The Word They Use to Keep You Out?
We celebrate it. We brand ourselves with it. We build entire professional identities around it.
Let me begin with where I live inside: music.
I have spent my entire adult life (and earlier) as a musician.
A practitioner, educator, coach, student, composer, writer, and producer, navigating one of the most psychologically and physically demanding, economically precarious, and structurally layered professional ecosystems that exist.
The three-decade plus journey gave me the privilege to have interacted with a range of humans that include likes of multiple Grammy Award winners, vice presidents of national music councils, Oscar-winning actors, bestselling authors, underground icons who became household names, and household names who disappeared into obscurity intentionally or otherwise.
A glimpse of every rung of that particular ladder, often several at once. Some actively, others less so.
I start with this not to impress, but to orient the reader. Because what I have learned from inside this world is a lot more than just about music, but something far more universal. Something every one of us navigates on a regular basis, regardless of our profession, background, or relationship to the arts.
Music simply happened to have been the laboratory in which I was eventually forced to see it with the clarity I did.
And this is what it looked like, over and over again:
A persistent gap in every configuration of relationship (professional or otherwise), between what was declared on the record and the actual unfolding of the same.
A word with two meanings
There is a word that finds its way into nearly every dynamic inside the world I mention above. Even more so in the past decade, to the best of my observations.
Artist bios, brand manifestos, and mission statements of organisations that once stood — and in many cases still stand, behind velvet ropes.
That word is accessibility.
In education, arts, business, leadership, and even politics, most figureheads claim to be 'accessible' now, with a proverbial open door.
Everyone wants to 'connect'.
And on one level, this is genuinely true. The internet has made tools, information, and platforms available in ways that simply did not exist a generation ago. That is real, and it matters.
But it's a surface truth and not a whole one just yet, and the gap between the two is where this conversation actually begins.
Accessibility as a concept performs two functions simultaneously in the real world.
- It signals virtue, warmth, openness, the absence of pretension, and the urge to connect.
- It aims to deflect scrutiny.
An 'accessible' person will aim to be immune to the accusation of gatekeeping.
An accessible platform will hope to avoid the adjective "exploitative" being used to describe it.
The word, when misused, can be an armour, worn in plain sight.
But in my experience, across every level, the louder this advertisement of the accessibility, the more carefully one would be advised to examine what exactly access is being offered to.
The performance of openness, in many cases, runs a very high risk of being a more 'evolved' form of the very closed door it claims to replace.
The small business nobody warned you about
In the arts, structural versions of this is particularly exposed, because the starkness makes it visible in a way that other vocations might find easier to conceal.
When you choose to operate as an independent artist, you are (whether anyone tells you or not) choosing to run a small business.
Usually, with no formal business training, often no infrastructure, and almost no honest acknowledgement that this is what the job comes with.
The negotiation landscape involves venues, labels, publishers, booking agents, collaborators, podcast guests, engineers, and all the teams in between, with every relationship carrying its own specific power geometry, every handshake a silent, mutual calibration of individual needs that both parties hope to be mutual in a specific transaction that usually goes unnamed.
For most of my career, I conducted these negotiations alone. Often in the name of authenticity and independence.
It felt like integrity, and in many ways, it hopefully was (and still is).
But the weight of the accumulated physical, psychological, and professional costs while navigating each of these power differentials without support began to tell a different truth at some point. One that I hadn't been ready to hear for the longest time.
The myth of the self-sufficient individual in any domain is not a liberating, but structurally convenient one.
Isolated people are manageable. A person who believes they should need no one is simply easier to underpay, undervalue, and overlook. And this is as true in a corporate hierarchy as it is on a record label's roster.
The mythology of independence serves those who benefit from our isolation, not not we ourselves.
Three selves, one name
Though far more widespread than we admit, a particular aspect creative professionals navigate more visibly than most is the constant triangulation between three identities that all bear our name but serve different functions.
- The profile — the part we can actually work to build ourselves with a varying but large degree of agency.
- The persona — the version of the same that interfaces with the world in real time: in meetings, on stage, in negotiations, and is enmeshed with its perceptions.
- The self — the private human being, with its needs, wounds, genuine passions, and fatigue involved in coordinating all three.
Contemporary culture, most notably social media, has created conditions in which the wall between these three is collapsing and becoming more fraught. Audiences no longer want only the 'polished product' at the end of the process. They want proximity to the human in the thick of it all.
Vulnerability, once the domain of private life, is now currency, and authenticity, a brand value.
And so we are, in the best case, encouraged and in the worst, compelled, to open the aperture increasingly wider at a pace that leaves us with very little space to gauge our comfort levels with the degree of accuracy one would hope for in the entire process.
Meanwhile, the actual consequences that might be involved down the line are something we rarely have explained to us.
