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Being a musician/artist means you also have to be an entrepreneur, so there are many hats we have to wear in order to successfully pursue it.  In addition to the artistic side (songwriting, arranging, bandleading, performing, etc.) you have to also run the business side (booking, promoting, networking, bookkeeping, etc.).

The other day someone told me a keen observation: when you have so many hats to wear, the #1 thing you do the best gets lost in the sea of chores.  It takes you away from what you do best, and it’s very easy for you to get burned out.

That made me remember my college-era mentor telling me another important insight.  All jobs demand life out of you.  The one you want is the one that gives it back.

That was a great insight for me, as I am able to wear many hats — and I do quite well on some and I even enjoy them.  But the question is, are all of them my Doing-Is-My-Reward activities?

No.

For example, I am an able web developer but unless I get paid or someone asks me to do it, I’ll never program anything ever again.  Sure, it’s kind of fun and I do it well, but at the end of the day, it’s still a life-sucker activity.  I don’t do it unless I have external motivations associated with it. Tolerable, sure.  More than tolerable — it’s a great job.  But is doing it rewarding by itself?  No.

And as I reflected on my career directions this fall, I came up with a number of activities/directions I could be engaging in, but it seemed like there was nothing I wanted to do unless there were external rewards attached to them.  Like this:

Activity -> Result = Reward

So if you take away the result, the activity itself isn’t rewarding.

This applies to any career but I just had to ask myself.  Is being a musician a reward on its own?  Would I still do it even if there was no pay, no recognition, no other rewards?  (As Klingons will say — “Will it bring your family HONOR?”)

I realized that ideas after ideas, they were all motivated by the proposed results they would bring in.  Like blogging or establishing an online business or even gigging.  I have to admit, I’m not one of those guys who would still enjoy performing even if there wasn’t any attentive audience — like playing some background music at a party or a restaurant.  Sure, you can turn heads if you can put in some soul-stirring performance — but that’s really not me.  I need the support and energy of attentive audience in order to enjoy performing.

So after I nixed away all the activities, it seemed like there wasn’t anything left after that.  I felt empty and hopeless, like I didn’t have any reason to get out of bed.

Then one day I happened to listen to my own first album.  And it hit me like a ten-ton hammer.  I love realizing my musical vision. By that, I mean I love not only writing new songs, but arranging them and recording them, so that my songs are completely realized to their full potential.  For a while I considered releasing videos of myself playing my songs in my studio and/or hitting some open-mic circuits that to get out and play, but they weren’t exactly motivating to me.  This is why — because just singing by myself with my acoustic guitar isn’t really enough to make my songs come alive.  I want to hear my songs with all the instruments and layering necessary, so that they are as good as I knew they could be.

Now, that is an activity where doing it is its own reward for me.  Finally, I nailed down the thing where:

Activity = Reward

is true.  No need for external results here.  I will write songs and record them because that’s fun and rewarding all by itself. I don’t need anybody to pay me or ask me to do it.

Having discovered this, I am now giving myself permission to focus all my available resources and efforts primarily into that one activity.  This is not a business plan or a career move — some may think it’s suicidal, as I’ll be ditching most promotional activities — but this is what I must do.  Shed all the extras and just focus on the life-giving activity.

It feels to me like I was a vehicle that requires a very specific type of fuel, and for so long I made myself run with fuel that had so much additive and dilution that I really wasn’t able to run long nor fast.  But even just a little spoon of the pure and exact fuel type I needed — and now I can really go.  The difference is night and day.

Finally, I feel alive — and am glad to be.  I’m getting started.

People focus too much on effectiveness, and while that’s not wrong, effectiveness can be tweaked, improved and sharpened over time.

The true secret to a successful strategy is to make it sustainable.

This applies to everyone but particularly true for musicians.  We get into this because we like music — playing it, making it, recording it, etc.  But with it comes the rest of “business” — promoting, schmoozing, booking, tweeting, and so on.

There are many how-to info out there that claim to make you successful.  But the problem is, they don’t take who you are into account.

Back when I released my first album, I promoted it heavily on MySpace, because Your Favorite Enemies was very successful with that approach.

9 months later, I got so burned out that I just couldn’t go on.  I did many things right as far as I could tell, and my fan base was growing — if slowly (YFE has 7 members, I was by myself) — but getting burned out and not logging in for a long time just burned down most of what I built during that time.

