Adele’s latest album, 25, was released last Friday. In a decision similar to Taylor Swift’s decision last year to pull her album 1989 from Spotify, Adele and her label have chosen to not make her latest album available on popular streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. I recently came across an article on the popular website Digital Music News called "Why I Will Not Buy Adele's new album 25", about why the author, Ari Herstand, feels like Adele is being greedy by removing her album from sites like Spotify and consequently Ari won't be buying it. You can read the entire article here if you’re interested. Essentially Ari's thesis is that streaming is here to stay, it’s what consumers want and that Adele is being greedy by trying to make extra money through CD and download sales instead of just giving the public what they want via sites like Spotify and Apple Play. WTF?!! I agree with Ari in that consumers seem to prefer streaming over buying cds and downloads. No surprise there. But why wouldn’t they? Are consumers always right? I don’t think so, especially when what they want doesn’t really work out to be a viable business model for the majority of artists involved. I’d prefer that my local grocery store just gave me my groceries or offered me a free meal a day, but they probably wouldn’t stay in business that long if they did that. It’s really no surprise at all to me that consumers are choosing to not pay for music (or paying very little) over paying for music, but this is in no way an indication that this is a healthy move for the music industry. Of course people would rather have something for nothing. Proponents of sites like Spotify point out that Spotify benefits artists more than it hurts them because it brings extra exposure and can increase ticket sales at concerts. I’m sure this is the case for some artists, but this still doesn’t mean it’s a good business model. I’m sure if pre-internet days, stores like Target and Best Buy just gave CDs away that artists would get a few more people to go to their shows. But they didn’t do that. Do you want to know why? Because that would have been stupid. So why is it a good idea now just because we have the technology to make giving art away easier? Now I realize with Spotify they’re not literally giving it away. They do collect some money and redistribute it to artists. But as we all know, for the vast majority of artists, it’s nowhere near the money earned from actually selling music via CDs and downloads. Over the last couple years I’ve gone back and forth on my feelings about sites like Spotify. Last year I made a video where I sort of defended Spotify and urged musicians to give them a chance to grow and collect revenue. I argued along the same lines as Ari and basically said that consumers have spoken and this is where we’re headed. So instead of fighting it, let’s embrace it and make the most of this new business paradigm. Something like that. But here’s the thing… none of this is set in stone. The music business is not set on some sort of pre-destined track from which there is no going back or changing direction. Just because we have technology that allows us to give our art away more easily than ever before doesn’t mean we have to. Just because consumers would prefer to get something for free or next to free doesn’t mean we have to give it to them. Just because the music business is in a hole doesn’t mean it has to stay there. We have to strike a healthy balance between promoting our art and selling it. Artists, as both Taylor Swift and Adele have demonstrated, don't have to stream their music. There's no one holding a gun to their heads. The music industry is comprised of essentially three groups of people; artists, middlemen (record labels, Spotify, etc) and consumers of music. Each group is helping to steer the direction of the music business. We all have a hand on the wheel. To argue that consumers have the most important role in determining the future of the music industry is silly. If anything, the artists themselves should play the biggest role in how things play out. After all, if artists don’t have a viable way to make a sustainable income from their art, there isn’t going to be a whole lot of art being made. I’m both surprised and delighted at how much good music is still being made given the current state of the music industry. It truly speaks to the passion that musicians have for making and sharing their art. Last year Taylor Swift decided to remove her album, 1989, from Spotify. It became the biggest selling album of the year, selling 3.66 million copies in just nine weeks. As of today, November 23, Adele’s latest album is projected to sell at least 2.5 million copies in its first week. That would be the biggest single week sales for any artist since at least 1991 when Soundscan started tracking sales. On Itunes alone, 25 sold 900,000 downloads the first day it was released, last Friday. Consumers have spoken and they’re still willing to pay for music they really, really like. Editors Note: Ari is doing good work over at Digital Music News and I suggest checking out his site as in general I appreciate the contribution Ari provides to our community, but on this issue I simply disagree.
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Today's post is about an idea that I keep coming back to over and over in my life. It's the idea that if you want to be successful in anything in life, whether it's music, relationships, business.... you name it... It's completely up to you to make it happen. Whatever you really want in life you can have, I truly believe that. Even success in the music business. Whatever experiences you want to have are out there waiting to be had. Whatever success you want to achieve is possible. Whatever you really want to do you can do. But... and this is a big but and I think what holds most people back, at the end of the day, it's completely up to you to make it happen.
