You Are a Small Business Owner (You Just Forgot)

There isn't a lot of guidance in the music industry that prepares artists and songwriters for their inevitable success. The majority of content around making it in the music industry, I'll admit including my own articles, Instagram reels, and YouTube videos, assumes the path forward for any musician with the stars of commerce in their eyes will be steep and rocky.

Music has never been something parents suggest to their children as a way to build a stable and generous income, and the viewpoint today is that music and art are an even scarcer source of income and well-being for young people than they were thirty years ago. "People don't pay for music anymore" and "only rich kids make it" certainly carry truth. Making time for music gets harder and harder while you're trying to put food on the table, and it becomes virtually impossible when there are multiple mouths to feed. This is especially true if you're just starting out without a fan base to grow on. Home recording costs may have shrunk, but like starting any small business, the early years demand long hours, thoughtful planning, and sacrifice, and those who give it a solid try learn quickly that a great product still requires significant marketing effort.

As musicians, we seem to forget that we are small business owners. If we decide that making it in the music industry is hard when people aren't requesting our music, aren't showing up to our under-promoted shows, or aren't accepting offers they never received because we have no mailing list, we're drawing irrational conclusions about the opportunity music still presents. We see the multimillion-dollar revenue streams of the largest artists and assume that's what success looks like, but that's also what a carefully honed team of experienced producers, publicists, managers, and booking agents can accomplish when they all work together with a budget. It may be true that songs are less than a dime a dozen, and that the sons and daughters of networked parents are holding rigged lottery tickets. But many songwriters and artists would be astounded how many people would pay them for what they make if they truly put themselves out there, following some of the same actions as the people whose whole job is to design and execute those plans for the artists we love.

There are fans for every kind of music and every kind of artist, and the sheer variety of taste out there is proof of that. If you believe that, the question now becomes how you'll find and connect with your fans. Turns out, that's one of the first questions any small business asks.

Who exactly is your customer?

When you find them, what will you say to them?

Part of the trouble is that we measure ourselves against a picture of success that was never our path to begin with. The pressure to scale a teaching product rather than teach one-on-one, to fill amphitheaters rather than play a house concert, to gain 100,000 followers rather than 25 superfans, to win the Grammy rather than own the stage of a local festival, all set a generic standard of perceived success that neither makes sense nor sets realistic goals for the everyday working recording artist. Yes, a tiny percentage rake in most of the money in the music industry these days. It IS harder to supplement music making with a regular day job. Unfortunately, this is also the case with art in general. But it says nothing about whether listeners want our music, or whether it's worth making. It only means the cost can give us pause, as something we choose to pay, or not. And when the answer is "not," we still have a choice about how to make music a part of our lives.

Whether your customer is a music consumer, a publisher, or even a co-writer you'd like to write with, a music library you'd like to be included in, or a venue you'd like to play, run your music business as though there are people waiting for your music. Instead of chasing what it means to "make it in the music industry," our goal can be to pursue what is uniquely and musically ours, and to try various approaches to translating that sound and story to the customers who will come back to us for it again and again.

Stay creative,