RESEARCH CONTEXT
Dr. Brené Brown, research professor at the University of Houston, has spent over two decades studying vulnerability, courage, and shame. Her findings are unambiguous: vulnerability is not weakness, it is our most accurate measure of courage and the necessary precondition for genuine connection. But her research also documents the armour we deploy to avoid it: perfectionism, cynicism, the need to be the "knower" rather than the learner. These are not personality flaws. They are learned survival strategies — often rewarded, particularly in professional environments.
I've been doing this long enough to experience what happens when honest, vulnerable communication is received not with reciprocity, but as an invitation to establish a power dynamic I did not intend to be entangled in.
I have also been on the other side, holding my ground, minus the levels of awareness that would qualify it for equality in the idealistic sense of the word.
Both positions are instructive and available to all of us, artist or not.
And this is where the science becomes uncomfortable in the most useful way. Research by psychologists Dacher Keltner, Deborah Gruenfeld, and Cameron Anderson at UC Berkeley and Stanford documents what they call the approach-inhibition theory of power.
In plain terms: elevated power activates approach tendencies, positive affect, attention to reward, and disinhibited behaviour. Reduced power activates inhibition tendencies like vigilance, attention to threat, and socially constrained behaviour.
RESEARCH CONTEXT
Keltner, Gruenfeld & Anderson (2003), "Power, Approach, and Inhibition," Psychological Review — one of the most replicated findings in social psychology, confirmed by a subsequent meta-analysis of 813 independent samples across 269,534 participants. Related work from Keltner's lab found that elevated social power is associated with diminished empathic accuracy and reduced compassion in response to another's distress — not because powerful people are inherently callous, but because power changes what the brain attends to.
Power doesn't just change what we do.
It changes what we notice, how we feel, and process our perception of other people.
The person who holds more power in a given interaction is neurologically predisposed to attend less carefully to our experience of it. This is less a moral judgement and more a documented feature of how the human brain responds to social position. And it operates everywhere: music, medicine (my parents were both acclaimed doctors), management, and down to the most seemingly ordinary human relationships.
We are consistently drawn to those who maintain an aura of unreachability, even as they list accessibility among their highest values. Understanding why this is tells us more about the human nervous system than any professional framework ever could.
When "access" as a product becomes theft
This brings me to one of the most brazen examples of 'accessibility' being commodified unethically. One that I find quite clarifying as a working musician, not because of the nuance we have been discussing so far, but the complete absence of the same.
Suno AI is a platform that allows anyone, regardless of musical training or ability, to generate what sounds like a professionally produced song from a text prompt.
Type a few words, press a button, receive a full track. Vocals, instrumentation, arrangement you got it all.
The 'pitch' is insultingly simple in its appeal: music, made 'accessible'.
No apparent gatekeepers, no conservatoire to establish training standards, no investment in practice needed. No need to collaborate with, compensate, or even acknowledge a single human musician.
The biggest problem (it is a significant one) is how the product actually works.
In June 2024, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group filed federal copyright infringement suits against Suno and its rival Udio, alleging what the RIAA described as the mass copying and exploitation of copyrighted sound recordings without permission.
The complaint was pointed: Suno, it alleged, had been deliberately evasive about what it copied because to answer honestly would be to admit wilful copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale.
LEGAL RECORD
The lawsuit, filed June 24, 2024 in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, alleges that Suno trained its models by stream-ripping recordings from YouTube and other sources, bypassing their anti-piracy encryption. An amended complaint filed in September 2024 expanded the accusation to include mass piracy of training data. The International Confederation of Music Publishers has described the broader practice across AI platforms as potentially the largest IP theft in human history. As of April 2026, the case against Suno by Sony and Universal remains active. Warner Music Group settled separately with Suno in November 2025 — not by exonerating the company, but by negotiating a licensing arrangement instead of continued litigation. Suno dropped its fair use defence as part of that settlement.
But the legal dimension, significant as it is, is not actually the sharpest part of this story for our purposes-the rhetorical one is.
The word Suno most consistently uses to describe what it offers is, of course, accessible.
Music for everyone. Creation without barriers. The 'democratisation' of sound.
What it does not say, what would make the pitch considerably less attractive, is that the apparent accessibility it offers rests on a foundation of inaccessibility imposed on others.
The human musicians, producers, and engineers whose work was ingested without consent, without credit, and without compensation to make the product function.
The decades of practice, collaboration, failure, growth, and earned understanding that were extracted as raw material and then repackaged as a feature that explicitly makes those decades apparently unnecessary.
While running the risk of feeling slightly tangential, this is a fantastic example of accessibility as strip-mining. The appearance of an open door, built from the timber of doors that were forced upon people clueless to the occurrence of any of the events behind closed doors.
That is where the Suno story rejoins the broader one with uncomfortable precision.
The mechanism is not new; it is simply a more technologically advanced version of an ancient dynamic: the appropriation of human depth and labour to produce the appearance of accessibility, while ensuring that the people whose depth and labour made it possible in the first place are excluded from the transaction.
And then music spoke
What I personally find the most fascinating (and a bit ironic, given that I have spent my entire life immersed in music), though, is a realization that actually quite positive and life-giving.
