Music is one of the many pleasures of life. This art form can transcend cultures, and time and can impact people all over the world.
Icons like Micheal Jackson, or Elton John prove that the power of music has the potential to reach around the globe. It’s hard to imagine someone who doesn’t enjoy music. True, you may find the occasional soul who doesn’t emphasize it much in their day-to-day lives, but even these individuals still enjoy music to some degree.
Within this world, there is of course musician and artists. Without men and women committing their lives to learn, perfecting, and honing their skills as musicians, the world wouldn’t be able to enjoy the common grace that music is. However, just because someone may be very passionate about music, or even enjoy dabbling in creating, doesn’t always mean they are cut out to be a professional musician.
The good news is that you don’t have to pull your paycheck from music in order to call yourself a musician or even be involved in the music industry. There are seemingly endless ways that you could find your place in the world of music, and even in its industry. For those who do want to become professional musicians and take their game to the next level – there are a lot of factors to consider. Everything from publishing, music distribution, touring, and much more.
Things to Consider
To say that being successful in the music industry will require some hard work, might be a bit of an understatement. It not only takes a lot of hard work, and personal discipline, but it takes being highly strategic and making a long-term plan that you are willing to adapt and follow through on. If you have been wanting to find some ways to take your music to the next level, here are some things to consider.
- Consider Where You Want to Be
This is perhaps the most important of the preliminary aspects of becoming a professional musician. Most people may already know the initial lane they want to be in – for example, the singer of a jazz band, or violinist in an orchestra! However, within that, you need to take some time to not only decide what you want to do with your talent and skill but invest in understanding how you will plan to get there.
This could look like getting real about your place in the journey – for example, if you are an indie rock band you need to make up your mind – where do you want to be? Do you want to be paying your bills with your streaming revenue? Do you want to be headlining festivals? What market are you wanting to primarily sell yourself to?
The good thing about this kind of exercise is it can free you up. If you find that you honestly want to make enough money to keep your music as a hobby that pays for itself, you can thankfully offload some of the stress that would come with the goal of your music being your main source of income.
- It Takes Continual Skill Building
The best musicians and the most profound artists all have one thing in common, they never stop building and growing their skills. Music provides a literally endless amount of improvement and in order to reach for some dreams it will involve an endless amount of learning, growing, and skill building.
For some, this is the most enthralling part of pursuing the art of music. However, understanding this aspect of it can help bring some much-needed guidance to those who may not share that calling. It may be inspiring to see an artist you love at the Grammy’s, however, what you aren’t seeing are the literal hundreds of thousands of hours that the artist spent in obscurity to get there.
- Have a Message
This is perhaps the most subjective of the factors to consider, however, if you were to do a quick inventory of your musical heroes – you would probably find that they all have something in common and that was their message. Yes, the message changes from artist to artist, however, the medium of music exists to deliver messages about the human experience. From Keith Richardson to Adele, artists have been connecting with their audience over shared experiences since musicians were able to first perform!
Taking time to understand what message, story, and kind of importance your music will have can go a long way to helping you best realize your music potential!
Conclusion
The road to becoming a musician is a wonderful, exciting, and at times, testing one. If you are wanting to take the next step in your journey as a musician, these are three factors that will do you good to consider on your journey!
Photo credit: Monk.
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