With the start of a New Year comes endless possibilities for change, progression, and enormous growth. New Year, New You, right?
But when it comes time to put those thoughts into action, it can feel a little overwhelming, to the point it leaves you wondering—where do I start? I’m glad you asked.
I’m well aware that the title of this article looks like something out of a self-help book for musicians, but I’m ok with it because it’s true. Neglect your career, stop writing songs and putting energy into music, and your musical identity evaporates. But spend all your time touring and holed up in your music studio and things like the state of your close relationships and bank account are sure to suffer. Balance is vital for musicians because it creates a big, dynamic space for their everyday lives to exist in. It makes room for an ambitious, fulfilling career along with vital non-musical aspects of a musician’s life. Can you always have it all when it comes to balancing a music career with a marriage, mortgage payment, or dayjob? No! Of course not. That’s why balance is so important.
There is no single method or secret ingredient in the process for making good music. Things like years of experience and lots of familiarity with any given songwriting process can be just as beneficial—or detrimental—as sitting down with an instrument without much musical training. Because every songwriter’s process is a complex mosaic of things like natural musical intuition, experience, and musical philosophy, pinpointing and imitating what songwriting approaches prop up great music isn’t always helpful or even possible to do.
As a musician, your single biggest challenge is getting your music before your target audience. It’s not enough to create good music; you also have to market it effectively.
It doesn’t help that far too many musicians rely on spur of the moment actions and ad-hoc marketing tactics. Instead of approaching their music marketing with a systematic plan, they make reactive decisions that don’t yield any long-term success.
In this guide, I’ll show you how to create a DIY music marketing plan that actually works. I’ll cover branding, developing a marketing mix, and finding your target audience so you can make better marketing decisions.
In 2018, solitude is a hard thing to come by. Because our daily lives are often revolved around technology, the non-stop noise of the internet seems to follow us everywhere we go. Whether we’re working on our computers or keeping up with friends and family on social media, solitude is something a person needs to seek out if they want to find it today. But while the distractions of modern culture brought on by technology impact everyone, songwriters are especially affected.
Figuring out how to record vocals at home can be tough on a limited budget. However, it’s still possible to get great sounding results as long as you know what to look for.
In this guide, we’ll cover budget gear you can use to record vocals at home and list some best practices for recording vocals.
Every serious musician knows that touring comes with its fair share of challenges, but that nebulous space of time between when a band arrives at the venue and when they begin their set is one of the less talked about hassles of being on the road all the time. If your drive between shows is short, you could be spending anywhere from 4-8 hours a day waiting for your show to start. With that amount of time at stake, it’s important to get the most out of your days on tour. Here are a few suggestions:
The whole process of putting a release together is exciting, confronting, and daunting in a lot of ways. Whether you’ve got a killer EP or a full album, there is something special about releasing something you have spent so long creating with love (and probably blood, sweat, and tears).
So you’ve gone through the whole creative process – everything is composed and produced. Your stuff has been mixed and mastered. Now it’s just sitting there, waiting for the green light to be released into the world.
The key to a good release is timing. The timing is dependent on how much you build it up beforehand.
Think of it as charging up a battery. If you release something when you’ve only charged it up halfway, you’re not going to get as much life out of it. If you charge it up to 100%, well, you’re probably going to see some amazing results. It all comes down to hype.
Here are 5 tips on building hype before a release.
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