I'm sure we've all heard before that nobody cares about our own success more than we do. It's completely true. It's not true because no one cares about you, it's not true because people are cold and mean, although a few are. It's true because it's just the way it is. Other people have their own dreams, their own desires and their own struggles. Other people are too busy with their own lives to care that much about yours. No one cares about your own success more than you. So how can you apply this to the music business and your dreams and goals? Do you have lofty aspirations and starry eyed dreams? Big deal. Most people have those from time to time. Dreams are a dime dozen. Do you think you're special because you have big dreams? You're not. We all have dreams and desires. Things we long for deep down. They're beautiful things don't get me wrong, but they're not inherently special and they don't make you inherently special. Do you think you’re special because you're talented? I think innate talent is a little more rare than just having dreams, but it's still not that big of a deal in and of itself. A lot of people have mad talent and don't do anything with it. What it really boils down to is what you do with your dreams and talent. It's all about the execution. It's up to you to make "it" happen. Whatever "it" is for you. No one is going to do it for you. I'll be the first to admit I've yet to achieve all my dreams and goals. So don't think that I'm up on my high horse being all preachy telling you what you need to do. I'm only sharing with you realizations I've come to after many ups in downs in both music and life. No one is responsible for my life but me. No one else is responsible for my happiness, my sense of self worth, my interactions with people and certainly not my success in music. And the same goes for you. If you want to succeed in music take responsibility and make it happen. Don't be a victim and bitch about all the things outside of your control like the economy, declining album sales, the public's bad taste in music and on and on. There might be truth in a lot of these things, but it makes no sense to focus on them. Focus on the one thing you can really control... yourself. If you want to make money from your music, make music that’s worth paying for. If you want people to spread the art that you’re creating, make art that’s remarkable that people will be inspired to share. If you think there are circumstances outside of you holding you back, think again. There is no one preventing you from creating and sharing your best work, but yourself. What are you going to do today to move your career forward? What can you do all by yourself right now to move yourself in the direction you want to go? Think about it. I guarantee no one else is going to care about the answers to these questions more than you are. I would tell you all about the new CD I'm working on and the awesome producer I have working on it and all the projects I have in the works right now. But would you really care? I doubt it and I have absolutely no problem with that. Let’s say that you really, really wanted to make it in the music business. Let’s say that this goal of yours was so important and that your desire to make it a reality was so strong that you simply couldn’t be stopped. Imagine that your will and determination were so powerful that you simply figured out a way to make it happen. Can you imagine that it would be possible? What if your goal of making your dreams come true were actually a matter of life and death? Do you think if your dreams were actually that important to you that you could figure out a way to make them come true? Do you think you would take your goals more seriously if they were actually urgent goals that you simply had to achieve?
I think one of the main reasons most musicians don’t realize their dreams is because ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, realizing our dreams isn’t that urgent. For most of us, whether we make it or not in the music business isn’t really a life or death situation. If we don’t realize our goals as musicians, it’s all too easy to fall back on other things as a way to pay the bills and get by in life. We take jobs we don’t really love but pay the bills. We work odd jobs utilizing different skills we have to carve out a living. We start completely unrelated businesses and enterprises as a way to support ourselves and do music on the side. There’s nothing wrong with supporting ourselves doing something other than music and pursuing music on the side. But let’s imagine a scenario, just for fun, where you succeeding in the music business was literally a life or death situation. Imagine, again just for fun, that someone had a gun shoved to your head and you had to figure out a way to make your dream a reality or you would lose your life. Let’s say that you were given two years to make it a reality. If you failed your mission, you would die. If you succeeded, you’d get to live your dream life. Do you think you could come up with a plan that you could execute to make your dreams come true in this scenario? I’d imagine in this scenario you’d be able to look at your situation in a way that made you see things differently. I think it’s fair to say that most of us aren’t really pursuing our goals with this sort of intensity and urgency. I think most us, at the end of the day, aren’t really that worried about whether we make it big in the music business or not. Sure, we have goals and they’re important to us, but we know either way it will all work out. It’s unlikely that anyone reading this will end up on the streets if their dreams don’t come true. That’s good and bad. It’s comforting to know that no matter what happens in our lives, we probably won’t end up destitute and in despair. Most of my readers live in countries that are developed to the point of relative economic prosperity. Most of us don’t have a problem getting by and supporting ourselves. Most of us have food in the refrigerator and a roof over our heads. Sure, we all have our struggles and challenges, but for most us, our lives aren’t literally dependent on making our dreams come true. I’m sure most of you reading this would love to realize your dreams, but you know deep down, that if you don’t, you’ll probably be ok. But what if this weren’t the case? What if you actually HAD to come up with a plan to succeed, whatever that means to you, or you would