“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will neither have good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither it’s pipes nor it’s theories will hold water” -John Gardiner

Let’s face it… it’s not the 90’s for the music business… For that matter, it’s not any of the previous decades in the music industry.. This is the most exciting time in the music industry… Why?

Your Music Business is all about you. However, that is the good news and the bad news..

Yes, the good news is that anyone writing music has access to distribution that will reach the entire world through iTunes, Napster, BeatPort and many other forms of digital distribution outlets.

The bad news is that no one is going to create the system and give you the talents and direction of how to do this according to your goals and what you personally want to do in the music business. The days of finding a manager, agent, label or company to invest in you are over…. that is, if you have not invested in yourself. What does that look like? Either you have the money to pay people to do it for you, you do it on your own, or you keep creating music as a hobby and never reach it as a lucrative music business. Keep in mind in today’s music business, lucrative starts as part-time and makes its way to full time.

Most artists who are creating music as a hobby for 5-10 years never visualize the process through. Where do you want to end up? “I want to be the best music producer in the world, I want to run a record label, I want to make beats for major labels”. I hear this all the time and try to help people really ‘see’ what that looks like.

Now that you have the end in mind, you must back track to where you are now with your current budget, resources and connections. How do you make it work? If you cannot see it then your end goal is a fantasy. There must be a realistic route to your goal. If there isn’t one, you must keep going back to the drawing board until it all matches up.

Investing in your own music business management is humbling, you have to prioritize, cut out unneeded people and tasks that distract you from your ultimate goals. Let’s face it, it’s hard to put all these things aside and go for your dreams. You’ll start to find that there really are a lot of Posers in the Music Industry once you knuckle down and get to work. People will shrug you off – ‘man you’re too serious, why don’t you loosen up?, why you changing all the time – let’s just go have some fun’.

Personally investing in your music business is challenging at first but once you dig in, start connecting the dots of how to get from point A to point B, you’ll soon find out that its much easier than you thought… AND you’ll find you are talented in more than musical gifts but also staying focused and getting things done.