By “mold” I was referring to this paradigm of musicians as entrepreneur. That is, an “artist” who scrambles to fund his “hobby” of creating and/or performing music by spending an inordinate amount of time working on ways to develop a “brand” and use that brand to generate revenues in non-musical channels.

Like you, I think many artists question whether they should have to fit into any sort of mold. In fact, if the artist is iconoclastic (as many of the great ones are), the whole idea of neatly fitting into a label or category is anathema. So in a sense, this expectation that they think of exciting merch or novel personal services (“For $5,000 OK GO will WASH YOUR CAR and give you autographed polaroids of the experience!”) is just the sort of thing to make a point to avoid. Why would you feel the need to radically fetishize the inherent and delineated meanings of the music with personalized glossies or elaborately constructed jewel cases designed for nothing more than the physical marketability of their own construction, anyway? As an artist, why would you want to pander to such fans?

Come on, admit it: such an enterprise slowly eats away at the soul of an artist and threatens to dull what gave spark to the inspiration behind their art, no?

And I think it’s rather cynical to believe that there aren’t artists who can live off of their art without selling out. Sure, the most commercially successful artists–the ones who live off of fame–have all been co-opted by consumer culture, but that is because that is the world they choose to inhabit. “Sell-out” or not, that was their choice or it was their compromise to make.

That said, simply because an artist may make money outside of their music doesn’t mean they have sold out. It’s the blending of the two enterprises that brings about corruption. If you play in cafes at night or on the weekend and make land deals in an office during weekdays, you can live as an artist without selling out your art. Know what I mean?