The Many Hats of a Musician
May 31, 2011
Rich Gordon in Marketing, music career

Preamble

If you’ve clicked on this and expected there to be a miraculous answer at the end that demonstrates how to balance all the factors of a hectic music career, you’re in the wrong place. Also, if you think that being a musician is going to be a case of “write a few songs, get a multi-million pound record contract, easy street…”, you should also stop reading.

The point of this blog post is to reach out to other musicians in my position and get their input. I want to know how other musicians balance their music lives with their personal, professional and social lives, and how they meet the challenges of being a musician that I’ve flagged up below.

I hope that in writing this, other musicians who face these challenges can pool their advice and knowledge of how to deal with them, and also not feel like they’re alone. I can’t be the only person in this world who’s juggling too many things at once!

Be warned: this is a little longer than most blog posts. Go get yourself a cup of coffee or something before you start.

Please comment on this post and share anything you think is relevant.

Wearing many hats

Being a musician (independent or otherwise) is great. The opportunities are limitless - anything you want to do, you can just do it. You don’t need anyone’s approval or opinion to make anything happen. You can simply go for it, and you don’t need to rely on anyone else to make it happen. Well, that’s unless of course you’re part of a function band, in which case you need approval from your audience for bookings. But that’s another story…

Unfortunately, this freedom comes with a major caveat. You are taking on the work of several people, and are saddling yourself with a pretty epic workload. Don’t get me wrong - being the master of your own success and seeing things progress has no equal in terms of providing satisfaction, but it very quickly presents two fundamental difficulties:

  1. Finding the time to devote to “doing the creative stuff”
  2. Balancing it all out evenly so each aspect gets its due attention

Sadly, if you’re serious about pursuing the music career, in any capacity, you really have to think very deeply and carefully about the business side of it.

Note: In case this is news to you, yes, being a musician is a business pursuit. But this is your lifelong passion, right? Bring it on!

The business of music

On the business side alone, you need to take the following considerations:

These three things alone can be extremely time-consuming (and addictive), and can sometimes get you bogged down, so much so that the creative part of your career begins to suffer. Believe me, I’ve been there, and it’s something I struggle with regularly.

You’ll probably want to be able to rehearse - either for self-improvement, as part of your performing repertoire, or even try and learn new things and improve your skills.

Your personal life

The chances are that you also need to think about how you can take care of your life in general. Just because you’re an artist, it doesn’t make you exempt from having living costs, a social life, a family life (and its various responsibilities). You also have a responsibility to yourself to live your life in between doing all these things. You need time to be a human - to rest, to eat, to recuperate, to be sociable (and to enjoy the world at the same time). Unless you’re an unsociable hermit, of course.

“The day job”

All of this needs time and money, and you probably have a day job you are doing to look after that side of things. With that, already there’s this massive chunk of time taken away from your week and you’re left with a very small period of time in which you can do the stuff you really want to do. Unless of course you’re one of those lucky people for whom music IS your day job. (My envy is immeasurable).

Making “the jump”

The likelihood is you’re only doing a particular day job for the money, and are desperately trying to find ways to make music your only day job, so you can live, breathe, eat and sleep music. For those of you in this position, you’ll know how difficult this is. Whilst you desperately want to just step into the music world, you know well that:

With those latter two points in mind, how on earth are you going to find what little time you have at the moment to make these things ready for you to make the change?

The other stuff

In the most extreme cases of people trying to do far too much (not that I know anyone in this position, personally), as well as everything else, you’re maybe also trying to achieve the following:

Juggling the hats

As a human, there is only so much you can do alone. Unless you have really reliable friends who are willing to do stuff for you, you’re pretty much lumbered with being a one-man business.

So, the question is, how can one person handle this?

Rich’s solutions

At the beginning of March I realised that I had to take measures to balance out all of these facets better, and commenced a major “self-audit”. It has been a lengthy process but it has been very valuable to me, and after stripping every part of it back to the foundation, I have become far more efficient through the following:

Yes, I have had to be very anal. There’s no escaping that.

Here’s what I haven’t yet properly solved:

The end. Your thoughts, advice, knowledge, expertise?

Please, comment below and share!

Article originally appeared on Music Think Tank (https://www.musicthinktank.com/).
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