In the Music Business course, a student last week did a presentation where she listed all the sales records which were broken by the Weeknd in his latest tour. I wanted to say something but wasn’t sure how to articulate it. The premise was what bugged me. As if performing music was an olympic category to compare with the speed of swimmers or how much weight you can lift above your head. The same awkward feelings two weeks ago when, in a presentation this time about Jay-Z, a different student shrugged that one of his records only sold four hundred thousand copies, tragic. Something about the student who in his mid twenties addressing these sales as if it was disappointing seemed the same as the student addressing the Weeknd’s new sales records. I felt as if witnessing a car crash in slow motion.

How do I explain that admiring sales seems counterintuitive if your goal is being a musician and a career sustaining it. Like losing sight that everyone is the same, they are no different than you or your grandparents. Everybody once said the wrong thing at the wrong time, everybody once missed the bus or lost their keys or played the wrong note when the chord changed. If you or I sold even one hundred tickets or copies of our music, wouldn’t we be amazed at our good fortune? Isn’t the reward doing what we love? I don’t want to encourage them to believe in mirages but I wish they saw reality already is so surreal and meaningful.