Profitable and Sustainable Music Careers Take A Lot of Work!

In order to become financially free in your music career, you will need to take a very different approach than the one that is taken by most musicians. You will need to approach your music career as both a “musical artist” AND as a businessman (or woman). You must run your career as a business, where your primary goal is to add as much value as possible to your fans, other bands, music company officials, and other people in the business of music.

Besides not being prepared to achieve success in the business side of music, many musicians fail to make a decent income in their careers because they make the following mistakes:

Not Taking The Time To Identify Your Market

Once you have become familiar with the value you have to give to the music industry, you will you need to find and identify the people who you will give value to. 

One of the most common mistakes made by musicians is that they spend the time to create an album, increase their musical skills, or work in another area of the music industry, but when it comes time to receive the payoff for their hard work, they have great difficulty making any money. This happens because they have not taken the time to build a database of customers who are ready and willing to pay for the value that the musician is offering. 

Not Having Solid Goals And Ways To Reach Them

To earn a good living in the music industry, you MUST develop a specific plan for how you will reach your goals. If you merely fantasize about making a lot of money, this is not enough to make this goal a reality. Rather than fantasizing, start working toward what you want to achieve by asking yourself the following questions:

1. What is your desired yearly income from your music career?
2. What are the sources of musical income that will make the amount in question 1 possible?
3. What action must you take to set up these sources of income?
4. How many ways can you ADD VALUE to your interactions with people in the music business? (Think of every possibility!)
5. How many ways can you eliminate risk for other people in the music business?

Thinking That Popularity = Making A Lot Of Money In The Music Industry

The truth is that some musicians (who are very popular) still work side jobs just to get by. By understanding this, you will be able to push ‘fame’ aside in order to focus on the most effective ways to work toward your goal of making a good living in music

Not Taking The Time To Set Up Various Music Related Sources Of Income

In order to make a good living in your music career, you must stop thinking from the mindset of obtaining a single sum of money as your main goal. Instead, you must work to build many different sources of musical income that go into your bank account on an ongoing, residual basis. 

Not Consistently Providing Additional Value To Other People In The Music Industry

If you want to make a lot of money in your music career, you will need to make it 110% clear that you are the number one choice when someone in the music industry must choose between you and your competitors. In fact, this must be TOTALLY clear before anyone has even listened to one second of your music!

 

Useful music business assessments and more insights/examples can be found on the original post.

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