Loren Weisman

It seems like there are so many different aspects to the music business, and so little time to learn it all and hone your skills. From keeping yourself healthy and keeping your musical edge, to knowing how to confidently sell your act and when to post on social media sites, life in the music business offers a wide variety of daily tasks.

Everyone has different abilities, needs, and requirements in the music business. Connecting and working with the right team, studio, and players can make or break a recording. When finding the right studio, producer, engineer, and musicians, it always comes back to your due diligence. Always double-check and find the reviews, follow up with past clients, and put in the time to research the people who are about to become part of your recording.

Think of your website as your home base, where everything out there in the music business links back to you. On the opposite side, this is where you can link everything to send people out to all your different social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, stores like iTunes and Amazon, audio sites, streaming sites, video sites, picture sites, blog sites, and everywhere else.

The music business can be difficult to navigate, at tines. Art is opinion, and no one is right or wrong when it comes to what they think of a song, a piece of art, an exotic food, or anything else that’s subject to personal taste and opinion. However, the amount of people out there claiming to be experts on the music business is staggering and scary.

You’ll need a tagline if you want to succeed in the music business. Before you lock in the tagline with your logo and font, plan to take it for a spin — a test drive of sorts — on a whole bunch of different roads. The better idea you have of how others perceive it, the better you can get a pulse on what works and what doesn’t.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if all you had to do was learn your instrument, practice your craft, write, record, and perform music? Many successful musicians tell of how they were “found” playing at this or that show, or how this or that record was played for this guy, or they signed this deal or that contract. Tens of millions more, however, had to take a different path, to find some level of success in music.

A gig is more than a gig in the music business. A song is more than the final mix. The marketing is going to take up more time than the recording and performing put together. So how do you focus on the individual tasks while continue to see and work for the bigger picture? It’s not as much about the idea of multitasking; it’s more about making every task have multiple results.

When researching a record deal, investor, gig, manager, music publisher, booking agent, or anything/anyone else that can help your music career, it’s important to look at the other side of the coin. Looking at how you can help or allow the other party to profit as well shows you are looking at the complete and bigger picture.

Just as it’s good to act as your own teacher in the music business, it’s also good at times to get a teacher or take lessons while you’re on the road with different instructors. While having one teacher who knows you and in a way can track for you, visiting different instructors and sharing some of your analysis and tracking of your playing can help them bring a different approach to and for you.