Business Advice for Aspiring Musicians

Here are some tips for musicians on social media looking for music exposure and awareness around their craft. As a music entrepreneur, you need to be everywhere that people who like your music are. Right? Follow the eyes, and (in your case) ears. If you’re not on Snapchat, Vine, Instagram, and Soundcloud, you basically don’t exist to the average 25 year old. You’re not even alive to them. So you need to be putting out content everywhere. Once you have the leverage, there are ways to monetize. Brands are going to pay for music. Live events will continue to be profitable.

But it’s not good enough to just put out content everywhere. It’s not good enough to make some vines, and then throw your music up on DistroKid and wait for the sales to roll in.

Those were and continue to be bands that flourished because they cultivated a community. People make fun of pop music because it’s fleeting. It’s big for a second and then it goes away. But the best pop music – Madonna, Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake – cultivates a community. The Grateful Dead. Phish. These are bands that outlived any reasonable expectation of popularity because over the years they went beyond putting out music and built an extremely engaged community.

If you want to make enough to crush it as a music entrepreneur and play your music, you need to care about the audience. You need to start doing things for them. Call it community management, call it access, call it whatever you want, but things like Meerkat and Snapchat are places that you need to be if you want to cultivate a following. I mean let’s stop for a second and just look at Meerkat (a platform I’m crushing it on, btw). Right now people are just kind of turning on the live stream at their desks, or in their kitchens and just… talking. It’s nice, but could you imagine doing it as a band? Putting on mini Meerkat concerts for your most engaged fans. Bringing them into your home studio to listen to you putting the finishing touches on your newest song? You’d have fans for life! It’s all about access for your community, my friends. Once they love you, it’s easy to sell them your stuff. That’s my business advice to musicians starting out, and also the path to being able to financially support yourself with your art.