5 Paths to Building a Successful Career in Music

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Carving a career in music can be fun and exciting once you realize that you can customize it to your strengths and lifestyle. There are so many ways to create a sustainable career in music with different revenue streams and opportunities and no two paths or artists are the same.?

Whether you want to carve a career in a local setting, tour, write songs for other artists, or build a sync catalog, there are many ways to build a career that can support you from home or on the road.?

In this blog I will lay out the 5 most common paths I see musicians taking that are yielding results for them. Once you identify what you want, the next step is to create an actual strategy and path to reach those goals. Not everyone is made for touring or working inside the music industry. Thankfully there are many options today for musicians who want to stay at home or find other avenues and income streams.?

You can carve the music career you want. It just take ingenuity, passion, persistence, vision, hustle, strategy, and perseverance. The quickest way to reach success is to work with a music mentor who has experience in all of the sectors of the music industry and has helped artists carve successful careers.?

Several of these paths overlap and can be used to build a following and grow your music and music business.?

Here are the Top 5 Paths to Building a Successful Career in Music.

The Local Artist

You love music but you don’t want to tour. You being a local artist is a reality today. The good news is gone are the days when you have to tour to have a sustainable and viable career.?

Many artists who want to stay local have families, want to stay home because they are struggling with an illness or taking care of a loved one, or just don’t like living out of a suitcase on the road.?

The good news is you don’t have to tour to create a sustainable career. You also don’t have to live in a major music town to be successful in music anymore. Now you can build your own career and brand from any town that is strong enough to build a local and regional following. You can also travel out occasionally to gig, but this type of path is about building opportunities close-to-home for lifestyle reasons.

Here are some of the career strategies to build a successful music career while staying local.?

• Play local venues. Find a venue that suits you and grow a local following there with live shows that build to a residency. A residency is a regular show that occurs monthly, or every few months on the same day of the month. I.e. Every third Thursday at 7:30 pm etc. The regularity makes it easy for people to remember and plan ahead, improving attendance.
• House concerts. House concerts in your own home and the home of local residents is a great way to share your music and build a community of like-minded people. You can keep it simple or get more detailed as in having a local chef make hors d'oeuvre or bring a local winery or fresh juice store for mocktails. This gives exposure to these local businesses and you can build together.
• Curate special concert experiences in the local environment. Find a local church or theater to rent to create your own custom concert experience. Or maybe hold a concert at a friend’s house out in nature or find a campsite or place where you can have a local outdoor concert under the stars? In Nashville and Spain they have a concert experience inside local caves. There are lots of opportunities to curate your own experiences for your audience. You could even do a group show of other local artists and include local businesses to build together.
• Cultivate community experiences and bring people together.?Similar to the custom curated experience, music can also build community through special experiences like sing-a-longs, choirs, hosting an open mic or songwriter night where other artists or people in your community get to use their voices too.?

In addition to playing locally you can also build an audience online. See #2 below.

The benefits to the Local Artist Path is that you truly have to start here anyway! Even labels work on building the following of the artist where they currently live and then working outward in concentric circles moving to local, to regional, to national to build the following.

The Online Artist?

Ever since Covid a new pathway for musicians was formed out of necessity. Artists began live-streaming from their living rooms and started building online communities turning it into a real way to build their fanbase and create viable income streams as well.?

Live-streaming is now another official viable revenue stream to add to your income and build your following online. Your music suits the world of online music experiences. From Livestreams to cultivating virtual community and experiences for your audience online reaches a global audience without ever leaving home.

Here are some of the career strategies to build a successful music career with this path.

• Lives: Lives are short Livestreams (30 min) where you share a song, read a poem or chat with your audience online and invite them to a show or longer Livestream.
• Livestreams: Livestreams are generally 1-3 hours long where artists share their songs, sing favorite covers, or share behind-the-scenes of their songwriting or production process. One artist during Covid started streaming her guitar rehearsals and suddenly exploded her following. That artist is Grace Bower who at 18 is now touring the world.
• Building a community online. Patreon became a household name as communities on its platform have been active for over a decade now. But more and more artists, tired of paying for these services, have been building their own.?

The benefits to building an audience online are that you can reach people all over the world building an audience you could never reach with traditional touring locally or regionally.

The Touring Artist?

There will always be artists who are born for the stage. No amount of change in the live performance industry will hold back live music. It is still one of the vital paths for artists to share their music and touch audiences regionally and internationally.

Following the pandemic live concerts are definitely seeing a bit of a dip in ticket sales and some local venues have closed due to lack of attendance (Rockwood Music Hall in New York City just closed this past week much to the community’s shock and surprise.)

However, live music is still alive and kicking. Who knows, in the coming years maybe we’ll see live performances fall more on either the well-known artists who can fill seats and/or a rise in independents touring who are willing to take the risk as an opportunity to reach audiences.

Here are some of the career strategies to build a successful music career with Touring!

• Start local. Always start by building a local audience.?
• Build out in concentric circles next traveling to venues within driving distance.
• Next extend out to the neighboring state or nearby area.
• Regional touring. When expanding to regional, start by following your audience. Using insights on social media and streaming platforms it is easier to see where your audience is – and go where they are.
• Build an international audience. This is why building an online audience is so important. This allows you to perform internationally. Build your global audience! Use hashtags and marketing strategies if this is on your bucket list (yes hashtags still work)
• Create custom live experiences for your audience. Curate custom experiences for your fans. Whether a concert at a retreat in Costa Rica, in a cave in Spain, or a show under the stars somewhere far away from the city lights— your music connects fans to intimate experiences that elevate

The benefits to Touring are the thrill of performing in a live setting, the revenue from shows and merch, and building an audience. There is nothing like a live performance to make a true fan for life!

The Multi-Hyphenate Artist

Worth a mention is the new budding multi-hyphenate. The jack-of-all-trades musician-songwriter-actor-dancer-author-speaker-comedian-playwright-activist-spiritualist-healer… As more artists build their own brands they build more opportunities to share their many projects and experiences with their audience. Learning how to position yourself correctly and market and sell these many offerings comes down to branding.

Here are some of the creative modalities multi-hyphenate musicians being a multi-hyphenate artists can offer their audiences:

• Music
• Public speaking?
• Authorship – books
• Visual Art?
• Screenwriting, Playwright
• Comedian
• Actor
• Dancer
• Activist
• Healer
• Spiritual Community

The benefits to being a Multi-Hyphenate Artist are that it gives you more modalities to offer and a wider array of products, services and experiences to give your audience to build a niche with more income streams.? ?

Behind the Scenes Artist?

Many musicians find success behind the scenes either as a songwriter writing for other artists, or writing for film and TV. This path continues to grow and thrive where musicians can touch the lives of millions from the walls of their home studio.

Here are some of the career strategies to build a successful music career with songwriting and/or sync.?

• Build a catalog of professionally recorded and produced songs. Release your music to build your online presence and fanbase. This also serves as a “calling card” for your work as a songwriter and for sync.
• Write with budding music artists in your area and online to build your songwriting catalog of songs written for other artists (important for publishing)
• Pursue meetings with music publishers who can send you out on cowrites with other budding musicians.
• Build your sync catalog with meta tags and submit your music to Submit Hub to get on playlists to grow your exposure.
• Pursue meetings with music licensing companies and sync agents looking for the right fit for you and your catalog. You’ll need at least 1 full album release to get started.?

The benefits to working as a songwriter, working with publishers and pursuing sync is that you can create a career working behind the scenes that allows you to do music for? a living without touring or performing.

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