It’s really hard to know how to play the artist game and go from essentially nothing to releasing your own music, playing concerts and connecting to an audience. There’s no one-size-fits-all formula for developing as an artist. There are too many factors involved, like how you define success, your personal life circumstances, the type of music you make, what connections you have, and the list goes on and on. But as far as developing a career goes, I’ve found 3 paradigm-shifting things to be true and useful as a way of approaching my music. And so far, they’ve allowed me to inch my way forward in the music world! (Watch my previous video, if you wanna know more about my journey)
3 Things That Shifted My Artist Game
- A label won’t save you from a pennyless existence. Of course there are different types of deals out there. But most labels nowadays essentially work like banks with small high interest loans. If you get a deal where they pay an advance, all costs will have to be recouped before you get your share. In the worst case you’ll be indepted to your label, if your music doesn’t generate the success that the label and you hoped for. And this happens more often than not. With some deals the label may provide you with a team of people to work with, but you won’t be in creative control and you won’t own your recordings. Aside from that, any reputable label is very unlikely to even consider you, if you haven’t shown that you are connecting to an audience and have strong material. And in my entrepreneurial mind, this brings up the question: If I’m able to attract my own audience and I can produce my own songs, why would I even give up ownership and control of my music journey? And I’m not saying that all labels and all deals are bad. I’ll happily take a deal that benefits both, me and the label and makes sense for my artistic goals. But what I mean is that if you wanna live the life of an artist, release your music, play concerts and connect to an audience, you don’t need anyone’s permission, but your own. And you gotta just go out there and do it. Before I learned about the music releasing process, I had this completely outdated idea in my mind where I felt like I needed to be picked. And if somebody discovered me, that would be the door to success. Truth is, you have to pick yourself and put in the work! And this leads me to my second point:
- Your craft is your main job as an artist – especially if you’re just starting out. There’s loads of noise around the topic of music marketing and it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that you can just make a couple of songs and they’ll blow up, if you just use the right marketing strategies. But the reality is, your songs need to be remarkable for strangers to be interested in them. Even if you may be able to attract people with ads and loads of non-music related organic content, if they don’t love you for your music, chances are high they won’t stick around for that. And this is brutal to hear when you’re starting out. I know from my own experience how vulnerable your songwriting can be when you’re just starting out and you’re not used to getting feedback on your songs. I myself had to grow into detaching my ego from what I make over time, and I absolutely get if you’re in a place, where you don’t want your songs critiqued. With that being said, your craft is the most important thing when it comes to your music journey. It’s the base of how you build a career as an artist. This is what makes up your unique contribution that can touch and move other people. And it’s what people are fascinated by when it comes to artists. At the core of your craft are your ears, your musicianship, your skills and your taste. Those are the things that will then define how your ideas translate into the songs and then the artistic world you create that then in turn is appreciated by other people. You may have amazing musical ideas in your mind, but if you don’t have the skills to translate your ideas into something other people can hear the way you hear it, you’re not doing those ideas of yours justice. So honor your creative practice! And this brings me to my last point.
- Craft is a practice and you get better at communicating your ideas and visions by simply doing it regularly and iterating in the aftermath. Whether you’re focused on your songwriting, singing, producing, mixing, performing or your visual art – it’s all a practice. And this is interesting, because coming from an athletic background, I’ve always known this to be true in sports, or any physical discipline. But for some reason, songwriting and maybe art in general is often seen under a different paradigm. Like true art comes from this unknown place of inspiration and artistic talents are born out of nowhere. But I think there is a fallacy here, because ideas are emergent in nature. We can’t actively make an idea. It arises in the mind and it can feel truly magical, so it may feel like it’s not under your influence. But you as the practitioner absolutely have an influence on your creative output, both in quantity and quality. And the best way to describe the way I see it, is like you’re tending to a garden: Your artistic world is a garden and your song ideas are the seeds that can grow into plants and make up your garden. It’s your job to make sure your plants have the space, the right soil and that you are using your skills and tools to give them what they need to facilitate their growth. Every garden can look different. It can be more wild, or more cultivated and you can pick the seeds you wanna grow and see which plants are symbiotic. You may wanna keep some of the fruits your plants bear to yourself, and you may wanna give others away for other people to enjoy them. Anyway, you get my point. So the way I tend to my music is by showing up for my songwriting practice. And what that looks like is, I simply make space for that to happen and for my mind to drift. But it can also look like journalling, taking a walk and discovering new music, practicing my set and being playful with it, or spending hours in front of my DAW. I encourage you to think of your creative practice as this space in your life that you get to completely make your own!
That’s it! I hope this is helpful and inspires you to take action towards the thing you love ❤️
Happy songwriting,