Why do musicians always feel disappointed about their career?

5 out of 6 reasons are THEIR fault. Time for retrospection.

Written by Tommy Darker. The whole article, explained in my podcast with WeSpin.

I was at a gig last night and I saw three amazing bands rocking out the stage and making people dance very hard. Note: it’s London, normally people don’t dance that hard.

The sad realization I made is that none of these bands actually makes money. Isn’t it sad? The band entertains you, makes you feel great, you pay the bar for drinks, but the musician gets nothing of monetary nature.

That brought an avalanche of thoughts and I started jotting them down! I quickly came down to 6 main reasons of failure, which you’ll definitely relate with (if you’re a musician).

Note: this order IS hierarchical. In other words, if you haven’t solved issue #1, don’t try to solve #3.

Let’s go.

1. Lack of focus on a specific goal and vision.

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” Lewis Carroll

Instead of blaming the system, musicians should blame themselves for not knowing where they’re going and having ambivalent goals.

A solo artist needs a long-term goal to focus on and a grander vision to accomplish. A band — to make matters more complicated — needs to maintain a mutual and clear route for all the 3-4-5 members that constitute it. Everybody needs to agree.

If you don’t, don’t blame the audience when you hear the phrase:

“You’re good, but you sound/look like (name other — probably well-known — artist)”

That is, you don’t stand out. Because you haven’t spend any time to refine what art means to you, who you are and why you’re different from the others.

And I don’t mean you need to be enormously ambitious to have focus on a goal. It’s good enough to say: “I will be the busker that all the people of Camden (neighbourhood of London) will talk about.”

2. They suck at communication.

Ok, let’s not hide behind our fingers. If you do have a vision, I guarantee that nobody will know about it if you haven’t communicated it properly to the world.

You can communicate a message in two ways: with words and with actions.

Speaking about actions, let me just drop some food for thought (and the hungry Musicpreneurs will get it):

The quality and nature of one’s vision is appraised according to the perception created by the context, the consistency and the progress of the visible bit of the vision.

All three must be present. In humanese: how do you expect someone to be convinced of your grand vision when you keep playing in bars and open mic nights all the time? Nobody says you don’t have a great plan behind it, but if people don’t see the signs to keep up with it, you’ve lost them forever. And that’s because of the bad communication on your part.

Actions speak loud, however copywriting is a forgotten but essential art for artists. As about verbal communication, I stated:

“Always try to build a bond and relationships that go through YOU, not through your band’s name or profile. Everyone might be able to ignore a band’s music, but nobody can ignore the fiery passion and vision of a PERSONALITY. This is what you should sell them. Everybody’s got good music.”

In other words, if you’re a charismatic communicator, this quality will rub off on your artistic profile as well. If you don’t have this inclination, work on it and become a great verbal communicator.

3. Has anyone heard of persistence?

The vision is there, you feel confident and you got some great people supporting you. But you are on the verge of giving up.

Persistence is the key. Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?

You constantly consider giving up because you haven’t tasted the corn yet after months of harvesting. It’s alright, keep harvesting. Adding value is not a race. It’s a life-long process.

The rewards will come sooner or later. It seems you still have steps to do, you’re not there yet. How can you expect to reach the goal if you haven’t executed all the steps? That’s unnatural, dude!