The music industry's silent killer

It takes a certain kind of delusion to work in the music industry, the kind that keeps you pushing forward despite every single door in front of you being closed in your face, the kind that lets it occupy your every waking thought, strip your time away, remove the sacred nature of weekends, and generally lose yourself in the vastness of it. And with all this being said you’d be right to assume that I’d be naming anxiety as the “silent killer.” But today I’m coming for something else, something which is honestly entirely avoidable, and which isn’t just limited to the music industry — I call it silent rejection.

It’s a simple idea: you send an email, a text, or leave a voicemail — and instead of any kind of acknowledgement, even an automated response, you get nothing. Nada. Zip. It’s the killer of spirits, the destroyer of confidence, the slayer of all those who seek to grow in their art. There is zero way to tell if the message landed, was actually read, taken in, or processed. You might as well have shouted into the void.

And yes, I can hear the voices of many in the industry — and other industries — saying “it’s impossible to respond to everything, it’s impractical, I can’t keep up, etc.” And yes, it’s a lot of work to respond to everything, I agree. But it’s also the key to the health of our cultural milieu. Songs take time to craft, and many of the best mean a great deal to those who crafted them — and often the demand of those further down the line is that the song should be well-produced and well-mixed. This takes more time, hours or days depending on the scope, and a response would take a fraction of the time. A simple “thanks for sending,” “this is great,” or “this doesn’t work, thanks though” is all that is needed in return.

And it isn’t only music. Silent rejection shows up everywhere: job applications that disappear into portals, unanswered texts from friends, ghosted messages on dating apps, even family communications that go unacknowledged. What they all share is the same corrosive effect — the silence doesn’t just close a door, it leaves us questioning whether the door was even there in the first place. Our brains fill the gap with doubt, and often with self-blame.

That’s the hidden cost. Rejection stings, but at least rejection gives us something to hold onto, a chance to pivot or learn or simply grieve and move forward. Silence offers no such gift. It forces us into a loop of second-guessing, and over time, it chips away at confidence and connection.

But here’s the hopeful part: this is fixable. It doesn’t take hours of someone’s time to prevent silent rejection. It takes seconds — a line of acknowledgement, a word of gratitude, even an automated reply that says “I see you.” And when we do that, we don’t just make someone else’s day a little lighter; we keep alive the human thread in a world that is increasingly stretched thin.

Maybe we won’t end silence everywhere. Maybe unanswered emails and ghosted messages are just part of the modern landscape. But we can choose, in our own corner of it, to do better. To treat acknowledgment as a kind of kindness, and to remind ourselves that behind every message is a person who risked vulnerability just to send it.

And if you find yourself on the receiving end of silence — as we all inevitably do — maybe the task is to resist drawing conclusions too quickly. Sometimes the silence is about bandwidth, not worth. Sometimes it’s about circumstance, not value. Which means our work is not only to advocate for a culture of acknowledgement, but also to cultivate resilience in the face of its absence.

Because the truth is, silence will happen. But how we choose to answer it — with cynicism or with persistence, with bitterness or with grace — that’s where resilience is built and nurtured, and a new culture born.