Are you using an old map to navigate the New Music Business?
If you're frustrated with your music career and struggling to build your fanbase and to make more money from your music, it can feel like a puzzle.
Have you ever tried to put a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle together without having the picture on the front of the box to look at?
If you don't know what the picture looks like when it's finished, it's almost impossible to put the puzzle together. You don't even know where to start because you don't know what you're working towards or what it looks like. We use the picture on the box as a map to guide us.
Similarly, if you want to get around a city, it really helps to have a map of the area that you're in and understand how it's laid out. You can't keep a map of the entire city in your mind, so you have to figure out what the right scale for the map is. If you're in a car and need to drive from home to work, you might just need a simple map that's got the big streets and the highways. But if you're going to be walking around a neighbourhood, going to have dinner over here, then meeting some friends for drinks over there, then going to watch a band play over here, you're going to need a more detailed map.
When you think about it, there's something miraculous about the fact that we can learn or make a map in our minds and remember it so that as we're navigating we know where to go. This is a metaphor for how success and development work because if you have the right map, you can succeed in any area, including the music business.
We can create models or maps of reality in our minds. Any successful person has a map or model of how that particular domain works, what to do in certain circumstances, the rules, etc. This ability to make maps and models is critical to success. Having the right map can increase your speed and efficiency significantly.
We have a map for each of the areas of our lives that we carry around inside of our minds, and the key to understand is that these maps are models; they're ideas, they're mental images and associations. They aren't the real thing; they're an approximation. This is a miracle because we can do test-drives of the real thing in our minds, and if we have good thought processes and accurate maps then we can save lots of trial and error. It's also amazing because we can learn rules that then give us shortcuts. Rules are a type of data compression that allow us to know what to do in a situation without ever having seen it before.
A lot of musicians are using an old, outdated map of the music business or of what a successful music career looks like. The map they're using is a relic of a time that no longer exists. If you're old enough to remember the days before Google Maps and GPS, if you were driving somewhere you'd look at a street directory for directions to get your bearings. If you had a street directory that's 10 years old and you were going to a newly developed part of town, that suburb or those streets wouldn't be on your street directory and you'd get lost.
This is a metaphor for what I see a lot of independent musicians doing. The territory of the music business has changed enormously over the last few years. But they're trying to navigate the New Music Business with an outdated street directory or a map that's 10 or 20 or 30 years old, instead of using something more up-to-date like Google Maps or GPS.
What having an outdated map of the music business looks like on a practical level is having flawed premises or believing certain things that aren't true about the music business - they're myths. If you're operating on the assumption that these flawed premises and myths are true, you're not going to have an accurate map that you can follow to achieve success in your music career. You're going to go round and round in circles, take wrong turns, hit dead ends, and get frustrated that you never get anywhere.
For example, you might be operating under the flawed premise that you just need to write great songs, record great albums, and put on great shows to be a successful musician. But because you focus exclusively on the music side of the equation and not the business side, you don't develop your marketing abilities and so you don't sell any CDs, you don't get anyone to come to your gigs, and you don't make any money from your music so you have to work a day job to support yourself.
Or maybe you're operating under the flawed premise that you're going to be discovered by a major record label and signed to a million-dollar contract and the record company will do all of the marketing and promotional work for you so you can just focus on writing, recording and performing music. This is a flawed premise because record labels don't take chances on undeveloped talent anymore. They see that as too risky for them. They'll only sign acts that have a proven track record of success. They expect you to have built up a reasonable size fanbase on your own before they'll even consider signing you.
Another problem is that musicians can have an incomplete map. They might know where a couple of landmarks are, but they don't know how to connect them, how to get from one location to another. It's like their map has been ripped up into tiny pieces and they've just got a couple of pieces that aren't connected that are from opposite ends of town. This would also be like trying to put together the jigsaw puzzle without having the picture on the box, and you're missing three-quarters of the pieces too.
This is the kind of thing that happens when you browse the net and you might read an article here or listen to a podcast there or a friend tells you about this idea that he's trying. You've got this jumbled assortment of random pieces and there's usually no connection between them. It's a very piecemeal approach. You might be getting a snapshot of some different locations on the map, or maybe of a street or two, but you're not getting that bird's-eye view, that larger perspective that lets you see how to get from one place to another and lets you see how to connect the dots. You need to put these random pieces into the greater context. Having success in your music career isn't just about doing the right things, it's about doing them in the right order. If you have an incomplete map, if you don't have that larger context, then you won't know the right sequence to do things in and you can't get from point A to point B to point C.
The last problem is that maybe your map isn't detailed enough. Maybe you can see the highways but not the streets. You need both the macro and the micro-level. You need to be able to zoom in to see more detail, like the street names and house numbers, and zoom out to see the bigger picture, like the suburb names and where they are in relation to each other and how to get from one side of town to the other.
On a practical level, this would look like someone only having a vague or general understanding of a particular subject, like social media. You might be on Facebook but you don't understand the strategy behind what you should be doing, so you're just posting random stuff that gets no engagement. Or you're trying to do the same thing on Twitter and Instagram that you're doing on Facebook, not realising that those platforms have their own etiquette and what works on one won't necessarily work on the other.
So if your map of the music business is out-of-date, incomplete, or lacking detail, you're really going to struggle to make progress. You're going to be putting your time, effort and money into things that don't actually move your music career forward. You're going to make lots of mistakes, some of them potentially very expensive. You're going to spin your wheels to the point of feeling burnout. You're going to sit around and wait for opportunities to show up that never will. If you do make some progress, it's going to be very slow and take a long time to happen. And then you're not going to know what to do next to build on that and go to the next level, so you'll just stagnate. You won't be able to connect the dots. You're not going to know specifically what to do to leverage each situation to grow your fanbase and make more money from your music. You're going to get frustrated and disheartened, music is going to feel more and more like a drag, you're going to doubt yourself and your abilities, lose confidence in yourself, and potentially even want to give up on your music career entirely.
What I'm trying to do for you is to give you the map, help you update your map, help you complete your map, and to help you fill in some detail on your map. If you want to navigate the territory of the new music business successfully, you need to have an up-to-date, complete, detailed map... or a tour guide.
If anything I said here has hit home for you, if you feel like your map is in urgent need of an overhaul, then reach out and message me and we can talk about how you can get on the right path to start growing your fanbase and making more money from your music as soon as possible.