Putting Your Music Career in Focus
The best way to approach a career as a musician who writes and performs original music is to take control and market your music yourself. No one will ever feel as strongly about your craft as you do. Which means you’re the best person in the world to spread the news. Sure, promoting your own music takes a lot of effort, but its worth it and it can also be very profitable.
If you don’t believe it, then you’ve probably never heard of Ani DiFranco. At age 20, she started her own label, Righteous Babe Records, and began performing a growing number of solo acoustic shows. Coffeehouse gigs led to colleges, then larger theaters and major folk festivals. Over a seven-year period she sold more than 400,000 copies of her many independent releases (an average of 66,500 units per year). In one year alone, DiFranco performed 130 shows and generated almost million in gross ticket sales. And she’s been written about in glowing terms by just about every major magazine and newspaper.
DiFranco was one of the early indie music pioneers who, in the 1990s, accomplished all of her success without a major record label, commercial radio airplay, MTV exposure, or advertising. “If you are disgustingly sincere and terribly diligent, there are ways for any serious artist to operate outside the corporate structure,” she once tol dthe Los Angeles Times.
Putting your Music Career in Focus: Question Everything You’ve Ever Been Told About the Music Business. If you get involved and immersed into the music biz, you’ll encounter plenty of people; some with impressive resumes, who will offer you their best music business advice. That’s fine. The more information you take in, the better educated you’ll be. But remain flexible and open-minded. The rules are changing quickly, so beware of anyone with an outdated, black-and-white view of the music world. These days, you get to pick and choose which existing “rules” truly apply to you; and you can create more empowering rules that suit you along the way.
Music promoter from Charleston, SC.
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