Creativity Quote by Eberhard Weber

There is a quiet sting in Weber's pragmatism: artistry alone is not a sales strategy, and commerce rarely pretends otherwise. By framing a record around a "musical reason", he elevates intention to something like ethics. The point isn't romantic - it's almost managerial. A project earns its existence when it has a sonic problem to solve, a new texture to chase, a band chemistry that only happens once. That's a musician talking to other musicians, not a brand talking to consumers.

The subtext lands harder: the market doesn't reward seriousness in any reliable way. Even when the music has a clear internal logic, attention and sales are only "might". That hedge is doing real work. It acknowledges the cruel randomness of cultural visibility, especially in the jazz-adjacent world Weber comes from, where innovation often lives in the margins and marketing budgets are allergic to nuance. Quality can increase your odds; it cannot rig the game.

Weber's second sentence draws a stark map of modern musical hierarchy: either you're a pop star with built-in distribution (fame as infrastructure) or you're "lucky" (virality as lottery). What's conspicuously missing is any fantasy that hard work closes the gap. It's not bitterness so much as clarity: in an attention economy, the default outcome for sincere work is silence.

Context matters here. Weber built a career in a scene that prized long arcs, ensemble trust, and craft over hype. His remark reads like a modest manifesto for making fewer things, for the right reasons, in a culture that constantly pressures artists to release more, faster, and louder.