Building A Music Career - For Students And Recent Graduates

I get a lot of young music folks sending me messages to "pick my brain" about a career in music, or as a creative person in general. Here are 4 career ingredients that have helped me to get to where I am today.

An Incredible Network

Read all you can about networking and practice practice practice while you're still in school.?

Meet new people all the time and build your ability to develop rapport with them using nothing but the art of conversation and listening. When you aren't rich, famous, or successful - this may be your most valuable asset.

Here's an article about developing conversational skills.

Eventually, your network will grow to the point where you can facilitate connections between people who might want to do business with each other etc and that's a great way to inject value in a way that doesn't cost you an arm and a leg.?

Here's an article I wrote about engineering short term rewards into long term networking.

Not going to sugarcoat it - this is incredibly difficult and takes a long time, especially if you are not neurotypical. Here's a story:

You'll have to figure out what specific strategy you can handle emotionally and mentally in the long term while also pushing yourself to your limits of comfort constantly in the short term.?

This eventually turns into an asset that you can use in various jobs.

Personal Branding

One of the reasons I've been able to network with people more powerful than myself and secure work from surprising places is the online presence I've made a lot of effort to build.?

Credibility that I've built from speaking at conferences, online visibility etc has put me into rooms with influential folks and made me interesting to them in spite of the fact that I am not rich or powerful.

Without this credibility, many people I now know probably would never have even spoken to me.

The funny thing is - at least half of this can be accomplished by just managing to stay visible on online platforms so that people are constantly made aware of your presence in a way that is not annoying.

Make content - have something to say. Read a book and share a lesson. Share a true story. Display your work in an entertaining fashion. Do SOMETHING. And do it consistently.

Be Really Good

If you are hoping to "Create" for a living - your work has to be ridiculously good in some respect. Nothing less will do.

Unless you have inside connections (I didn't) or some kind of backdoor route to gain the experience you need (I didn't), you're going to have to do all of this yourself.?

Look at all the competition you have and think very hard about whether you are going to be able to compete, and if not, how you can change that/what you need to improve in order to do so etc.

This does not mean you need a bunch of expensive gear - you're not an established empire - you're a guerrilla army. Do what you can with what's available to you.

Be A Generalist

Do lots of things at a high level, but not necessarily at a genius level. This allows you to work cross-functionally and take on many different kinds of challenging opportunities.

And it doesn't just have to be music. Consider what the industry you want to enter needs most urgently and see if you can focus on learning aspects of those things so that you have a broad skillset that may make you more attractive to a company than someone with just one specialization. Data science, business knowledge, finance, whatever.