Career Goals for Indie Artist.
It’s easy to take the wrong decisions at the beginning of your career. You may take a wrong turn the first time you do it. In the indie music industry, mistakes don’t feel like mistakes while you’re making them, because this industry doesn’t have set guidelines for the path to success and there are few people available around to guide beginners. It’s easy to invest in a new album without asking the right questions first. By the same token, it’s easy to take too long in making the first release, spending precious years waiting to come up with the right song to launch yourself or your band, etc. When you look back at your mistakes, you’ll probably ask yourself “Why did I do this?” But for now, go to your parents for advice on becoming a doctor, and they will be able to procure a personal encyclopaedia for you. But go to them for advice on becoming a successful indie artist, and all they will be able to give is best wishes – at best! So, to all the beginners, remember that in this industry, everything seems fine until it’s too late — and then reality hits!
No, I don’t mean to demotivate you! In fact, in this series of blogs, I am sharing some common mistakes that indie artists make in their career, that keep them away from success. And the next mistake that I am going to discuss is – not setting an easily achievable initial goal.
Now, I am first going to ask you, have you set a goal for yourself yet? I had discussed the importance of setting goals in my blog Indie Artist Defining Goals. Most of us aren’t very good at setting goals. We set vague and unmeasurable goals like wanting to make enough money so you can quit your job or wanting to finance your new album. With this kind of goals, you never know when you have achieved them because they are so broad and impossible to track. You work more and more to get there and eventually wind up with this pit in your stomach that makes you feel like a loser. Let’s cure this crappy goal-setting problem right now.
Create a checklist of goals that are not so vague. Let your number one goal on the checklist to be the homing beacon for everything that you do. Every time you see it, every time you open up Twitter or Facebook, every time you sit down, every time you go to the bathroom, every time you get up, that goal is going to be staring you in the face. You’re going to have to know what you’re about to do, to quickly get to that goal. Is it the most efficient and effective way to get to that goal? If not, stop doing it. If yes, you need to work harder on it.
You do not necessarily have to get lucky or get the attention of Industry decision makers in order to create a successful music career that brings in a steady income. Instead, build a platform to attract and engage an email list of fans who are eager to support your projects and love your music. This is far more important and is going to help you more than just the attention of big shots. A solid fan base gives you the ability to get booking referrals instead of you constantly having to do cold calls. If you are an unknown and you don’t have any sales anyway, why not give your first song away to get a fan base. You cannot get distribution quicker than giving your stuff away by leaking it to the illegal downloaders and to make sure it gets around quickly. But here’s the trick. Do not call your track “Love” by the ‘Lovemakers’ or whatever your song or band is really called. If your track sounds somewhat like Linkin Park, title it ‘Unreleased Linkin Park?’ with a question mark behind it. Hey, now everybody who likes Linkin Park and looks for an illegal download will see your song and if they like it, they will download it. The key here of course is, the tag for the song when they play it will show the real name of your song, your band name and if you are really smart, the URL to your web site, etc. This is just my take on it. You may come up with a more creative idea to become famous or get attention of the listeners.
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