How To Treat Your Music Career Like A Business

Many artists hate mixing business with their craft. What else would you expect from someone who is creative by nature, right? The reality, however, is that a balance of art and business knowledge is essential for growth. The business side of your career helps elevate your brand, which in turn generates you more income so that you can create more of what you love. Income is vital if you wish to create financial freedom and more importantly: Time freedom.

Right after you read this, check-out this article we wrote that covers 10 free online tools for musicians!

Here are some ways to treat your career like a business.

1. Systemize Repeatable Processes

In business, one area that’s repeated to help scale a company is sales. A sales team is the heart of many companies. Sales teams have strict, repeatable processes they must follow in order to reach out to clients, onboard them into the company, and to build relationships with them over time. It’s a sequence that is automated to produce better results.

Likewise, Delta Airlines has one of the largest mechanical workshops in the world to repair planes from various airlines. Once an engine, which can cost upwards of $30M+ comes into their shop, they have a checklist of processes they need to establish before the engine is torn apart and fixed. Once they’ve diagnosed an issue, they then send the engine through several stages throughout their facility to ensure each team has done their job.

Each member of the repair team must also log everything they do to any component of the engine. This is their process/system.

As an artist, you too can create processes that have to be repeated often. For example, if you get fans DM’ing you on Instagram asking, “Where can I buy your merch?”, you can create a “Quick reply” direct message within Instagram, so it makes the process of getting your fans from A to B faster.

Likewise, if it’s a headache to individually contact music promoters every time you make a new song, simply create a spreadsheet with their contact information so it saves you time in the future.

List some things you can systemize so that it saves you more time, and create processes to speed up results. Efficiency is key. Make your career flow like clockwork.

2. Connect With Fans Deeply

When I scroll through Instagram, one thing that always astounds me is the privilege some artists display. They have hundreds of fans commenting and supporting them, and I see not a single response to any comment. The harsh reality is that nobody is too busy to reply to 20 comments in 10 minutes, and if you don’t have ten minutes for your fans (every few days), then you don’t have a career - You have a one-sided brand that doesn’t care about its customers/fans. Don’t be that artist.

Fans are people who work their as**s off each week at their job, to then spend their free time consuming your music, buying your merchandise, and coming to see you at live shows. If you neglect these people, it’ll show down the line.

3. Get Your Finances In Order

Your brand is your business, so why wouldn’t you treat your finances as its bloodline? The idea of finances can be stressful, especially if you have no experience running a business or have no experience managing money well. Here are some quick and easy-to-learn finance tips:

i) Taxes, Taxes, Taxes.

Say you’re lucky enough to get a $10,000 check for a licensing deal. You need to understand that the entirety of that check is not yours. You may think you deserve the entire amount (which is true), but legally, Uncle Sam (the Taxman) needs his share first. Depending on your country and income threshold, you should consult with an accountant to find out how much of your income you should be setting aside for taxes. Even mega-artists like Lil Wayne and DMX have gotten into trouble with tax issues in the past, so please be sure to read up on this topic (as well as company formation for tax advantages).

ii) Know Basic Profit/Loss/Expenses

Knowing about profit, loss, and expenses will put you miles ahead of those who have no idea about it. Here’s a basic break down.

Gross Revenue: Your income before expenses are taken out
Expenses: Any expenses related to your business/career
Net Profit: Your Gross revenue minus your expenses.

Another Example Using Numbers

Gross Revenue: $10,000
Expenses: $5,000 (taxes, your salary, internet bills, etc).
Net Profit: $5,000

What does a loss look like?

Gross Revenue: $10,000
Expenses: $11,000
Net Profit: -$1,000

Your goal, as you grow your career, should be to create a profitable business/brand (so more revenue than your expenses).

iii) Ask A Professional

Whenever you’re confused about finance-related questions (which you will be as you grow), always be asking your accountant questions. Accountants you hire are there to take your questions and to make your financial lives easier. If you’re always worried about “bugging them” then you’ll forever find yourself in financial issues. Ask away.

4. Think Long Term

Here in the U.K, around 60-80% of new businesses fail within the first 3-5 years. Of the remaining 20-40%, another 50% of those fail within the next 5-10 years. What this shows is that business is not easy. I can only imagine the statistics in the U.S (with even more competition for various markets).

Knowing the above data is why you need to ground yourself in the process of building your career. Things can take a turn as fast as they begin. Instead of anchoring happiness and a sense of achievement to the next goal, focus on building habits that your goal requires.

E.g. A Soccer manager’s goal is to win the championship, but instead of focussing on the scores and trophies, he should focus on the systems and processes that will get his team to the championship, such as recruitment, training, and so on.

Focus on the skills your goals require you to obtain and you will experience consistent growth, instead of just anchoring satisfaction to new goals every so often.

5. Outsource When Needed

One great use of your money is to buy yourself time. The best way to do this as an artist is to outsource things so that you can spend time doing things you love.

For example, if you suck at making lyric videos, head over to sites like Fiverr.com or Upwork.com and pay someone to do it for you. Not only will the quality be fairly decent (depending on who you hire), but you’ll also spend far less than having a professional make it for you.

We use sites like Fiverr to hire people to make certain graphics for us, as well as animated videos (that will be released in the future ;)).

6. Focus on what you’re good at

One way to help excel your business is to double down on what you’re good at. Yes, at the beginning of your career you’ll be wearing all the hats such as the marketer, the legal person, the songwriter, the designer, etc, but at some point, you’ll need to focus on your strengths and hire others to do things.

One rule I couldn’t advise enough is the 80/20 rule, otherwise known as the Pareto rule. It works as follows: Focus 80% of your time/effort into 20% of the things that bring you the most results.

For example, if engaging with your audience and create nice artwork is helping you grow, double down on those tasks, and hire others to do the other stuff. Believe it or not, as the CEO of Musicspace, I do two-to-three things per day, every day. I design content, I post content, and I contact artists. I do fewer things for the following reasons:

• Fewer tasks with 100% effort are better than ten tasks with 20% effort.
• It’s simple for me to follow and doesn’t make me complicate life.
• Fewer tasks growing the company means I have more time to speak with our users and support them where needed.

7. (Bonus) Be Organized

A business cannot thrive unless there is organization. This is why Musicspace allows you to manage your most valuable assets, your music catalog. Keeping organized means you’re always ready for potential licensing deals, and have one place where all of your most important information about your art is stored.

Keep your catalog organized, your finances organized, and any other things that relate to your brand. Organization not only shows what type of business-person you are but also has a bunch of mental health benefits, too.

Nobody should have to try to pick up the pieces due to lack of organization years from now. Keep your life and business in order.

I hope you enjoyed!

As always Musicspace family, I hope you enjoyed this article! If you found some value in it, please be sure to share the link with others!