Future Of Music

Here are 10 recommendations for strategies that can lead to success in music, and in life. Take them with a grain of salt. With this new year comes the promise of digital music, the power of the entrepreneur and the tools to connect with an audience and deliver the goods.

1. Living a life in music is a privilege. Earn it.

There is very little more satisfying then spending time making music. If you make this your life’s work, then you can be truly joyful. However, the chances of being successful are extremely low and the only people who are going to get there are going to have to work hard and earn the right to be a musician. Respect the privilege of being free enough to have this choice (if you do) and honor the opportunity.

2. No one is in charge of your muse but you. Be happy and positive.

People can be their own worst enemy. Countless times I have heard artists tell me the reasons why their career is not working out. Most of the time they are putting blocks in their way and pointing fingers at people and things that are holding them back. Stop whining and blaming other people and make the conscious decision that you are going to be successful and that things are going to work out in your favor. You are creating your own reality every day, so make it a good one and excel.

3. Practice, practice, practice – then go for it. Over prepare.

You can never be ready enough for opportunity. Your live shows can always be better, your songs can be more amazing, and your playing can only improve. As the CEO of your own musician business, you can learn how to run the company more effectively, reach out to more fans and be an more effective social media marketer. Don’t hold yourself back by not being ready. Be a professional.

4. If you suck, you will never make it. Find a way to be great.

Lets face it, it is really hard to be amazing. Some people have the natural talent and you can see it in the first 5 seconds of meeting them. They are truly blessed. The rest of us have to find our niche, our passion, our calling and then reach for it. Ask people around you for feedback. Find what you are good at and focus on that. Get other people to help you. If you don’t stand out and rise above the pack, you will struggle forever. Be amazing.

5. Learn how to breathe and keep your focus. Stay calm.

There is nothing more pleasant than working with someone who knows who they are and what their goal is. Remember the old adages of thinking before you speak, and taking a deep breath before you lay into someone. Most of us have a lot going on in our lives and we can all benefit from staying focused on our goals and remaining calm in most situations. Learn yoga, exercise, run, meditate, sit still, breathe, learn who you are.

6. Don’t take yourself too seriously, no one else does. Have fun.

I am amazed at how many people spend so much time looking backwards and trying to understand what people think of them. This is worrying about the past and not embracing the future. Reviews are important, but don’t run to them or let them ruin your day. Not everyone is going to like you, but more people will if you are having a good time.

7. No matter how difficult things get, move forward. Don’t give up.

The only thing that will help your career take off is forward momentum. That is how you are going to reach your goals. A lot of people are stuck in their own mud. Take action, make a move and then see what happens. Don’t spend time procrastinating or worrying about how hard it is, just do something positive to advance your cause. You will feel much better by acting instead of waiting or worrying.

8. Find a way to make money. Start small and grow. Avoid being in debt.

This is probably the most important strategy of them all and why so many artists have gotten into trouble in the past by taking label advances. All that is, is a big loan. Get some kind of cash flow happening right away, no matter how small. Sell merch, play for the door, license your songs, play sessions, teach, write, start your musician business. The biggest mistake you can make is to borrow a lot of money and then spend it on things that don’t matter.

9. Be unique and true to your vision. Say something.

The people that we remember are the ones that are unique, exciting, special, provocative, fascinating, original, inventive, interesting. Music is a basic form of communication. The really successful artists have something to say and work on delivering their message. Your chances of success go up exponentially if you have a unique position and message and create a following of fans who really listen to you because you have something important to say.

10. Work and play with people you like every day. Collaborate Often.

Music is a tribal experience. You cannot make great music alone. Surround yourself with talented people, write together, play together, try new things. Bounce inspiration off of each other and learn. Listen to each other and let the music weave it’s way around you. Find a producer, songwriting partner, other musicians and dive in together. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Wonderful things are waiting to happen to you.