literally die? I know if I were put under this pressure I could probably come up with some new and unique ways to both define what success is to me and figure out a map for getting there. If there really were that sort of pressure for becoming successful in the music business, I’m confident I could at least come up with a plan to become more successful than I am currently. Do you think if making it in the music business were actually something you HAD to do you could figure out a way to make it happen? I propose we do an exercise. Let’s pretend that making our dreams come true is actually a life or death situation. Let’s pretend, just as a sort of intellectual game, that we really have to figure out a way to realize our dreams or we actually lose our chance to keep living. Of course we’ll know that it’s not real, so that might allow us to cheat a little bit. But imagine a life where you were actually living your wildest dreams. What would that look like for you? Now imagine that you have a gun pointed to your head and you have two years to make this vision of your life a reality. Our imaginary gunmen is reasonable though, not only is he giving you two years to make your dreams come true, he’s also going to let you define what success means to you. Of course, I’ve already established that success, as most people define it, doesn’t make us happy (see my recent blog post). But imagine creating a life where you actually met your own expectations in terms of success, and got to live a life doing more or less what you wanted to do and made plenty of money as a result to meet all your basic needs and then some. I think there would be some very tangible benefits to living this sort of lifestyle. So, play along with me. Let’s pretend we have to figure out a way to make our version of success a reality. The stakes are high. It’s all or nothing. Defining Success If I had a gun pointed to my head and I had to figure out how to make my dreams come true, I imagine the first step would be to actually define what my dreams and goals are. What they really are. Not the childish version of my dreams where I simply had the vague goal of becoming a “rock star”. For this exercise, let’s dig deep and really examine what our goals are, why we have them and how to make them a reality. Of course, I can’t do this for you. You’ll have to figure this part out for yourself. But I’ll walk you through my thought process, so you can do the same. If I’m really honest with myself, I don’t really care If I become a rock star or not and truth be told, that’s probably why I’m not a rock star. It’s just not that important of a goal, if I’m really, really honest. That particular dream of mine was a sort of adolescent dream I had when I was much younger. If I’m honest with myself it was largely based on ego and not really having an understanding of what makes people happy and what true success is. I think it’s important to really develop goals based on who you are now and not who you used to be. We all age and evolve and it’s normal that our goals change as we get older and mature. I used to imagine that having tons of money, being a household name, having girls throw themselves at me and getting paid to travel the world would be pretty cool. Ok, I admit it, it still sounds pretty cool, but these days I’m much more concerned with leaving a legacy behind and getting my music and message out on a wider scale than becoming a household name ala “Bon Jovi” or “Justin Bieber”. This might sound like the same goal, and it probably does overlap a little with the idea of wanting to become famous. But it’s rooted in a much different place. When you’re simply chasing success and fame, you’re really coming from a place of ego and your need for validation. But when you’re really in it for the love of creating art and spreading joy in the world you’re coming from a much different place, that, at least in my opinion, is based on something more solid. It’s much easier to not get discouraged and stay positive and focused if you’re simply trying to share your love of music with the world. If you’re doing it for egotistical reasons it’s easy to get discouraged and take things personally if you don’t succeed at the rate you think you should be succeeding. So, in my case, knowing that I’m not really that worried about whether I become a bona fide rock star or not, but that I do really do want to get my music out on a wider scale and work on leaving more of a legacy behind, I need to plan accordingly. Although I often talk about how there isn’t really a clear formula for “making it” in the music business, the reality is there are things we can work on every day to move forward in the music business. It’s just a matter of getting really clear about what our goals really are and determining what steps we need to take. Sometimes it’s a matter of really doing some soul searching and being honest with ourselves about both what we want and what we truly believe we’re capable of. For me, ultimate success in the music business would mean making plenty of money to live on from my music and being able to wake up every day and create music that a large audience would listen to and appreciate. It wouldn’t necessarily involve touring the world and playing stadiums, but it would mean getting my music out on a much larger scale, to a much larger audience and gaining more respect for the music I make. Think being able to tour and play small theatres versus playing stadiums and having hordes of people waiting for you everywhere you go like U2, The Rolling Stones or Katy Perry. Think of having enough of a devoted following to support my independent album releases versus going platinum like Taylor Swift. So with those goals in mind, here are a few things I can think of right off the top of my head that I would need to do if I had that proverbial gun pointed to my head and had to figure out a way to be more successful:
The bottom line is that I think most of us could figure out ways to move our careers along faster if we really had to. If we really had a gun pointed to our head, I bet most of us could come up with some pretty creative ways to become more successful. Of course, the reality is that for most of us, making our dreams come true isn’t a life or death matter. But what if it were? What would you do differently if your life literally depended on you figuring out how to succeed in the music business? Share your thoughts below.
