We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sam Solino Mazahery a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Sam Solino, thanks for joining us today. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?
Well, as you might already know, this is a very common question for both the people outside the creative world, and people who are contemplating getting into the world of art: will I be able to earn a living. And I think the short answer is yes. As in any other field, there are many ways to earn money in the world of art. And as any other field, there are many factors other than your hard work and talent that contribute to how successful you are in the field and for this question specifically, to make money from creative work. But the catch is that you might not like many of the revenues for earning a living in the creative field. So for instance, while your initial goal might have been to become a music producer, at least in the beginning many of the revenues that might be available to you might be in other parts of the music industry such as sound mixing, sound editing, or studio operations. And this is true for non-creative works as well. But because people who step into the creative world are often very passionate about their specific artistic visions and the art they want to create, having to work in the parts of the industry that doesn’t satisfy their artistic output is often more taxing and disheartening for them. The same is true for me as well. While my main passion in the film industry is directing movies, so far most of the revenues from which I’ve been able to make a living have been in editing and post-production, which is still creative work that I enjoy doing and not very far removed from my main passion, but at the same time it does feel demotivating not to be able to do what I love the most.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I grew up in a family that enjoyed and appreciated art, and even a couple of my uncles were already in the creative field. So at an early age I knew I wanted to work in the creative field, and yet I could never decide whether I wanted to become a musician or a filmmaker, until one of my piano teachers told me I could be both, as others like Charlie Chaplin, Clint Eastwood or Tom Tykwer have been before. So I studied film making in Iran and Los Angeles and continued my education in music on the side, and to this day, I’m both a musician and a filmmaker.
In the film industry, I’ve directed and edited several shorts, animations and music videos. I’ve also composed original music for a number of independent narrative and documentary films. Additionally, to make a living -going back to your previous question- I’ve also been involved in the production of various films and TV shows in different capacities, including assistant editing on Netflix shows such as Chef’s Table, Cheer and Street Food. The list of different projects that I’ve worked on in different capacities can be found on my IMDb page, while the short films, animations and music videos that I’ve been more creatively involved in are mostly available on Vimeo and Youtube. I should also mention that a collection of some of the original music that I’ve composed for films and other projects can be found on Spotify, Apple Music and all other platforms, under “Dechroma”, which is a duo of my friend Milad Mardakheh and I, composing music for a variety of projects.
On the other hand, as a musician, I’ve been involved in multiple bands in different capacities. I was a part of the popular Iranian pop band, “Dang Show”, before I moved to Los Angeles. I’m also a part of the metal band, “Achromatic”, in which I play bass, write music with my bandmates, and growl from time to time. As I mentioned before, I also compose original score for films. But recently my main focus as a musician has been producing music as a solo act. I released my first solo album, “the Android”, in summer of last year (2022), and I’ve been working on follow-up releases and live shows both in Iran and North America. This debut album was accompanied by animation pieces for each track in collaboration with different visual artists. The album itself is available on Spotify and all other platforms under “Sam Solino”, and the complete package including the music and the animation visualizers for each track is available as an NFT collection on Foundation. While producing music as a solo artist has been a fairly new endeavor for me, the reception so far has been very encouraging, both on music platforms such as Spotify and Soundcloud, and on social media and Instagram,
Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?
As I just mentioned, I’ve had my fair share of experience with NFTs, at least as a creator. I think considering our digital world today, and considering how a big percentage of our artists today are digital artists, the concept of NFT in itself is very logical and understandable and it provides a potentially game-changing solution for digital artists. To put it simply, while painters, photographers, sculptors or any other type of artists have always been able to sell an “original” copy of their work, with emphasis on the “genuinity” of a – nonfungible – “original” copy, digital artists have never been able to do the same, as a digital painting or photo can easily be duplicated in a way that is virtually indistinguishable from the original. That’s where NFTs come in, creating a solution through which you can assign a unique, unreplicable – and nonfungible – attribute to a copy of your work, making it a “genuine” original that cannot be copied without losing its mark of genuineness, which in turns allows artists to sell these “original” and unreplicable copies of their digital work. In this way, NFTs were -are- a real solution to a real problem that a large number of artists have.
The problem is, as many other trends that involve money and finance, especially things related to crypto-currencies, the NFTs soon became a proxy for investment finance, and in the course of a few years or even less, for the most part they completely lost their initial concept and the reason they were so helpful for artists in first place, and NFT markets were flooded with “collectible” sticker-like drawings that were only there as an item that can potentially become “rare” in the future, enticing many people to buy them as an investment. While it’s an undeniable fact that these investment-based financial activities on such products predictably created bubbles that nearly destroyed the the market, they also made it impossible for actual digital artists who wanted to showcase and sell an original copy of their work through NFT to be able to do so, pushing most such NFT works to be drowned out by the flood of “collectible” NFTs that were mostly traded like stocks.