Here is some excerpts from an interview I did with Rick Goetz from musiciancoaching.com

“I think it’s critical that you have your own website and drive traffic to your own website in any way imaginable, and that you set up ways to do business transactions on your websites. That can be collecting names, cell phone numbers, Twitter follows, selling product, building dialogue, communication, selling tickets and merch. That’s essential.

At Music Power Network and Berkleemusic we teach a lot of people DIY basics. Get your act together, get a website together, have a business partner that is going to help you create a strategy and deal with promotion and distribution and touring and publishing and your finances and the business aspects of your career so you can focus as much time as possible on creating art and getting better and practicing and becoming a better artist. I think that’s essential. Lots and lots of people I’ve seen – musicians, artists – have thought, “I’ll get online and Facebook and YouTube and get a bunch of friends and spend all my time blogging and tweeting.” But if they’re not working on your music, most of the time that other stuff doesn’t matter at all. If you’re not really great, nobody is really going to care.

It’s such a fine balance to strike between perfecting your art and being unique and different and having something to say and getting the word out. That’s the conundrum. We often counsel people that you have to have a business partner. At Berkleemusic we teach entrepreneurship, artist management, how to start your own business, how to run a business, how to market direct and use social media to market, what copyright law is all about, what contracts are all about, how to tour, how to make money, the realities of the different levels of touring and how you can get paid and use that to be a driver of your career.

It’s a huge ambition that we have here at Berklee to try and help create a healthy music industry going forward. If there isn’t a healthy music industry, none of us have jobs, none of our students have jobs and the whole thing goes down the toilet. We have to help people be free thinkers, entrepreneurs, to break the rules.

When we started the berkleemusic online school ten years ago there was no iPod, YouTube, Myspace, Facebook or Apple iTunes store. That all happened in the last ten years. So if you think about what’s going to happen in the next ten years, it’s going to be completely different and almost impossible to predict what’s going to happen. People that want to be in the industry have to be willing to accept that it’s going to constantly change for the foreseeable future. There is nothing you can be sure of, and the things that work today probably are not going to work tomorrow.

God willing, some kid is going to create the next big thing in music like Sean Fanning did with Napster or a new format or a new kind of virtual experience that is as good as a concert. Something like that is going to happen, and who knows what it is going to be?  It’s hard to predict.”

Read the whole interview here. Thanks Rick!

As a musician in the 21st century, you need to learn how to define your expectations. Otherwise, how will you know when you have achieved your goal, or even what to aim for? For a project, for a tour, for your career, and for your life – what are you trying to accomplish?

Most people in the music business want to “make it,” but what does that really mean? What is making it for you? What does the finish line look like? How would you recognize making it? Do you want a record deal? What does that record deal look like? Do you want to sell a million CDs? Do you want a publishing deal? What does that publishing deal look like? Do you want your music played on Grey’s Anatomy or your songbook published by Hal Leonard?

Once you know what your expectations are, then you can plan accordingly and know what to shoot for. Is success for you playing huge stadiums? That would mean you have to make a plan and probably dedicate yourself to work full-time for many years to get there.

Or, is success for you to have a steady gig on weekends? This is more achievable and something you can do on a local level and perhaps as a part-time endeavor. Is recording a CD and selling 10,000 copies your definition of success? If so, you can create a plan to achieve that perhaps on a regional level.

Or, is success for you writing songs that other people play? That would require you to network with other musicians and focus on writing, publishing, and placing your songs. Or, is success for you recording an EP and playing it for your family?

What do you want to be? What does success look like for you? Be as specific as possible when setting your expectations. Don’t be vague because it won’t lead you anywhere and just breeds sloppy thinking. First, define exactly what you want to do, and then you can break it down and make a plan to do it.

