I have worked as a professional musician for over 20 years. Through that time, I have traveled to many different cities, I have seen venues come and go, I have seen businesses succeed and I have seen others fail, and through it all I have accumulated quite a few good suggestions for anyone who wishes to be successful hosting live music. Whether you're a nightclub wishing to have live music on a regular basis, or an events promoter who does an event with a live band once in a while, or a swing dancer wanting to put on a big dance-centered event with one, or possibly multiple, live bands; I hope these tips will help your event become a successful one.
1. Give your potential audience an expectation, and then exceed that expectation. Give your event or venue a focus. Audiences need to know what they're getting into. If you're a jazz venue, stick to a jazz format. If you're a blues venue, stick to hiring blues bands. The most successful nightclubs with long-running histories have a built-in reputations that are more powerful than any other form of advertising. If you walk into the Blue Note or the Village Vanguard in New York City, you know exactly what type of music you will hear, no matter who the musicians are. There is a club in Denver called El Chapultepec that has had live jazz seven nights a week every night since the 1930s. The faces of the musicians come and go, the style of the music changes with the times, but everyone in the city knows that if they want to hear good jazz music any night of the week, they can walk into the 'Pec and they won't be disappointed. The same goes for the Candlelight, a blues club in Portland, OR. Blues fans no that no matter what night of the week, they can go to the Candlelight and hear some great live blues music. The club doesn't need to tell people that they are a blues club; that's understood because they have never deviated from that format through all of their years.
This principle also applies to event organizers, not just nightclubs. I have played music for swing dancers for the past 14 or 15 years and have seen those events succeed or fail too. The most successful events are the ones that have a "theme". Something that gives audiences an idea of what they're buying a ticket to. This can be as simple as a catchy, descriptive name, or it can be an entire marketing plan, but it needs to be something that clearly conveys to your potential audience exactly what they should expect at your event. This is called Branding, and it is important if you want people to attend your event.
Please note that your Theme doesn't necessarily need to limit the style of music you present to your audiences. Having a singular style of music definitely makes it easier for your customers to define their Expectations, but it is by no means the only way to do so. Your theme could be "French Restaurant with classy acoustic background music". Or it could be "we serve the finest local wines, and look we have Live Music too." The only rule is, if you're planning on presenting Live Music at your event or venue, give your audience an idea of what to expect and why it's important that they spend their money at your venue or event.
2. Reach the widest audience possible - This is the number one secret to success in any business, and the number one preventable cause of failure. The Live Music business is no exception. Unless your Theme (see above) is "we're so hip we don't want anyone to know about us" in which case your business should expect to lose money for at least a year or two while the word-of-mouth does its work, (which is doubly ironic since the shelf-life of a "too-hip-to-advertise" business is only a couple of years until the hipsters decide that their hangout has become "too mainstream" and move on) the Bottom Line is you should always plan on reaching the widest possible audience. You might have an idea of what kind of clientele is your "target audience". By all means court them, cater to their every whim, but don't exclude the rest of the world in the process. You yourself might not care about little details like atmosphere, wall decor, or the quality of the wood in the dance floor, but as crazy as it sounds, there are potential paying customers who do care about those things, and it could mean the difference between having a few people walk through your door who share exactly the same interests with you, or having a lot of people walk through your door who share enough similarities to be interested.
This is all about atmosphere. 10% of your potential clientele might be interested in exactly the same reasons for being there that you are. But in order to achieve "critical mass" you need to give 100% of your potential clientele a reason for wanting to cross your threshold. Some of them might be there for the drinks. Others might be there for the food. Some might choose your venue because of your fine selection of microbrews. Others might enjoy the fact that you have a dance floor. There might even be some who like the color scheme of the artwork on your walls. Whatever the reason, it is vitally important to understand that different people have different reasons for going out on the town. The more of these reasons you can successfully accommodate, the more people will have an incentive to choose your venue in which to spend their money.