For all the complexity of the music industry, music itself — the actual organised arrangement of sound, the practice of making it together, contains a clarity about power, structure, beauty, and human relationship that the noise of the industry has always obscured.
Music is not just 'music' to me. It is my guiding light. A truth system. The reply to questions I often don't even know I was asking.
And every time I have stopped long enough to actually hear what it was saying the whole time, the moment has carried a slight sense of embarrassment at the amount of time needed to see that which was staring me in the face all the while.
Consider a symphony orchestra: a hundred and ten musicians, a conductor, stringent hierarchy, clearly defined sections, significant constraints on individual expression, and spontaneous freedom.
Now ask the question everyone tends to ask first: why all the rules?
Is it tradition? Elitism? An institution protecting its own structures?
None of the above can be dismissed, but the deeper answer, a more musical one, is something else entirely.
At that scale, the constraints are not ideological, but a bigger plan for a much larger sonic endeavour at harmony.
And with a hundred and ten players in a room, if every individual performer expressed themselves with random individual freedom simultaneously, the result would not be liberation, but dissonance to the point of noise.
Discipline is not in opposition to harmony. It is the precondition for it.
The orchestra is not hierarchical at its atomic level; it is responding to physical and sonic reality at an entirely different scale. The structure involved exists not to suppress what is being made, but to allow its existence in that expanded form in the first place.
Now reduce the ensemble. A string quartet, trio or duo, and the dynamic shifts immediately.
Not because someone decided to be more democratic, not by prior arrangement or ideology, but because the actual acoustic reality changed. With fewer voices, each carries more individual weight and audibility.
The freedom expands not due to rules being relaxed but because the physics simply permits more of it, and with that expanded freedom comes more space to stretch. A term musicians often use often to refer to refer to musical performances.
And then there's the solo performer: one person, silence, and nothing else.
Maximum freedom.
Maximum exposure.
Maximum responsibility.
But here's the thing: the structure has still not 'disappeared'. It's just been internalised entirely. A level of artistic demand completely exposed, with nowhere to hide and every choice visible. Every moment of contact, or its absence, audible.
The best solo performers have a masterful relationship with silence.
And the best orchestras know that the space they occupy within the same is sacred.
And the access the performer receives is, in reality, best handled with the appropriate capacity to handle it.
The Irony Deepens
Musicians — people who live and breathe this reality, who have embodied these truths for years in their hands and their ears and their nervous systems, are often among the first to miss their implication for every other domain in life. We resist structure in our businesses, our collaborations, our communications, and our inner lives, while simultaneously depending on it every time we pick up an instrument. The answer was always inside the music. We just kept forgetting to listen to what it was actually saying.
The law that holds everywhere.
Think about any organisation, team, community, or relationship you have been part of.
The larger it grows, the more formal its structure tends to become. More process, more hierarchy, more protocol.
Usually, we will resent this instinctively, as if structure itself were evidence of a threat to our agency. Accessibility being traded for hierarchy for hierarchy's sake.
But what if the structure is simply acoustic?
What if it is not evidence of power being hoarded, but of scale requiring coordination in order to function at all?
The real question is never "why so many rules?", but ''are those rules in service of a deeper purpose''?
A real purpose. One that genuinely matters. Not a self-serving display of power hidden behind discipline or institutionalized, industrial or corporate ego, but a deeper intentionality that transcends the entire spiel completely?
Because the moment structure stops serving 'the music' (music being the metaphor here), something predictable happens.
The language of accessibility gets louder than needed. Pompous open-door policies get announced. Values are written on the wall. It is the sound, I have come to recognise of an ensemble that has forgotten what harmony was ever supposed to be about.
David, Goliath, and the sling
I have been David in this story. Outgunned, under-resourced, finding unexpected angles, surviving.
I have also been something closer to Goliath, occupying space that someone else wished to enter and didn't have the means to.
Both are instructive and available to all when the context is in alignment with the larger picture.
And what I have come to understand is this:
Both are roles. Costumes that situations hand us. Costumes we can step into, often without noticing, and sometimes forget to step out of.
Also, systems are very good at 'casting' people.
Systems need Davids to sustain the myth that they can be beaten, and Goliaths to ensure the power stays concentrated.
Both roles serve the structure, and neither is the entire truth of who we are.
And the most challenging question in that arena is this; who am I when I am neither?
Hopefully, just a person engaged in something real with others trying to do the same, accountable to the work, each other, and nothing else.
Music taught me to tell the difference between a real connection and its performative version.
Between a structure that serves the sound and another that serves vested interests in its name.
A door that is truly open to those who want harmony, and the one with a glowing neon sign proclaiming 'access' to the same.
That, more than anything else I have learned in this profession, is why music remains my guiding light.
And I suspect, whether or not you have ever played a note in your life, that some part of you has always known the difference too.
Join my free training.
Artist Mindmap 2.0 is a reimagined 6-day email mini-course designed for serious, sensitive, and soulful artists who want more than
surface-level hacks.
0 Comments