How many income streams do you have as an artist? Do you often look for ways to monetize your career outside of live performance, merchandise, and streaming royalties?
In this episode of Creativity Excitement Emotion, David highlights the importance of thinking like an entrepreneur.
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Highlights:
00:17 – Resistance to earning additional income streams
00:41 – Why you need to begin thinking outside the box
01:24 – The soft skills and hard skills you develop as a musician
02:58 – Making an income from music in 30 ways?
03:22 – Limiting mindsets won’t serve you
05:03 – Be willing to explore the opportunities as they arise
Transcript:
I'm kind of amazed at how many musicians are resistant to creating or having revenue streams that aren't somehow directly connected to their music. Like if it's not gigging and live performance, and if it's not streaming royalties, and if it's not merch sales, and maybe sync licensing would go in that category too, “Then I just don't want it.”
I mean if you want to create a sustainable and profitable career, you may need to start thinking a little outside of those categories, because I don't think you've done the math. I don't think you've looked at the odds.
And we all hate that right? Like we've all been told by people “Oh, you know the odds of becoming a successful musician,” but that's not what I'm talking about.
We need to practice accurate thinking and accurate thinking requires that we look into not just statistics but gain a very deep understanding of markets and audience and customers, so that we can create a strategy that is going to get us to where we want to go.
I remember reading an article many years ago and I wish I could remember who it was because I would credit him. But he was talking about how you're developing a lot of soft skills and hard skills as a musician.
If you're committed to your growth, and I think a lot of people still aren't committed to “Let me invest in myself first, and then I'll become the kind of person that naturally attracts opportunity.”
But those who are continually developing themselves are aware of this. They become aware of the many opportunities available.
The more you develop yourself, the more you become aware of opportunity.Click To Tweet
And so, the skills they gain along the way, they've realized they could write articles, which we might be at the tail end of that reality now, like making money on articles. We'll see. Like I said before, demand is still going up for me, but the reality is this could be the beginning of the end because of AI.
You could take on public speaking engagements, you could do something as obscure as build a lead generation business. There are so many skills you're going to learn along the way, whether that's setting up a website or writing a bio or editing a video or putting together a logo.
And ideally, yeah, we wouldn't do all this ourselves. We would find people and professionals that can handle that on our behalf. And with AI coming in, I mean, some of those tasks are going to be handled by AI moving forward.
But you've gained the skills to be able to do many things well, and there may be lean times. There may be times when you need a little bit of additional income to make your gigging and career dreams a reality.
I've talked about how I've made money from music in 27 ways. It's honestly probably close to 30 by now, with all the things that I've done. And sometimes people just scoff at it, right? They're like, “Oh, well, that's not live performance, and that's not making music and writing songs.”
And I'm like, “Well, okay, so first, all those things are on there. But secondly, if you're thinking like an entrepreneur, you can't help but seize the opportunities that come.”
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