From a fascinating article just published in the Atlantic. “The Grateful Dead’s influence on the business world may turn out to be a significant part of its legacy. Without intending to—while intending, in fact, to do just the opposite—the band pioneered ideas and practices that were subsequently embraced by corporate America. One was to focus intensely on its most loyal fans. It established a telephone hotline to alert them to its touring schedule ahead of any public announcement, reserved for them some of the best seats in the house, and capped the price of tickets, which the band distributed through its own mail-order house. If you lived in New York and wanted to see a show in Seattle, you didn’t have to travel there to get tickets—and you could get really good tickets, without even camping out. “The Dead were masters of creating and delivering superior customer value,” Barry Barnes, a business professor at the H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship at Nova Southeastern University, in Florida, told me. Treating customers well may sound like common sense. But it represented a break from the top-down ethos of many organizations in the 1960s and ’70s. Only in the 1980s, faced with competition from Japan, did American CEOs and management theorists widely adopt a customer-first orientation.

As Barnes and other scholars note, the musicians who constituted the Dead were anything but naive about their business. They incorporated early on, and established a board of directors (with a rotating CEO position) consisting of the band, road crew, and other members of the Dead organization. They founded a profitable merchandising division and, peace and love notwithstanding, did not hesitate to sue those who violated their copyrights. But they weren’t greedy, and they adapted well. They famously permitted fans to tape their shows, ceding a major revenue source in potential record sales. According to Barnes, the decision was not entirely selfless: it reflected a shrewd assessment that tape sharing would widen their audience, a ban would be unenforceable, and anyone inclined to tape a show would probably spend money elsewhere, such as on merchandise or tickets. The Dead became one of the most profitable bands of all time.

It’s precisely this flexibility that Barnes believes holds the greatest lessons for business—he calls it “strategic improvisation.” It isn’t hard to spot a few of its recent applications. Giving something away and earning money on the periphery is the same idea proffered by Wired editor Chris Anderson in his recent best-selling book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Voluntarily or otherwise, it is becoming the blueprint for more and more companies doing business on the Internet. Today, everybody is intensely interested in understanding how communities form across distances, because that’s what happens online. Far from being a subject of controversy, Rebecca Adams’s next book on Deadhead sociology has publishers lining up.

Much of the talk about “Internet business models” presupposes that they are blindingly new and different. But the connection between the Internet and the Dead’s business model was made 15 years ago by the band’s lyricist, John Perry Barlow, who became an Internet guru. Writing in Wired in 1994, Barlow posited that in the information economy, “the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away.” As Barlow explained to me: “What people today are beginning to realize is what became obvious to us back then—the important correlation is the one between familiarity and value, not scarcity and value. Adam Smith taught that the scarcer you make something, the more valuable it becomes. In the physical world, that works beautifully. But we couldn’t regulate [taping at] our shows, and you can’t online. The Internet doesn’t behave that way. But here’s the thing: if I give my song away to 20 people, and they give it to 20 people, pretty soon everybody knows me, and my value as a creator is dramatically enhanced. That was the value proposition with the Dead.” The Dead thrived for decades, in good times and bad. In a recession, Barnes says, strategic improvisation is more important then ever. “If you’re going to survive this economic downturn, you better be able to turn on a dime,” he says. “The Dead were exemplars.” It can be only a matter of time until Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead or some similar title is flying off the shelves of airport bookstores everywhere.”

Read more at the Atlantic.

The music industry is being reinvented before our very eyes. Learn how it is developing from today’s entrepreneurs including Ian Rogers from TopSpin, Steve Schnur from EA, and Derek Sivers and how you can capitalize on the changing opportunities.

MPN is my latest project and an online service for music business people and music and artist managers creating the future of the industry. MPN provides online music business lessons, exclusive video interviews and advice, career and business planning tools and thousands of specially selected resources designed to help you achieve success in this ever changing industry. MPN gives you the tools, expertise and guidance to help you get organized and take your music career to the next level. Learn from industry experts, set your goals and realize your vision.

Here are 10 recommendations for strategies that can lead to success in music, and in life.  Take them with a grain of salt.  With this new decade comes the promise of digital music, the power of the entrepreneur and the tools to connect with an audience and deliver the goods.

