Be Your Own Expert

If you’re an independent musician trying to carve a career out of your own music–writing it, recording it, selling it, performing it, and hopefully finding some fans along the way, this is for you. I’m in the same boat as you, and I’m constantly thinking about the 20 options I have for making my next move.

Independent musicians tend to have a shortage of several resources, most notably time and money. What we have control over is our talent and our will to succeed. The biggest pitfall for any of us is getting paralyzed by the myriad of decisions we face everyday. Paralysis by analysis, as one of my old sales managers used to say.

There are resources to make things easier. Experts on every topic sharing their ideas online. The problem is that many of these experts have created a market out of independent musicians. Experts with no expertise in making their own music, or more importantly, no expertise in YOUR music. How are we supposed to know which information is useful? How do you know if your best interests are genuinely taken into consideration?

Part of my routine is to read what these people have to say on their newsletters, blogs, or interviews. I consider it an important part of my day. Just like listening to music inspires artistic creativity, reading other people’s ideas inspires me to do some of the business hustle.  Here’s what I think about as I read.

What is this person’s expertise?

By understanding what this person specializes in, I can sort fact from opinion. Most of the blogs and newsletters are not written by professional musicians. Therefore I don’t look for advice on what to do with my music. Instead, I learn what I can from what they know best, whether that’s marketing, promotion, sales, web design, etc. It’s usually unrelated to music. Then I can figure out how to apply it to my situation.

For example, I once read an article by Derek Sivers about owning your niche. Derek’s time at CD Baby gives him a unique perspective on sales trends in independent music. He hasn’t sold 1,000 of his own album this year, but he’s seen others do it. His blog offers insight to things that he’s seen work, and he words it so you HAVE to change the words and make them apply to yourself.

My music happens to be a very specific sub-genre of jazz, so this idea hit home. I stopped trying to fit my music into the larger, mainstream genre of jazz and just started making the music I heard in my head. I took this a step further and sat down with a couple jazz musician friends to brainstorm a list of music we could record that was apologetically niche oriented. Can we make the best of a certain kind of album? As a result we recorded a bossa nova Christmas album and made it available at digital music stores like iTunes and Amazon. We made some decent money from the effort, and nobody had any idea it was us (well, now you know I had something to do with it).

In an article that was recently brought to my attention, the author basically said artists don’t know how to budget their money. Because of our lack of financial savvy (I’m paraphrasing), he was going to offer some free information. Remind me to write him a thank you letter!

In backing his claim, he said most artists with a $5,000 budget end up spending everything on recording and beer.  Instead they should spend $1,000 recording and $4,000 on promotion. Really? What about my beer? A close second to my booze money, I’ll need professional quality manufactured product to distribute as a promotional tool. That alone usually costs more than $1,000. Perhaps he was just using the numbers as a ratio, but then why not say 80% of your budget should be used to promote the album?

This author was not an expert at budgeting. I should have ignored that whole bit. He’s an expert at social media, and was simply trying to create a tool for broke musicians. I’ll continue to check out his blog, but only to look for insight on social media. Then I’ll try to apply it to my own music.

Will this work for me?

I have a singer/songwriter friend who has been told that she needs to get 40,000 MySpace fans/friends. When industry people see that she has that many fans, a bunch of doors will open up. I’d debate whether or not that’s a decent use of her time, but more importantly, would that work for me? Does my audience live on MySpace?

Like I said, nobody knows your music better than you. You have a better idea what will work and what won’t. I’ve tried many different strategies for different periods of time and found some more useful than others. I once dedicated a month to adding 50 MySpace friends a day, finding people I thought would like my music through similar artist pages. Maybe half the people accepted the request, and I don’t think it generated very many meaningful fans or too many sales. It wasn’t a waste of my time, rather it just proved one thing that doesn’t work for me. It might work for you, but I’m not going to recommend it.

This is simply a matter of knowing your strengths and owning up to your weaknesses. As an instrumental jazz/funk guitarist, it’s unlikely that I’ll achieve Bruce Springsteen’s household-name version of fame. Frankly, I’m ok with that because many of my heroes are relatively unknown to the masses. Therefore a lot of mainstream promoting or marketing advices is automatically disqualified because my music is not mainstream.

Are they selling something?

The number one turn off for me is a blatant sales pitch. “Sneak peaks” into some excerpt from a new book or web pages that read like an infomercial. However, I’m a huge fan of authors that discuss their ideas in completion, and then I see a list of their books in the side column of their site.  The latter works on two levels:

1. If you’re sharing complete thoughts and ideas for free, frequently, then obviously you eat, sleep, and breathe in your area of expertise. I bet your book is full of these kinds of ideas with expanded discussion. I just might buy that book.
2. You’re a published author. That gives you some credibility, even if (maybe especially if) you are self published.

Bloggers are allowed to make a living, just like independent musicians, but if they make their living explicitly by selling their wares to independent musicians, there may be a slight conflict of interest.

I’ll be the first to admit that I started blogging ultimately to bring more attention to my music. Do you like what I have to say? Buy my music! Or don’t! But blogging is, in a small way, another type of marketing. The ideas I have, and the things I write about, come from the same brain that produces my music. People that read my blog and get curious about who I am are more likely to run into my music.

I highly recommend reading about the industry, right after practicing and listening (really listening) to some music. But ask yourself these questions while you read to make sure you take away the best of what the authors have to offer. This advice applies to this website as well.

Here is a list of blogs I read to get you started. Please share any not listed here that you find helpful, and happy reading!