One example of a business failing because of this: I once worked as a musician in the house band at a jazz club in a ski town in Colorado. The owner's vision was to provide a "touch of class" in the midst of all the skier bars and pub hangouts where the smell of days-old beer and cigarette ashes permeated the bare floors of all of those other places. So he invested in a sound system, built a stage, covered his entire floors with carpet, and emphasized an upscale atmosphere with good food and classy jazz music instead of the typical bar-band fare. A nice concept, which could've worked well. He even made his venue non-smoking, which, in 1994 was still unheard-of for a bar. But he overdid it. He stocked his bar with top-shelf scotch and decided to charge at least $1 more per-drink for his Well drinks than any other bar within walking distance. (note: in a ski resort town, there are Many bars within walking distance!) His rationale was that this would limit his clientele to only those with plenty of money to spend. Venue owners call this a "riff-raff filter" and yes that's a real term in the industry. So what happened? Customers would go get liquored up down the street and then come in and listen to the high-quality music for free. Due to the density of bars featuring Live Music within walking distance, no bar was willing to be the first to charge a cover, so the only way any of them could make any money was from food/beverage sales; the other bars were all doing fine but he was losing money every night even though his room was packed with people. The riff-raff filter didn't keep out the riff-raff, it just kept them from spending any money in his establishment. Meanwhile, his bar was so crowded with non-paying customers, that the people who did want to buy drinks from him had to wait 45 minutes to get served by one overworked waitress. The lesson to be learned from this: this owner could have easily turned his business around by offering a low-cost, competitively priced alternative to his top-shelf fare. His top-shelf clientele would still show up; he had done everything else right; atmosphere, music, food, sound system -- but his one crucial mistake was not having at least a few affordable menu/drink items for the casual bar crowd that made up 90% of his potential customer base. Instead, he chose to blame the band for costing him too much in overhead. He fired the band, cancelled his Live Music to save money (thus eliminating the one remaining reason why customers should patronize his establishment at all) and his doors were permanently closed in less than a year.
Another example of a narrow audience base leading to a diminished role for Live Music is the Swing Dancing scene. I have been playing music for Swing Dancers since the early days of the "revival" in 1997. Before that, I was playing in a Big Band in a small club on Wednesday nights. The guys in the band, all professional musicians with established careers, saw these Wednesdays as our "bowling league nights". You know, a chance for 18 guys to hang out and drink beer and have fun making music together for $20 bucks per man. Our audience consisted of about 30 dedicated fans who showed up regularly once a week to dance to our music and drink wine. Then, suddenly, in about 1997, we saw our audience explode to 200 young people trying to cram into that tiny space. We eventually moved to a larger space, a former Masonic temple that had been repurposed with a brand new, pristine dance floor -- and not much else. No bar, no food, no atmosphere, and no fun. Our original fans, most of whom liked to enjoy a few glasses of wine or beer throughout the night, stopped going to these dances where no alcohol was served. The new crowd of Lindy Hoppers stopped going too, because they discovered there was a different swing band with a weekly gig at an actual bar, their dance floor was slightly smaller but still big enough to accommodate hundreds of dancers. Inexplicably (since the majority of swing dancers don't drink) the presence of alcohol and an actual "bar atmosphere" seems to be more inviting than a multipurpose building with a great dance floor but no atmosphere.
I use the word 'inexplicably' because the majority of swing dancers will tell you they don't drink and that they don't care if there's no alcohol, no food, etc -- but obviously someone does care, and here is the truth of the situation: a successful Live Music event needs some diversity. DJ'd dance events on the other hand do not. A Swing Dance Event with a top-notch DJ and top-notch instructors will attract people who are interested in dancing, but a Live Music event necessarily needs to attract listeners as well as dancers in order to be viable. Even back then, this was true. The most successful "dance" events took place at bars and established businesses where people could dance if they wanted to, or they could sit and be a bystander and feel like they were part of the "scene" even if they weren't participating. The past few years have seen too many Swing Dance events organized by people who don't put much thought into anything but the bare essentials: the dance floor, the band, the DJ, the instructors, etc... Don't get me wrong, these are all important!! But they are not the only things that are important. Lots of people, especially those who are listeners or who are casual sometimes-dancers like to sit and have a drink, socialize, and watch once in a while. If you want your event to be successful, give those people some kind of reason to be there, too.
