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How To Start Your Music Career

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Your passion for music has finally encouraged you to make the decision to pursue what you love. Whether you are keen to progress your music career from home or start up your music career, here are some pointers to get your music out there.

Make Sure You Continue To Have A Continual Income
You do not need to become a starving musician, as is shown on TV and film in popular culture today, to make it the music business. It is not wise to give up all of your financial stability as it can take a while to get to earn consistently within this industry. The only time this rule may not apply is if you have considerable savings or a large fan following already.

So with that in mind, you can still continue to work your standard 9-5 and use your evenings and weekends to start building your music career on the side. Everyone’s journey will be different but very few manage to jump into stardom without having other income streams in place.

Have A Plan And Goals
Everyone’s journey is different and everyone has different targets of success they want to reach. By having a goal to aim for it will make it easier to set realistic targets to help you achieve this. Also, it is important to be realistic with timescales. Having goals is more about having the steps in place to reach your target as opposed to set timescales to meet.

The music industry can be tough to break into and therefore it can bring a lot of challenges and result in set timescales not always being viable.

Think Of This Career As A Business
There are a lot of similarities between a new business set up and a new music career. Regarding your music career in a similar way to a business is a good idea as it will get you to consider the brand you want to create for you and your music, use social media to market your music, identify your audience, create and understand your budget etc.

Even if your end goal will be to have hired or outsourced some of these tasks to others, it is still important to have a basic understanding of business and how they can influence your music. Even with basic knowledge it will help you make sure that when you do hire others, they are meeting your expectations.

Keep Making Music
Although you’ll now be sharing your focus with other tasks, it is still important to continue to make music and hone your craft. This business avenue can change so quickly so it is always worth while keeping your skill and improving it.

It is also beneficial that as you perfect your craft that you use a recording studio and capture your music. This can help you in numerous ways, not only by giving you a digital copy but also allowing you to hear back your music and reflect on it and if needed tweak accordingly.

Network Within Your Community
Like within other aspects of life, it isn’t always about what you know but who you know, and music is no different.

You can’t build a career without clients and a support system in place to help you along your journey. The best place to start this is within your local community. Reach out to local schools, colleges, bars, clubs and music venues. This can offer you an avenue into meeting other like-minded people within the industry who may be able to help you whilst allowing you to start to build a following and fanbase. If you can manage to build a fanbase it will help your career massively. Consider your fans as free advertising for you. Plus you never know, by getting out there you may get spotted by an agent.

Social Media And Online Presence
Along with networking it is worth building up an online presence. Again think of this from a business perspective. You need to use online tools such as social media to enhance and engage with your following. Whilst doing this it is important to consider how this is being portrayed. If you want to be taken seriously and seen as a professional within the industry, you need to portray yourself this way.

So consider the quality of the photos and videos you share. Also, consider your audience and branding within this. This is the same with any visual aspects, such as graphics you may choose to use for logos and album art.

How to Progress Your Music Career From Home

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One of the best parts of being a singer and musician is performing on stage and seeing the audience’s response. Unfortunately, during the COVID-19 pandemic, live music performances have not been possible. As the situation is ongoing, it is not clear when life will return to normal, and gigs can take place once again. While not being able to perform to a live audience is incredibly disappointing and you probably miss the buzz of being on stage, there is no reason to put your music career on hold. With a bit of creative thinking, you can take this situation and look for ways that you can work through it and continue to drive your career towards success. If you need some inspiration to get you started, then these tips should give you some ideas to take forward:

Think Outside the Box

While live music is on hold, there are still opportunities that can be used to increase your chances of success. The first things to think about are all of those tasks that you meant to get around to doing previously but never managed to find the time. It is likely that you have loads of ideas that could help you to gain exposure, but have always been too busy to put them into action, so the free time you have now is the perfect opportunity to get started.

Keep Performing

If you like the idea of your music going viral, then why not start uploading some performances and see what happens. Acoustic performances from home are an excellent way to attract attention, and you will be able to reach a much wider audience than you could at a live gig in your local area. Posting content online is an excellent way of getting noticed by the right people and generating interest in your music and you as a performer. Using social media in the right way and connecting with the online community could potentially open up genuine opportunities for your music, just be sure that people are who they say they are.

Continue Making Contacts

If you have some useful contacts, don’t be afraid to stay in touch. Arranging meetings to discuss opportunities is something proactive that you can still do from home via conference call, just make sure that you have a good quality microphone speaker so if you need to put on an impromptu performance to impress you can do so and showcase your sound clearly.

Start Streaming

If you haven’t done so already, now could also be an excellent time to upload your music to subscription streaming services. As most people use music streaming services nowadays, you stand a good chance of reaching a large number of subscribers. With so many different subscription streaming services available, you will need to weigh up which ones you want to add your music too. Seeing your music available on a streaming service is a great feeling, so if you think you are ready, why not give it a go?