I’ve been meditating off and on for the last twenty years. When I was younger I sort of dabbled in meditation. I would get really into it for a few weeks or months and then I would invariably drift away from it due to life circumstances. When my schedule got busy and hectic it would become harder to find the time to do it and I would stop for a period of time. As my schedule quieted down, I would then resume my practice. I was off and on for many years. I could see the benefit of meditating, but found it hard to maintain a regular practice due to my busy schedule. The last couple years I’ve made a much more concerted effort to maintain a regular practice and have meditated this year more or less every day for at least 20 minutes a day. This year I’ve noticed some dramatic changes in my life that I attribute, at least in part, to my meditation practice. In this post I’m going to explore my experience with meditation, how it’s improved my life and how it can improve yours, if you’re open to trying it.
What is meditation? There are different forms of meditation and I’m not going to get into all the different meditation techniques or the “how to” of meditation in this post. There are tons of resources online if you’re interested in exploring meditation and finding a technique or techniques that work for you. I like to think of meditation as going “under the hood” of your conscious thoughts. We all have a constant stream of thoughts running through our head all day long. We have a story that we constantly our telling ourselves about our relationships, our careers, our self-identity and so on. This story we tell ourselves is a combination of beliefs and ideas we’ve developed from our family, friends, the media and basically everyone we’ve interacted with throughout our lives. Thinking happens more or less automatically. We don’t have to try to think. We just…. think…. all the time. Thinking is an amazing tool and we would be lost without our ability to think and make sense of the world. The problem though is that we do it so much, that it’s easy to sort of lose ourselves in our thinking mind and mistake who we really are for our thoughts. An expression that explains this well is that “it’s hard to see the spot you’re standing on”. In other words, most of us are so in our heads and thoughts, that it’s hard to be truly objective about our own lives and our place in the world. We tend to get lost in the story we’re telling ourselves. Meditation is a powerful tool to help you pull back from your “story” and see things more clearly and objectively. Let’s use music as an analogy. If our regular, day to day thoughts are happening at 220 bpm, when you meditate you can slow those thoughts down to around 40 bpm. I’m of course just picking arbitrary numbers to make an example. But through meditation, we can quiet our minds down to the point where we’re sort of detached and observing our thoughts, as opposed to our regular waking consciousness, that for most of us feels like we are our thoughts. Benefits Of Meditation According to researchers, meditation has a number of tangible benefits. Meditation reduces stress, lowers blood pressure, improves immune system functioning, improves cardiovascular health, it improves feelings of happiness and it slows down the aging process. Meditation is good for your health. However, the benefits of meditation go far beyond just improving your physical health. When you meditate and observe your thoughts in this way, a number of interesting things happen. For starters, you begin to see more clearly the nature of your own thinking, which is that it happens more or less automatically. It’s happening all the time, whether you want it to or not. You can’t really control your thoughts, although you can certainly influence the direction they go in and through meditation you can slow them down, which by itself, is very calming and relaxing. Perhaps most profoundly, meditation allows you to see that you are not your thoughts, but that your thoughts are happening through you. Another great benefit of meditation that I’ve experienced is getting insights either during meditation or shortly after I meditate. There’s something about quieting the mind that allows you to think more clearly and see situations in your life more objectively. You become the witness to your own story, as opposed to being the story. I believe, and I really have no way of proving this, but my experience has been that meditation can speed up insights and lessons that we need to get in order to progress in life. I believe meditation can provide the lens through which we can expedite our spiritual and personal growth. I’ll tell you a story that illustrates what I’m talking about… Earlier in the year I was dating my ex-girlfriend of several years. We had reached a point in our relationship where it had become clear that we had some major incompatibility issues and that it would be in my best interest, and hers, to end the relationship and move on. I had been struggling with this issue for many months. I was consciously aware of what I needed to do. But yet I couldn’t quite do it. I kept going around and around in my thinking and would rationalize why it wasn’t the right time or the right decision, despite my “knowing” that ending the relationship was what I needed to do. Of course breaking up, as they say, is hard to do, but in my situation it had become painfully clear this was the right choice. Yet I couldn’t completely pull the trigger. I kept going back and