As for my personal experience, when I finished recording my debut album, The Android, I thought of releasing a unique copy of the album as an NFT, and as a result, I started working with visual artists to create “visualizers” for the songs. At the time of the release of the album, we had 10 unique animation NFTs for the 10 tracks of the album, each created in collaboration with a different visual artist. So on the day of the release, while we released the album on all digital music platforms such as Spotify as planned, we also released a unique copy of each song with its own animation visualizer as an NFT on Foundation, making a unique copy of the whole album available to be purchased as an audio-visual NFT collection on the platform. And as stated above, the main hurdle that we faced was the fact that these NFTs were completely drowned in the flood of collectibles and stickers that people started to trade and “invest” in at the time, which on one hand made it almost impossible for us to be able to make our NFTs seen in the market, and on the other hand lead to a bubble in the NFT market that eventually crashed and again, hurt us and all the other artists who were just trying to showcase their art in the NFT market and were not trying to profit off trading collectibles.
So yeah, while NFTs – I guess like most other tools and technologies – can be very useful and potentially game changing new tools and frameworks for digital artists, they have mostly been used for unrelated, vain, and potentially harmful means which has rendered their potential for many digital artists, diminished to say the least, at least at the current stage of their market. But of course it still has an immense potential for being a great tool and creating a great market for digital artists to showcase their work, especially if the trend of finance traders and collectible investors dies down and allows the NFT market to turn back and mature into a digital market for “genuine” copies of digital work.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
What comes to my mind at the time is how we all learn “people who’re good at what they do and work hard, will always succeed”, which I think misses a great deal about how luck plays into our success, whether its through the family we are born into, the connections and advantages or disadvantages that we have in the community we grow up in, and many other kinds of privileges (or lack there of) that we’re either born into or obtain through sheer chance and how it shapes our path towards success. That is not to say being good at what you do and working hard towards your goals isn’t important. Those are pre-requisites for success if and when one of those chances or opportunities show themselves. You have to be prepared, otherwise you might get lucky and find that rare opportunity, but not be prepared to use it to the best of your ability.
So yes, finessing your skills and working hard towards your goals are indeed important, but what we’re rarely taught is that those are not enough, and that even if you’re one of the lucky ones, there are many people out there, – statistically a vast majority, – who do have the needed skills and talent, and do work very hard, perhaps harder than the most successful people that we know, but never get to shine and to rise up and reach their goals because of the circumstances out of their control. Statistically, that’s the majority of the hard working and talented people out there.
One reason that we tend to think that through sheer hard work and talent we can get to whatever we set our minds to, is the fact that the lucky few who do get there, tend to echo this untrue mindset. And the reasons why is not hard to see. Of course, some of those people, are the very few people who were born extremely privileged, and never want to admit that the main reason for their success was in fact the privileges they were born into. We can see many examples of this happening these days: millionaire-born rich kids trying to sell themselves as entrepreneurs who started from the bottom, while in reality they started with hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars of “investments” from their parents and the people they knew because of their family, not to mention always having the safety net of their family to fall back on whenever things went wrong, allowing them to afford to make big risks again and again, until one of the these risks pays off, the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward. And of course, in reality most of us do not have any of these privileges, can’t start off with hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment from our families, and can’t afford making many big risks.
But aside form those few extremely privileged ones, there are also others who started not very privileged, and got to climb up the ladder and reach to the top, and many of those people also repeat the same line about how through sheer hard work and perseverance they were able to reach what they set their minds to. And that’s also very understandable. Starting from the bottom and rising up to the top does take a lot of hard work, and once the hard work pays off, we don’t want to think that maybe one of the biggest factors in our success has been luck. But that’s the reality. Yes, many of the people who got to the top did have to work very hard to get there, but there were also many others who worked just as hard or even harder, and were just as talented or even more talented, but didn’t have the same chances and privileges. And many of us already know this because we have experienced first hand how qualifications and hard work are not enough most of the time, but once luck shows us its kindness and circumstances change in our favor and we are able to rise up in our field of work, we tend to forget what a big role luck and circumstances played in our success story, because we either forget, or feel that acknowledging what a big part luck has played in our success, diminishes our own merits and hard work. But that’s not true. Acknowledging the importance of life circumstances and sheer luck in the road to success, helps us look at the journey with a more realistic view point. It makes the hard work and immense talent of the people who never get the chance to shine, visible to us, and reminds us of how many brilliant people are trying to make it out there. It makes us think of ways to tip the scale towards those who are more talented than us and work harder than us, but never got the same chances that we got. And It also humbles us and makes us kinder to the ones who didn’t make it, never forgetting the many brilliant, talented and hardworking people we met along the way who could have been much more successful than we are if success was actually based on merits.
Yeah it is not easy to unlearn such principles engraved in us and our culture, and to acknowledge that at least in our society today, the biggest part in any person’s success, including our own, is just luck and life circumstances. And that acknowledging this does not diminish our hard work. And while knowing this and acknowledging this might not be so difficult at some points in our lives, as we get to see or experience such circumstances first hand, it might become more difficult not to forget it if and when we do get to the top.
Contact Info:
- Website: open.spotify.com/artist/5aQzlLBoWg707MurgX0jcn
- Instagram: instagram.com/samsolino/
- Facebook: vimeo.com/samsolino
- Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/sam-solino-mazahery-983b26104/
- Twitter: foundation.app/collection/andr01d
- Youtube: youtube.com/@samsolino/playlists
- IMBD: imdb.com/name/nm7061806
- Other: soundcloud.com/samsolino
Image Credits
Musicema, Fatemeh Abedini, Henico, Ardalone Sabouri, Ryuksana