale (the philosophical approach) can be presented, and work can emerge as part of a conversation with the audience. For Steve, listening to how people (who respect your work) engage with it, whether “that reminds me of…” or “my Dad just died and all I can listen to is you,” becomes so much more meaningful than having a reviewer who doesn’t know what you are doing or why, and place it in a pile of other CDs. What matters is how people relate it to their lives, and what it means to them. Creating spaces for this dialogue became central: a mailing list, website forum, Twitter, and eventually a subscription model through Bandcamp.
Non-Algorithmically Defined Community Spaces
This meant integrating community with the economic rationale for making music. The audience emotionally sustains the music and financially supports its creation, along with the maintenance of the space where both artist and audience belong as equals. When the audience has already paid for the music before it is made, there is no need to rationalise it with hype or spectacle. Instead, it connects with people who already share the philosophical approach. This is a form of patronage, supporting the artist because of how they create, not only what they make.
Scenius (Brian Eno)
Genius is not an individual trait but the manifestation of the collective intelligence of a scene. Famous names are simply the visible tip of a larger iceberg, as with Russian painters in the early twentieth century.
Reception Theory (Stuart Hall)
Audiences actively interpret media texts by encoding and decoding. They may align with the intended meaning (dominant reading), reject it (oppositional reading), or negotiate it. Instrumental music does not encode meaning in a concrete way. Its sense of meaning emerges cumulatively, with artist and audience encoding together. Decoding and recoding become a collective process, shaped by new work and ongoing observations.
The Space of the Talkaboutable (David Darke)
Great works expand the “space of the talkaboutable,” an invitation to discuss ideas and broaden horizons. While Darke sees this as arriving around the work, Steve sees the space as built first (through mailing lists, forums, Twitter, Bandcamp), with the work then released into it. Meaning is collectively encoded, decoded, and recoded in this shared space.
“The Audience Comes Last”
The PhD began with the desire to make better music. What became clear was how much the audience contributes to the process, and what happens when that is denied. Rubin’s statement that the audience should be ignored overlooks the wisdom, care, and vulnerability that listeners bring. If the artist reflects the collective experience of a community, then the soundtrack emerges from what is shared.
This model does not scale, and that is the point. It does not rely on 200,000 monthly Spotify listeners or disconnected fame. That pressure brings entitlement and expectation. Within the subscriber community, no one tells the artist what to do. Even when people do not understand, they ask in good faith why, rather than demanding change.
From a Transactional to a Relational Audience
In transactional dynamics, the audience and the artist are set against each other, either dictating the work or being ignored. But a community of practice is about shared growth around a central practice. Interest in process can deepen listening and appreciation, rather than feeding competitiveness or exclusivity.
In a culture of shortcuts and AI-generated outputs, curiosity about how something is done can add depth. Seeing how a sound is made can enhance enjoyment, provided it is not reduced to transactional comparison.
Algorithmic Sensationalism
When everyone strives for spectacle, nuance disappears. Storytellers risk being drowned out by carnival barkers. The demand for more outrageous content comes at the cost of honesty and integrity. In this context, honesty itself becomes an act of resistance.
Transformative and Incremental Change
Incremental change adds more of what already exists, such as new ways to sell CDs. Transformative change shifts the whole landscape, such as the move from a scarcity economy to a digital economy. Streaming services illustrate this. It takes 100 premium streams or 600 free streams to equal one paid download in the UK charts. A fan listening 50 times counts for little. This model discourages deep audience and artist relationships, favouring scale and safety over innovation and depth.
Value and Meaning
“Art is how we decorate space, and music is how we decorate time” (Basquiat).
The value of music is not in how it is made or delivered, but in what it does to us when we hear it. It lives in memory and anticipation carried in the present moment of listening.
How Can I Keep Doing This?
“How can I keep doing this?” Creators want to make meaningful work in ways that are true to their vision and voice. But the new market risks corrupting that relationship, bending art to serve algorithms and demand. The pressure for novelty creates a treadmill of spectacle rather than depth.
The Stagnating Effect of Unexamined Nostalgia
Nostalgia plays a powerful, often unexamined, role in media consumption. While loving music from the past is natural, unexamined nostalgia can become life sapping, pulling us into yearning for an imagined past at the cost of present possibility. Complaints that “nobody writes like X anymore” undermine new work, and algorithms rarely prioritise sharing others’ new music.
Community in Practice
When Steve was diagnosed with cancer, he recorded a piece immediately after leaving hospital and shared it on Bandcamp. The audience was present, part of his journey, and the music carried meaning in that shared context. It was not “music about cancer” from a safe distance. It was a raw reflection of his brain on cancer, sparking connection and healing with those who were already part of the story.