forth. I began meditating about my relationship and I began to see more clearly that the real reason I didn’t want to end the relationship was that I was afraid of being alone. On the surface I was telling myself I wasn’t sure if it was the right decision and that I didn’t want to hurt my girlfriend, which were both partially true. But the real obstacle, what was really holding me back, was my own uncertainty and fear about the future apart from my ex. To put it simply, I was afraid. Over the next few weeks I got more and more clear about this issue until during one of my meditation sessions I had the overwhelming certainty that I had to end the relationship and that everything would be ok. It was a sense of knowing that up until this point I had not experienced this vividly. I called my ex up that night and told her that we had to end things. Here’s where things get interesting. I realized my primary fear was that I didn’t really want to be alone, yet I came to peace with the idea to the best of my ability. I’ve been alone before and I’ve always met someone else I thought. I was ok before I met my ex and I was sure I would be ok after our relationship concluded. I realized, one way or the other, things would be ok and so I took the leap of faith and did what I needed to do. I felt relieved after making the decision, as if a weight that had been holding me down had been lifted. Two days after I ended things with my ex, I was out to dinner with a friend of mine and our female server was being very flirtatious with me. At first I thought she was just being friendly. A lot of servers have outgoing personalities and after all, it's their job to be nice, so I didn’t really think much of her behavior at first. But throughout our meal she became more and more flirtatious. When she brought the check at the end of our meal she asked me if I wanted anything else. “No”, I responded. “I’m good”. “Are you sure?”, she asked, just standing there. “Maybe my phone number?”, she asked. At this point I was reasonably confident she was being more than just friendly for the sake of getting a good tip. I’ll make a long story short. I got her number. I went out with her a week later and we’ve been dating exclusively for the last six months. Now what’s remarkable isn’t the fact that I have a girlfriend. What’s remarkable, to me, is how it happened and how quickly it happened after I made the hard decision to leave my ex. I literally met my new girlfriend two days after breaking up with my ex, and my new girlfriend basically fell into my lap, despite my fears of being alone and struggling with whether or not to leave my ex for months. I’ve had maybe two or three girls approach me this aggressively in my life and for me, meeting my new girlfriend was one of the most serendipitous things that has happened to me in a long time. I don’t know what the future holds for us, but we get along great and are much more compatible than my ex and I were in areas that are very important to me. This relationship feels right to me and I really don’t think it would have happened had I not gained the clarity and perspective that I did through meditation. Meditation and business Meditation has also helped me improve my business. In much the same way that we can get stuck in patterns of thinking about relationships, the same is true of things like business. I’ve had several key insights this year about how to expand my business that I believe were a result of meditating. Sometimes all it takes is a very small shift in your thinking to create very big changes. It’s easy to get in ruts with things like business and relationships where we simply keep doing what we’ve been doing. I will often get new ideas while I’m meditating about ways to improve my business. Several of these insights have made a very big difference in my business this year. Most of these insights have been fairly simple ideas that I’ve been able to implement easily, but they’ve made a big difference. I don’t always get these types of insights when I meditate, but they happen regularly enough that it’s clear to me that meditating is encouraging these insights to happen more frequently. Meditation and music To be honest, when writing this post, I saved the idea of how meditation has impacted the music I make and my music career for last, mainly because there's been less of a dramatic influence on this part of my life as a result of meditating. Perhaps it's because making it in the music business is a more complex process than getting a girlfriend or growing my business. It’s also harder to quantify things like the creative process and how something like meditation affects it. I'm not really sure to be honest, but I do have a handful of new ideas related to marketing music and the music business that are still percolating. So we'll see how that plays out. Some ideas take longer to develop and come to fruition than others. In Conclusion I believe that our quality of life, to a large extent, is related to the quality of our thinking. When we think clearly and calmly, we tend to generate better ideas that lead to better decisions and better outcomes. A lot of success in life is simply the result of coming up with the right idea at the right time. It’s a mystery that I don’t fully understand. It’s sort of like writing songs. Do you really understand where songs come from? I don’t! But I do understand the circumstances and environments that tend to lead to better songs. In the same way, I believe there is a way to cultivate more