1.  Living a life in music is a privilege. Earn it.

There is very little more satisfying then spending time making music.  If you make this your life’s work, then you can be truly joyful.  However, the chances of being successful are extremely low and the only people who are going to get there are going to have to work hard and earn the right to be a musician.  Respect the privilege of being free enough to have this choice (if you do) and honor the opportunity.

2.  No one is in charge of your muse but you. Be happy and positive.

People can be their own worst enemy.  Countless times I have heard artists tell me the reasons why their career is not working out.  Most of the time they are putting blocks in their way and pointing fingers at people and things that are holding them back.  Stop whining and blaming other people and make the conscious decision that you are going to be successful and that things are going to work out in your favor.  You are creating your own reality every day, so make it a good one and excel.

3.  Practice, practice, practice – then go for it. Over prepare.

You can never be ready enough for opportunity.  Your live shows can always be better, your songs can be more amazing, and your playing can only improve.  As the CEO of your own musician business, you can learn how to run the company more effectively, reach out to more fans and be an more effective social media marketer.  Don’t hold yourself back by not being ready.  Be a professional.

4.  If you suck, you will never make it. Find a way to be great.

Lets face it, it is really hard to be amazing.  Some people have the natural talent and you can see it in the first 5 seconds of meeting them.  They are truly blessed.  The rest of us have to find our niche, our passion, our calling and then reach for it.  Ask people around you for feedback.  Find what you are good at and focus on that.  Get other people to help you.  If you don’t stand out and rise above the pack, you will struggle forever.  Be amazing.

5.  Learn how to breathe and keep your focus.  Stay calm.

There is nothing more pleasant than working with someone who knows who they are and what their goal is.  Remember the old adages of thinking before you speak, and taking a deep breath before you lay into someone.  Most of us have a lot going on in our lives and we can all benefit from staying focused on our goals and remaining calm in most situations.  Learn yoga, exercise, run, meditate, sit still, breathe, learn who you are.

6.  Don’t take yourself too seriously, no one else does. Have fun.

I am amazed at how many people spend so much time looking backwards and trying to understand what people think of them.  This is worrying about the past and not embracing the future.  Reviews are important, but don’t run to them or let them ruin your day.  Not everyone is going to like you, but more people will if you are having a good time.

7.  No matter how difficult things get, move forward. Don’t give up.

The only thing that will help your career take off is forward momentum.  That is how you are going to reach your goals.  A lot of people are stuck in their own mud.  Take action, make a move and then see what happens.  Don’t spend time procrastinating or worrying about how hard it is, just do something positive to advance your cause.  You will feel much better by acting instead of waiting or worrying.

8.  Find a way to make money. Start small and grow. Avoid being in debt.

This is probably the most important strategy of them all and why so many artists have gotten into trouble in the past by taking label advances.  All that is, is a big loan.  Get some kind of cash flow happening right away, no matter how small.  Sell merch, play for the door, license your songs, play sessions, teach, write, start your musician business.  The biggest mistake you can make is to borrow a lot of money and then spend it on things that don’t matter.

9.  Be unique and true to your vision.  Say something.

The people that we remember are the ones that are unique, exciting, special, provocative, fascinating, original, inventive, interesting.  Music is a basic form of communication.  The really successful artists have something to say and work on delivering their message.  Your chances of success go up exponentially if you have a unique position and message and create a following of fans who really listen to you because you have something important to say.

10. Work and play with people you like every day.  Collaborate Often.

Music is a tribal experience.  You cannot make great music alone.  Surround yourself with talented people, write together, play together, try new things.  Bounce inspiration off of each other and learn.  Listen to each other and let the music weave it’s way around you.  Find a producer, songwriting partner, other musicians and dive in together.  The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Wonderful things are waiting to happen to you.

Happy New Year Everyone.

Dave Kusek