Definitely not a successful strategy.

Derek Sivers says it well when he says “Do what excites/scares you.  Don’t do what drains you.”

I’m still trying to figure out what a successful strategy for me is.  But one lesson I learned: it better be sustainable.   If it’s even half way effective, if I can sustain it, it’ll build.

So, don’t blindly accept other people’s success methods without taking compatibility with yourself into account.  If you hate parties, don’t attend them.  If you hate going online, stay offline.  If you like drawing, incorporate that.  If you like biking, incorporate that.

Make up a career strategy stuff full of activities that excite you, and boldly ignore the rest of good advices.

So that you can sustain it.

Most artists go and record an album because they thing it’s “the thing to do.” While I don’t disagree that it’s a thing to do in your pursuit of a career as an original artist, but it’s a good idea to pause for a moment and ask yourself “why.”

There are many good reasons why you should record an album, but off the top of my head, I can think of three big ones:

1. You want to sell it to make a profit.
2. You want to use it as a promotional tool to get as many people as possible to know your act or come to your gig.
3. You want to showcase your talent/songs.

Now, they are not exactly mutually exclusive, let’s just say that it’s extremely hard to do all of them extremely well at the same time.

Consider for a moment.  If your goal is to make a maximum profit, you may want to reserve some money to promote the album instead of spending it all on production.  In fact, you may want to spend as little as possible on the production as you can get away with, so that it’ll increase your profitability.

On the other hand, if your goal is #2, you may want to forget about profits — and give away your recordings for free.  That way it’ll make the maximum impact on your promotions, and your visibility may help you move forward.

Or if you want to make an album as a showcase, then you’ll want to put everything you got into your production, and never mind what happens afterward.  Having a great showcase of your talents can be your greatest asset — it may woo and impress the important people, if not that many of them, that you’ll want to attract.

I’m sure for most of us, our goals are varying mixes of three.  When I made my first album, my goal was to see if I can do it by myself.  I did everything on my own, and I never let anyone else listen to my work in progress until the very final stages of mixing.  My experiment was to see if I made a record that appealed to nothing but my own taste, if people would like it.   Judging by the responses I got from my listeners, I think my experiment was a success.

But beyond that, I didn’t have very clear idea how I was going to use my album to further my career.  I spent about 9 months on a diligent MySpace campaign, then got burned out doing that, and took a break from my own music.  As I am pondering resuming and thinking about my next album, I realize how my lack of vision/strategy really made me spend my time and resources in an inefficient way.  Lesson learned, I hope to make a bigger impact when I release my next one.

What about you?  What are you setting out to accomplish with your album?  Ponder for a moment and write them down — it’ll help you make decisions throughout your recording, releasing and promoting process.

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I’m sure we’ve all done it: playing to an empty house. And my story is probably a familiar one, if not mirroring your own.

Back when I was performing as a solo singer/songwriter, this is what happened all the time.  I was getting whatever gigs that I could get, thinking that a little exposure is better than no exposure.  And I was counting on the club or the coffeehouse to have a “house crowd” that I could play to, because while I always had friends, the kind of people I associated with were seldom bar patrons or live music enthusiasts.  But the venue was counting on the acts to bring in the crowd — thus, both parties looking to the other to produce the audience.

On another level, I knew that playing with an acoustic guitar by myself, I was never that good.  While I could write songs that sounded good with just an acoustic guitar, it sounded so incomplete and boring to my mind.  And my singing isn’t my strongest suit — I would never impress anybody with my vocal= prowess alone.  I knew that my strength was in songwriting and arranging and without a band to bring out the intricacies of my songs, my performance was flat.  (continue reading…)

One of the ultimate dreams of musicians — particularly, songwriters, composers and “artists” — is to make a living making music you love.  Not only you are “in” the music business, but you are one of the elite few who just do what you please.

It certainly sounds attractive to me.  No bosses to boss you around, no clients to please — just make the music that makes your heart sing, and get paid for doing it.

But there is a catch there, isn’t there?

Yes.  The catch is this: you can’t do it.  It’s not a theoretic impossibility, but realistically, no.  You need to be both extremely exceptionally talented, and equally exceptionally lucky.  So, no ma’am.  You can’t expect your life to be that exceptional. (continue reading…)