Your Musician Career Plan: Discovering Your Steps to Success
Pursuing a professional career in music requires immense passion, talent and determination. However, talent alone is rarely enough to achieve long-term success in this highly competitive industry. To truly thrive as a professional musician, it's crucial to approach your musical journey with a strategic plan. Simply put, the first step in creating any new business is to create plan and musicians aren't exempt from that process because they're pursuing a career in music versus a traditional profession.
Your Musician Career Plan: Why you actually need a plan
Simply put, because you can significantly increase your chances of success if you create a plan for you career BEFORE your try to build it.
A musician career plan, helps you clearly define your goals and vision.
What does success mean to you?
What type of live performances will you play?
Do you want to tour internationally?
There are various genres of music, which one or ones does your music fit in?
Do you want to secure a record deal or build a loyal following as an independent artist?
Answering questions like these, helps you to define what you career will look potentially look like and provide you with a clear career path. This will help you make informed decisions and stay focused as you progress through your music career.
The 2 key parts of a Musician Career plan involves developing your Niche and Brand and building your audience.
Your Niche and Brand is essential for standing out from other musical groups. Your brand should encompass not only your original music but also your visual aesthetics, personality and personal values. It doesn't matter if you're a solo artist, jazz musician or opera singer, crafting a strong and consistent brand will help you connect with your target audience and foster a deeper emotional connection with your fans. Yes, it takes hard work, but what you get in return is crucial to your success, so don't worry about how much time you invest in creating your brand, just create it.
When attracting and growing your audience. You need to first build a solid online presence that helps you reach and engage with your audience. Your online presences, in addition to music venues, is the workplace of a musician because it's the space we're you're developing your career. This means investing time and effort into creating a professional website, maintaining active social media profiles and consistently sharing a wide range of high-quality content , including original music, that helps you learn about your audience and nurture your relationship with them. But which channels and what kind of content?
Again, all things your musician career plan will answer.
In short, creating your musician career plan serves 2 purposes
1. It helps you understand all things you need to have and do to build your career.
2. And it allows you to plan out a strategy for getting and doing all those things.
This includes building your professional network (i.e. music producer, session musicians, background singers, recording engineer, etc. ) and your internal team, selecting your social channels, choosing how you’ll earn money, figuring out what expenses your career will have and so on.
While artistic expression is at the heart of your music, it's equally important to cultivate a business mindset and strategy and that’s what your career plan does. After all, if you're going to invest all the time it takes to create great music, shouldn’t you spend some time learning or even get extensive training on how to effectively sell it?
Your Musician Career Plan: Activities and Resources
As you progress down your career path and work on connecting with your audience at live performances and on social media, everything you do will require time and energy. Your musician career plan helps you figure out all the activities you need to perform to deliver your music, social posts, etc. to your audience, as well as determine the resources you need to perform those activities. Meaning, if your going to play a show, you'll spend time rehearsing and you'll need your gear or if you're posting online, you'll spend time creating content and will need images and / or videos for your post. Knowing these things are important because there's only so much time in the day and having this info will allow you to create a schedule for yourself. This is also where the workplace of a musician comes into play. You need to set up your space so you can be productive.
The Importance of Key Partners
Finding the right people to work with that can help to develop your career and present your music in the best way possible is important to every musicians. Whether you a rock musician, pop musician or classical musicians, you still need to surround yourself with the right people. This can include audio engineers, web developers, studio musicians, music arrangers, background singers, music producers, accountants, lawyers, vocal coaches, business coaches and the list goes on. How do you figure out the type of help you need? Again, that where your musician career plan comes in handy. You'll look at all the activities you've added to your plan and then determine which activities you'll perform verses activities where you need a specialist. This allows you to clearly see what kind of help you'll need BEFORE you need it. So if you need to record music, you may choose to do it yourself at home or you may go to a recording studio and hire a music producer and audio engineer. If your primary instrument is your voice and you need to learn proper vocal techniques, you can try a YouTube video or get private lessons from a vocal coach.
In short, yes, build a career in music is hard work, but you not having a plan makes your career progression harder than it needs to be. By creating a plan you'll be better equipped to navigate the challenges you’ll face because you’ll be prepared for them vs simply reacting to them like most artists do. So if you want to create popular music that reaches the masses or you want to be a music artist that is simply well-known in their local scene, both scenarios begin with a plan.
Learn more by watching the video below:
And finally, if you're serious about making music your profession, then I strongly encourage you to learn how to build a sustainable music career for yourself because it takes more than talent and great songs to be successful.
Suggested Articles:
