Pursuing a career as a musician can be challenging, rewarding, and full of ups and downs. While it’s important to never lose sight of the artistry and the motivation to create art in the first place, it’s also important to approach certain elements of your career like a business to give yourself the best shot at success.

Don’t shoot the messenger but there’s a reason it’s called the music business and not the music “hobby”! Whether you’re an artist, manager, or someone with another role in the music business, creating a sustainable, prosperous, and long career as a musician takes a balance of creativity and business savvy.

For clarity, this newsletter doesn’t suggest treating the motivation and intention behind your art as a business or treating your art as simply something that falls on a P&L - your art should be purposeful, meaningful, and created for the right reasons. This newsletter simply suggests a framework for thinking to build around the art that you’re proud of making.

This newsletter covers:

• 8 ways to approach treating your music career like a business (in no particular order)

Let’s dive in ⬇️ 

_{1) Product}

Everything starts with the music and making the absolute best possible art you’re capable of. Something you’re proud of and excited to share. Creating music is a very sacred and special experience - however, when thinking about how to market that music, build a fanbase, and grow your career, it can be helpful sometimes to approach that part of your career from the perspective of how to market and grow a product.

If artists want to earn a living, they’re not just making music and creating art - they’re running their own businesses.

If you want to build a fanbase and earn a living as a musician, you’re essentially trying to figure out a way to get your music (aka your product) in front of people so they can support it.

For example, when Apple rolls out a new product (for example a new iPhone) there’s an entire campaign around supporting that product - out-of-home marketing, their annual presentation, social media advertising, content, etc. They are doing everything they can to raise awareness, as opposed to just releasing it and hoping people discover or stumble upon it.

2) Building a team

“Great things in business are never done by one person - they’re done by a team of people.” - Steve Jobs

While artists are certainly the epicenter of their careers and executing their vision, it takes a team to achieve longevity.

While some artists are self-managed, record their music, and handle their own marketing, it’s challenging for them to play every single role at a high level (and sometimes challenging for them to play specific roles because of relationships or experience).

Here are a few examples of roles worth thinking about when building your team.

• Manager - responsible for guiding an artist’s overall career, helping execute their vision, and creating opportunities

• Record label - depending on the artist's needs and where they are in their career, if they sign to a record label they can have the support of that label’s team and their resources (expertise, staff, financial, relationships, visibility, etc that come with it)

• Content creator - a videographer or content creator who specializes in video content creation. Someone to help the artist create content that will help raise awareness for their music and ideally can film as well as edit

• Digital marketer - help run the artist's social media (if needed) and execute digital marketing strategies to help the artist grow their fanbase online, increase visibility, and monetize

• Booking agent - establishing the artist in the live performance space, routing tours, booking shows, etc

• Business Manager - someone to help manage the artist’s business affairs - accounting, money management, etc

• Attorney - representing the artist in a legal capacity

• Publicist - setting up interviews, press coverage, and creating opportunities in the press world

*There are certainly more roles, these are just a few

3) Economics & scale

What are the economics of each artist’s specific situation? For example, there are a few important questions worth thinking about…

1) How much money does that artist need to live and be happy?

2) How do they plan on earning that money? (establishing core pillars like streaming, touring, merch, etc)

3) How much does it cost for them to create their art and based on those costs, how much do they need to earn to see a profit? For example…

How much does it cost to create 1 song? - including production, recording, mixing, mastering and artwork? If it costs X amount to create 1 song and you want to try and create and release X songs per year, how much will that cost in total?

How much does marketing a song you really believe in look like in your opinion? Is it $100? Is it a few thousand?

Being able to answer these questions can help understand the full scope of your operation and help make decisions to maximize success and build an operation that’s scalable.

4) Marketing your product

I wish building a fanbase was as easy as uploading a song and your fans finding you but unfortunately, it takes marketing and a lot of hard work to build a fanbase.

What does marketing look like for you? Who are your potential fans and the people who would support your music? What value are you giving them to incentivize them to support you?

5) Murphys Law

What can go wrong at some point will! It’s important to be prepared and have a backup plan so you don’t get caught off guard.

There’s value in always having alternatives and backup options for the different parts of your “engine”.

For example, if your videographer takes another gig and can no longer help you create content, what do you do? Do you stop creating content or have other alternatives / find someone else?

If your engineer moves to the other side of the country and can’t record you anymore, what might a plan B look like in those challenging circumstances?

6) Relationship building

The music industry is a relationship business at heart. Whether you’re an artist, manager, publicist, marketer, etc, a certain amount of your success (whether we want to admit it or not) will be contingent upon your relationships and the opportunities that those relationships create for you.

Nurturing relationships will help create opportunities over the long run - for example, collaborating with other artists, opening up for shows, brand partnerships, etc.

In addition to networking vertically, networking horizontally amongst your peers is also crucial!

7) Understand the landscape

Just as businesses are aware of what their competitors or similar businesses are doing, it’s important to do the same.

What are your peers or similar artists doing to market themselves?

How are they rolling out music?

If you’re an artist manager, what are other managers doing to create opportunities for their artists?

It’s important to always evaluate the landscape and also understand how artists are gaining success at any given time.

Is it a specific platform, part of their career, etc?

8) Do good business

Above everything else, treating people the way you want to be treated is always the #1 most important thing.

Not only because it’s the right thing to do on a human level, but because it’s a small business and you don’t want to burn bridges.

Hopefully, these thoughts were helpful.

Thanks for reading, until next time.

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