So, You Want to Be a Working Musician? How to Earn Your Living in the Music Business

I'm writing this series from the standpoint of being a musician who has made a fairly respectable living in the music business for the last twenty years. There is an old expression that goes, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." I hate to burst the bubble, but I can do and do it well. I can also teach and I have done that well for quite a while too. The music business is a hard business for musicians, but it is really quite a simple endeavor for people who approach it from a business perspective. Unfortunately those two disciplines are sometime as divergent as water and oil.

This is the first in a series of articles on the subject of how to make money in the music business. These articles are not intended to be the definitive all encompassing bible of the music industry. They are intended to be basic, focused approaches to a few of the traditional segments of the music industry. I'll qualify that a bit more by saying that these articles are targeted toward musicians/entertainers in the popular music genres i.e., rock, jazz, country, alternative, new age, hip hop, and faux gangsta zydeco klezmer punk, though not necessarily in that order.

In order for these trade guidelines to be effective, there is one overwhelming requirement that will be made of you. You will be required to be brutally honest at all times- honest with your self; honest with your fellow musicians; honest with the contacts you are about to make; honest with your loved ones; and honest with your higher power, unless you don't have one. In that case, you must already be the highest power and I ask that you forgive me for the thoughts I've had involving peanut butter, a toy rubber gorilla, Brittany Spears, and a spatula. And olive oil. I digress.

We've wasted enough time on chit chat. Lets get down to the brass tacks of this first article.

What are you? A musician? A band? A group of like minded individuals lobbying for change with regard to societies injustices? No, my friend. You are much more than any of these things. You are one of the most important business entities in the U.S. today. You are a manufacturer. More than that, if you live in the U.S. , you are one of those heroic manufacturing concerns that has yet to be outsourced. If you haven't been thinking of yourself as a manufacturer you have been thinking incorrectly. It is time to modify your thinking.

You, either singular or plural if you play in an ensemble of some sort, are a manufacturer of music. Let's not get crazy here. You are a manufacturer of sound. Your raw materials of production are talent and/or creativity. You process these raw materials through various machines like instruments, microphones, recorders, and speakers. You package your product in the form of CDs, live performances, and any number of different multimedia formats which, with any luck or business skill, you sell on the open market for a price that you as a willing seller find acceptable when it is offered buy a willing buyer. You are a shining example of a free market capitalist.

I am sure that there are a few readers who are anarchists, anti-American, anti-corporation, anti-big business, grass roots, non-profit, etc. types whom will have a difficult time accepting this fact. I absolutely live for the opportunity to put your long held notions of how the world works through the meat grinder of reality. And unless you intend to sit alone in your domicile diddling dithyrambs on a diapason - if you intend to play music for money- YOU ARE A CAPITALIST.

So, throw away your worn out images of the glamorous lifestyle of a rock musician or band manager. Take off that flippy little artist's beret you've been wearing and don the hard hat and safety goggles of a working class industrialist. At this stage of the game, it doesn't matter if you play message laden organic granola blues, or hedonistic techno-demonic speed metal. Your job is to manufacture, package, and sell a product. In order to do that you are going to have to identify the potential market for your product; the demographic breakdown of the consumers in that market; the demand for your product by that market; the costs involved in bringing your product to the market. You are going to have to look at things like distribution, advertising, public relations, promotion, and personal selling. And when you design your advertising, regardless of the medium, or channel, or even the message you are going to try to convey, you are going to want to get the best reach and frequency you can negotiate. Your advertising will always strive to follow the A.I.D.A. model: Attention; Interest; Desire; Action. Business 101.

Why?

Because there are at least 50,000 other musicians out there who sleep until noon, dress like they live in an MTV video, practice in their girlfriend's brother's garage while working at a minimum wage job for a non-profit organization while trying to get a band together over the last year and are just about ready to start playing clubs but they really want to do bigger venues to begin with because they are better in front of audiences of a thousand or more screaming fans who will be buying their singles at the web site as soon as the bass player can get it up and running, dude.

Next: Is The Product Finished? & Designing A Package