There is a certain amount of attrition to the Swing Dance scene (dancers grow up and start families & don't go out all the time anymore) and there is hardly any new blood coming in. The dancers' solution to this, unfortunately, has been to hire fewer live bands, to rely more on DJs playing recorded music for their events. For one thing, it's cheaper; and for another, if people only care about the dancing, the floor, the instructors, etc at their event, then Live Music is less of a priority and is often the first thing to get cut when budgets are an issue. Swing organizers will often pay huge amounts of money for big Name instructors to teach their dance lessons, but they balk at paying for a live band or paying to have their event in a decorated room with food and/or drinks for the non-dancers. As a result, the only people who show up to these events anymore are those who are so completely obsessed with dancing that nothing else matters. And how does one become so completely obsessed with dancing in the first place? Every one of these dancers started out as a non-dancer first; they came to the venue or event for some other reason (such as to hear the band) and they decided the dancing looked like a lot of fun. That's not going to happen if you don't give them a reason to show up in the first place.
If you want to organize a successful Swing Dancing event, or an ongoing successful Swing Dancing community, the secret is to grow your community; reach out to non-dancers and give them a reason to keep coming back. Appeal to the widest audience possible. And I'm not talking about just offering a free lesson ahead of the band's performance. Most people will not take the lesson their first few times, they just want to watch, soak up the scene, determine whether they want to join in. People are inherently shy, they need to feel comfortable. It's a lot easier to make people feel comfortable if they have some semblance of ambience they're used to. A bar, a restaurant, a candlelit table, things people associate with "going out on the town". Most people do not associate a gymnasium or multipurpose building with "going out on the town" so if you want to appeal to a wider audience than just established swing dancers, (and you should want to appeal to a wider audience than just established swing dancers) you need to create an atmosphere that gives people a lot of reasons to want to be there, not just the dancing.
3. Location, location, location - this is another most important secret to success. If you're operating a bar where your primary income is from liquor sales, you want to be located in a part of the city where people don't have to do a whole lot of driving when they leave your establishment. Access to public transportation and/or taxi service is important, and will increase your liquor sales and overall patronage. If you're operating a Live Music venue, you want to be accessible and easy to find, with plenty of parking and conveniently located to other eating and drinking establishments. When people are going "out on the town" or to "dinner and a show", they're typically going to start at a restaurant, then go to your Live Music venue, then possibly finish up at a bar if the date is going really well. If all of those establishments are within walking distance of each other, that increases the likelihood that your venue will be on their itinerary. If they have to park their car more than once, it's not as likely - especially if there's alcohol involved. The most successful Live Music venues are the ones that are easy to find. Having a prominently displayed marquee advertising your place of business definitely helps, but even more simply than that, picture yourself as someone giving a newcomer directions to your establishment. The more complicated the directions are, the less likely they'll be to find it. A simple cross-street directive works best, such as "12th and Hawthorne on the East Side", or "NW 10th and Everett" - but if you have to tell someone "it's at that weird triangle-shaped intersection where the 205 and the 26 come together at the bottom of the hill below the medical school" your potential audience is going to be lost before they even start looking for your place. Also: the Suburbs are automatically a bad location for a Live Music venue, don't even try.
4. Promote it like it's the Second Coming. Seriously. Your target audience should feel like their lives will be over if they miss this event. They should have no excuse to miss it. "I didn't hear about it because I never saw it advertised anywhere" are words that should never be uttered by anyone in your target audience. Which brings up another point: Never expect the band to do your promoting for you. Musicians are very good at entertaining people but as a general rule we aren't promoters. We always do everything we can, including mailing lists, emails, and Facebook/Myspace/Twitter feeds, but your event needs the benefit of a real P/R professional to really do it right.
