Wearing Many Hats as An Indie Musician

If you want to be a successful independent musician, you need to wear many ‘hats’. You need to be the ARTIST, PRODUCER, PROJECT MANAGER, TOUR MANAGER, BOOKING AGENT, MARKETING MANAGER, ART DIRECTOR, sometimes GRAPHIC DESIGNER, ACCOUNTANT, etc. If you’re blessed, like I am, you have people who are willing to help with some of the tasks listed above. But there are two things I’ve come to learn after doing this for a few years. First, even if you have people helping, it still gets overwhelming. If you are independent and unsigned, YOU are your business and YOU are the one that has to keep it going. The details can get a bit stressful. Case in point, right now I’m dealing with manufacturing and artwork deadlines for the album. I’d be fine dealing with two or three different things but I’ve got website redesigns and promo interviews in the back of my head to on top of trying to get my album posted on iTunes on the release date, getting promo cd’s made, and finishing the album art. I’m not complain’, in fact, a part of me really loves this business stuff. But sometimes you’re juggling so many hats, they end up just falling down on your head all at once and burying you simply because you are human. Signed artists have teams of people doing this work, because this is what needs to be done to make an album have a *chance* at being successful. If you want to sell albums and make a living doing music, you must do this work at the bare minimum to even have a *chance*. That is REALITY. Be prepared. And when you get overwhelmed, make sure to breathe, take a step back and keep perspective. If a deadline isn’t met, it is NOT the end of the world. This leads to the second observation I’ve learned doing this ‘indie musician’ thing.

Wearing many hats like this can cause the artist in you to get buried and then nearly die. (This happened to me after my first album.) This is because you get so consumed with the business side of things that the art gets neglected, you just don’t have TIME to write a song, work on the script, paint the canvas. BE ON THE LOOKOUT for this happening and get back in touch with your art when you suspect it happening! The business side of things can also cause discouragement. For example, you don’t get a booking or someone ignores your calls, etc. Ups and downs are part of the road, BE PREPARED to ride the ups and don’t let the down times get you TOO down. Keep a focused attitude (I’ll write more on that in a future blog entry) and keep moving forward. If you let discouragement grow into bitterness you can end up hating what you do and give up music entirely. Don’t let that happen to you. Taking a break is fine and RECOMMENDED. But don’t let the business side of being an independent artist crush you. TAKE A BREAK, STEP AWAY, get back in touch with the reason why you do art in the first place, then TRY AGAIN!