How To Get Started As A Professional Music Artist
The biggest issue I see with most artists are that they think like an artist, and not with a business mindset. If you think you’re going to get famous over night by just dropping tracks on your sound cloud because your “work speaks for itself”, you might as well hang it up. The reality is no matter how good you are at your craft, you won’t get anywhere without understanding or fulfilling the business side of your music. The business side to music for an independent artist includes creating a website, branding, marketing, creating visuals like taking music videos or photoshoots, forming up legal contracts to protect your work, and more.
If you’re already a seasoned artist trying to take it to the next level, you’ve probably heard of 3rd party distributors such as CD Baby, Distro Kid, Tune Core etc. For most music artist, getting on iTunes and Spotify seems to be not only a huge accomplishment, but a stamp to the public that they are “official”. What most artists don’t know is that these third party distributors are just another party that an artist has to split money with. You may not see the importance of it now, but it adds up. As an artist you want to be able to invest more in your career, which means you will need to develop financial literacy. You need to start thinking about money, in order to make money. As an independent artist you need to wear many hats. If you do not have the knowledge or skill for example to make beats, you either have to learn how to make them or be able to afford a producer that will.
Big artists do not have to worry about wearing many hats, because being signed to a label they can afford people to fulfill those roles. Record labels can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. Labels are no different than a bank loan for music. What happens is a record label will approach you and offer X amount of money that needs to be paid within X amount of time and until you pay back the money you’ve received, you will not be making money. Now they can offer you $1.5 million dollars, but that doesn’t mean you know how to use it wisely. No matter what, you will need to develop financial literacy. A good example of an artist who struggled is T-Pain.
A big tip I can give to you guys is to always cut out the middle man. Many artist will tell you even $1,000,000 is not enough to break an artist into the industry. There are fees new artists do not take into account such as studio fees, producer fees, pay for beats, photoshoots, videography, website, third party distributors are taking cut, manager fees, marketing team fees etc . There are only two major ways to invest. You can invest time, or money. You can hire someone or invest in the time to learn that skill that is really holding you back. Buy recording equipment, learn how to record yourself! Doing this alone saved me so much money. Learn how to shoot your own videos and be creative. Again if you invest time and money learning and filling these roles you will not need to split the end result. You will be saving money. Another rout most artists do is to create a business such as a clothing line as a way to create a new funnel for money other than music. I would suggest though on focusing on things that will require little to no effort such as focusing on something that can generate passive income.