Networking is an essential part of your music career. The days where you can simply release music, invest no time in promoting this music, and become a well-known artist are gone. The good news is that there are plenty of tools available to you for free to promote your music to a global audience. Below, I have listed three ways that you can network as a music producer.
The concept of genres is fascinating if you look at it closely. Before a song is categorized into a specific genre, it’s just a collection of sounds. But when that same collection of sounds is called rap or rock or EDM, it transforms into something completely different. Musicians are thought of as having an almost unlimited amount of creative freedom at their fingertips every time they set out to create new music, but when songwriters and producers focus too much on genre, they risk losing that creative freedom.
For most bands, putting together a music video is an opportunity to express themselves, provide new content for their fans, and extend the life of a single or album. Yet somehow, the first piece of that—expressing themselves—tends to get lost in the mix. What results tends to be an underproduced, poorly shot, kind of boring music video that probably wasn’t super cheap to make, but also isn’t making much of an impact on anyone. Not really much of a win.
To avoid that disaster and create a music video that will actually make a lasting impact on your fans, we’ve put together a few tips. Even if you’re on an incredibly DIY budget, these tips will still help make your next video a hit.
When you begin playing music out – especially in a new place – it can be intimidating. There’s often gateholders to breaking into a music scene, and they often have their own standards by which they allow people to play the shows they involve themselves with. I come from a big town where I was involved in the music scene for almost a decade, and then moved to a giant city with hardly any idea of what to do next. This one is personal to me.
What I truly believe is that no matter how old you are or what kind of music you play, there are ways to find people to play with and an audience for you. You just have to get out there and find them. If you’re having trouble figuring out how to play shows or have never done it before, let this serve as a guide to booking your first show.
Creating music can be bruising or even downright crushing at times. Writing meaningful music often requires isolation, vulnerability, and fortitude in withstanding dead-end after dead-end throughout the creative process. When an idea is finished, it’s put out into the world for everyone to hear and criticize – or even worse, to be ignored or never heard in the first place.
If you make music, you are inviting disappointment into your life in some form. And while young musicians seem to be able to roll with the inevitable physical and emotional punches of a music career, older musicians don’t cope as well. Add in the fact that as musicians age the non-musical aspects of their lives become louder and more pressing, and it’s easy to see why so many people stop making music after their twenties. An image of someone at a desk job reminiscing about the good old days of being in a band comes to mind. Lots of perfectly talented musicians trade in their dreams for lives that are financially and emotionally safer with claims that they weren’t good enough to keep making music. But the truth is that when musicians lose their passion, the world loses something as well. Individual musicians lose a vital creative outlet and the rest of us lose the music they would’ve made if they wouldn’t have quit.
Money is almost always tight for musicians whether they’re just starting out or have been building their careers for a while. This makes knowing how much and what promotion efforts to invest money in a tricky task. There’s no guarantees in music, and this doesn’t just apply to whether the world will connect with your songs or not. Throwing money into an expensive PR or radio campaign won’t necessarily get you any closer to your goals, meaning there’s a certain amount of risk involved when you pay for music promotion. But for many artists, forking over precious cash for professional radio and PR campaigns ends up paying off in huge ways. And with today’s ridiculously saturated music culture, most artists need all the help they can get.
But with tight budgets and shrinking profits, many bands are forced to decide whether to invest money into radio campaigns or professional PR efforts.
For many musicians, writing songs, playing on stage, and recording albums is the most rewarding work in the world. But look around your local music scene and you’ll quickly find a disparity between ambitious young musicians and their seasoned counterparts. Younger musicians are usually the most visible and active folks working in the industry, though there are exceptions. When some musicians get older, life gets in the way of their art and they eventually stop making music. But while aging is responsible for stopping many talented musicians in their tracks, burnout is another factor not taken seriously enough. Putting real energy, love, time, and sacrifice into your work is essential for finding any significant traction for your music, but play your cards wrong and you might put yourself in an unsustainable position for making music over the long-term.
Making music is something the world has a romantic perception of, which means that giving up is typically looked at as a sign of weakness. But make music long enough, and you’ll soon see that scaling back, changing course, or quitting in music is essential at times. Here are three times when taking a break from music makes sense.
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