I recently had the good fortune to interview Paul Waaktaar-Savoy of A-ha about his new studio in Park Slope. This is the first time I’ve seen a Tree Audio Roots console in a studio. Very cool design by Jim Keller of Sondhus. Beautiful space worth seeing.

We put the finishing touches on a new issue of Scientist yesterday. In it, you will find:

• Why Music Education Actually Matters

• Music Business Lessons from The Beatles

• 5.1 Surround Mixing Tips

• NYC Indie Labels: Captured Tracks

• The Best Basses for the Recording Studio

• …and some favorite posts from this blog.

There are also some big changes coming to Scientist soon—and to this blog.

Among other things, we’ll be adjusting our posting schedule. Going forward, we’ll be releasing our longform, research-driven articles in a steadier stream, rather than in the big monthly lumps that have been normal for us in the past.

We’ll also be paying more guest writers, more money, more often. So if you have a good story idea of your own, get in touch anytime.

Thanks as always, and enjoy.

It’s a natural instinct to seek prestige. Given the choice, we’d all prefer to be regarded highly rather than lowly. But prestige in and of itself is not a worthwhile goal, and seeking it outright will often lead you down exactly the wrong path.

If you look around the world—and this goes doubly in creative circles—whatever is currently the most prestigious is often that which is losing the most money, and is slated to soon disappear into irrelevance.

If you want remain on the lookout for what is likely to be prestigious tomorrow, it is probably best to keep your eyes open for whatever is considered gauche and unseemly profitable today.

By now, this seems to be something of a pattern: Newspapers, once home to the garish yellow journalism of Hearst and Pulitzer in the late 19th century, gained an air of respectability in the the mid-20th. They held on to this prestige, for a time, until they all started going down the tubes in the early 21st.

Thanks to the endowment he left to Columbia University, Joseph Pulitzer is now better known for the prestigious award named after him than he is for the sensationalism and scandal that he pushed throughout much of his career. And newspapers, now seen in hindsight, still retain some of that sanctified kind of prestige we so often reserve for the dead.

It’s also worth remembering that The Beatles, back in 1964, were regarded about as highly as ‘N Sync was four decades later. Speaking of which, Justin Timberlake seems to be on his way to becoming a prestigious name himself, right alongside Ben Affleck, Mark Wahlberg and Leonardo DiCaprio. At the time they appeared, who would have guessed?

Even television has grown out of its undignified infancy to surpass both film and fiction in becoming what is often considered the most prestigious and highbrow art form in America today. Meanwhile, Western Classical Music has very nearly died of a terrible case of excess prestige. And when was the last time you remember anyone taking modern art, on the whole, very seriously at all?

Ultimately, seeking prestige for its own sake is unlikely to get you much of anywhere. Instead, keep good principles, and seek ever more satisfying challenges. You might find that kind of thing somewhere that’s currently “prestigious”, and you might find it elsewhere.

But if you keep that up for a good couple of decades, you may be surprised to find out just how much prestige you’ve earned, quite accidentally, in the end.

It has been said that there is a consumerist trap: “Buying things we don’t want, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like.”

As creators, we face an additional set of pitfalls. I would offer the producerist trap: “Spending revenue we’re not making, to create art that doesn’t speak to us or our fans, in order to impress peers, parents, and other people who aren’t in our audience.”

This can affect any of us, from symphonies that only perform works that impress professional composers and musicians, to journalists who write stories that only other journalists would be interested in, to audio engineers who buy equipment that only other audio engineers care about.

If you look at good businesses, you’ll notice that they only concern themselves with making things that the market is interested in, and that they can produce cost-effectively. Good artists are surprisingly similar. They only have to concern themselves with what moves them and their audiences. And they only have to do the things that they learn to do well.

But too often, we forget to focus on what really matters in our personal and professional lives. We get wrapped up in our own little creators’ networks and forget who we’re creating for.

Are you writing songs for other songwriters? Newsflash: They don’t care. (Not until you’re dead or out to pasture, anyway. There’s no kind of musician that other musicians love more than a great one who’s no longer working.)

Are you writing fiction that’s aimed at other fiction writers? Good luck with that.

Are you practicing pieces whose sole function is to intimidate other professional performers? Okay. Do your fans care?

Are you writing screenplays only so that other screenwriters will know how clever you are? What kind of sick satisfaction would that be? And why? Do you think you’ll sell one that way?

There are traps laid out for all of us. If you learn to see them, you’re less likely to step directly into one of your own making.

In an age of infinite information, priorities become more important that ever.

You can’t read every article, you can’t master every subject, you can’t see every movie, and you can’t devote yourself to every cause.

But if you pick just a few, and guard your hours and your intellect enough so that you know you have the time for them, you’ll find that you’ve read more, mastered more, seen more, and devoted yourself more deeply than those who mistakenly think that they can take everything on at once.

We spent a good portion of the past decade decrying gatekeepers and middlemen. Turns out that we need their help more than ever before.

Sometimes, the culture gets it wrong.

Maybe it is a bad idea for us to leave all the floodgates wide open at the very moment our relentless river of art information swells beyond overflowing. Maybe we don’t need to get rid of the gatekeepers. Maybe what we need is even more of them, to manage an increasingly intricate irrigation system. To help us learn more, live more deeply, and get even more done.

Maybe it was a bad idea to kick the bean-counters out of the boardroom. Maybe it was a bad idea to tell all artists that they should all be their own managers. Maybe, as we make decisions on art, that “lie that tells the truth,” we need even more pragmatic guides to help us prioritize, and to help keep us honest, if only with ourselves.