clear thinking. Meditation is a powerful way, but there are of course others that I didn’t touch on in this post. Things like nutrition, exercise, healthy relationships and reading can also make a big difference and are also topics I’m interested in. The body, mind and spirit are all connected and anything you do to improve one, will improve the others. Meditation is beneficial for all three. Here’s the bottom line on meditation. If you’re feeling stuck or anxious, or even if you just want to learn a new method for relaxing and improving your health, give meditation a try. It’s not a magic panacea that will fix all of your problems. But if your experiences are anything like mine, if you’re patient and you stick with it, you’ll discover some very interesting and undeniable benefits. Want to get more articles like this? Subscribe to my free newsletter and I'll notify you when I publish new articles, music and podcasts. My favorite thing about running my website and doing my podcast are all the great people I get to meet and network with working in the music business. I’ve often said that there isn’t really a one size fits all formula for success in the music business. If you want to become a doctor or lawyer, you go to school, study, take out loans and if all goes well, when you get your degree, you are a doctor or lawyer. The music business doesn’t really have the same, direct line to success. Sometimes it isn’t really clear how to move forward. It’s much easier to get somewhere if you have directions, or a map. If you want to drive from Chicago to Los Angeles, it’s pretty easy. You pull up the directions on Google or GPS, you get in the car and you go. If you’re following the speed limit and didn’t stop to sleep or eat, you’d make the drive in about 28 hours and 31 minutes. It’s a straightforward and predictable drive. Arriving at success in the music industry isn’t quite as straightforward or predictable. However, like Tony Robbins often says, “success leaves clues”. One of the best ways to understand how success happens in the music business is to look to others that are succeeding. Look to others that are experiencing the success you want to experience, and see how many of the steps they took to get there you can reverse engineer. Now of course, everyone’s path is different, and you’ll never be able to replicate someone else’s experience completely. Sometimes it’s a matter of meeting just the right person at just the right time. These sorts of serendipitous moments can’t really be duplicated. But what can be duplicated are the behaviors and actions that led to those moments. If there’s one common theme that runs through all of the success stories of people I’ve interviewed over the years it’s this: hard work and effort pay off. In the music business, hard work doesn’t always pay off in predictable ways, but it almost always pays off one way or another. Whether it’s winning two Emmy awards as in the case of composer Lars Deutsch, or writing songs for Grammy award winning artists like songwriter Lorenzo Johnson has done, or playing festivals along-side artists like Bob Weir and Jakob Dylan like artist Mike Mizwinski has done, or touring with John Mayer and Ed Sheeran like artist SJ has done, or getting your music on 200 TV shows like Paul Glover has done. In every case the common denominator that led to success was simply working hard towards the goals each artist set for themselves. When you’re not sure what to do next, remember that the only way to succeed in this business is to be in it, fully engaged and taking action every day. I’ve yet to talk to someone or interview someone that had success just fall in their lap. The most successful artists I know have all made a very deliberate and conscious decision to pursue success in music. It’s not all going to be fun. Some of the work required to make it in the music business is sort of boring and tedious. Things like contacting music supervisors, promoting yourself on social media and so on aren’t exactly the most glamorous things to do. But if you’re pursuing music as a business it’s imperative that either you or someone working on your behalf does these things. One of the most important things you should be doing every day, apart from creating music, is networking with people in the industry. The music industry is comprised of a vast network of people working in different roles that make the whole business go round. I know so many extremely talented musicians that seem to stay in the same place year after year, simply because they're not connecting with the right people. They're not connecting with the people that could help them get to the next level and move forward. I recently interviewed Taylor Swift’s former manager about Taylor Swift's ascent to success in the music business. Swift worked hard for four years before most people had ever heard of her. She had a team of people she worked with that included managers, booking agents, publicists and so on, that helped her get to where she is today. Getting to this level of success in the music business CAN'T be done alone. There are too many roles that need to be fulfilled. If you do nothing else today, network with someone. Reach out and connect with a supervisor or publisher. Send your music to a booking agent or bar owner. Connect with other musicians. Success in the music business doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Make music. Connect. Rinse, wash, repeat. |
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