5. Get your reputation honestly. Face it, the first few weeks any new club is open, they'll still be ironing the bugs out. Some customers will have to wait too long for their food, others might have trouble finding parking, who knows what or why but there are bound to be people who have a bad experience during the first few months of a venue's existence. And unfortunately, those people are likely to complain to their friends, because it's human nature. This is normal, and it's why the rule of thumb in the nightclub business is to have enough capital to be able to operate at a loss for a full year before things turn around. The people who wrote that rule knew this fact: first impressions happen immediately, but lasting reputations are built over time. Keep your focus and don't lose your mojo; the number of people who have good experiences at your venue over time will overcome the few who had a bad experience early on. If your menu is tasty and your music is worth the money people are paying in cover charges, people will eventually catch on. (on the other hand, if the bad reputation is well-deserved, good luck trying to shake that, because people will complain, especially if they keep having a reason to.)
Note that this is not an end-all-be-all of how to run a nightclub or live music venue. I sure wouldn't want to do it. My hat's off to the people who do - it's a tough business but we all appreciate the fact that there are still live music venues out there. Hopefully some of them will take this advice to heart and stay in business...
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
On "quitting your day job"...
It has been about 10 years since I officially "quit my day job".
Actually, I have had a lot of day jobs over the years. I've sold cutlery and vacuum cleaners, I've done my required tenure among the barista ranks (which I think is required to qualify as a Pacific Northwest resident), I've flipped burgers and I've served hot dogs at a venerable locally-owned fast food joint near the Denver University campus, I've delivered pizzas. With any career in the arts, one gets used to doing whatever one needs to do to pay the bills and keep a roof over one's head. I manned a call center for a while (yes, you too can activate your brand new MaestroCard which gives you reward points and free gasoline every time you use it at the pump!) I've done retail in clothing stores, shoe stores, computer stores and more, worked for awhile as a projectionist at a movie theater, and I was even a ski lift operator for awhile. Through all this I was also playing gigs for money and making a solid attempt to find the hours each day to practice and improve myself as a player.
The unfortunate reality is that a path to a lucrative career in the music industry doesn't ever start out immediately with a six-figure income. Or even a five- or four-figure income. Almost all musicians need to work multiple day jobs to afford to live while they develop their skills and do the requisite networking in order to hopefully eventually begin to earn some income as a music worker. The ones who can manage to stay focused on continuing to develop their musical skills while doing something else for money will eventually succeed, while those who choose to focus instead on doing something non-musical as a career will still hopefully be able to do music as a hobby and find some enjoyment, but that's never been enough for me. I have always had a drive to be the best musician I can be, and I have always found it incredibly frustrating when my skills aren't quite up to the level I think they should be; I don't think I would ever be able to be satisfied as a "hobbyist". For me it's never been any question about whether making music should be my number one priority; I see every day job as only a temporary means to finance my music habit, and I expect it will always be so. But the reality is that the bills need to get paid somehow, so we do what we must. Or at least we do what we think we must.
The truth of the matter is, music is a day job, or can be so if we treat it as such.
The first time I can remember not needing to work a day job at all was in 1993. I was part of a quartet that was the house band at a jazz club in the bustling mountain town of Telluride, Colorado. In the opening lines of the NPR JazzSet broadcast we were on, Branford Marsalis quipped "Welcome to Telluride, Colorado, a town that's so small that the number of jazz musicians who actually live here is small enough to fit into a quartet." In reality, Telluride was, at the time, getting the reputation of being the next Aspen. Or rather, the Aspen for those people who think Aspen has become too "celebrity mainstream". Our neighbors were movie stars, but they were the kind of movie stars who didn't want people to know where they were. One particular star, a famous director, had a house up on the hill with no roads leading to it; the only access was by helipad. Our gig in town was four nights a week, often the Telluride Jazz Festival people would bring a big name into town and we would be their band for the weekend, and the rest of the time we hiked, biked, skied, fished, and generally enjoyed the picturesque outdoor setting -- until, as all things do eventually, the gig ended, the club folded due to badly idiotic mismanagement and left us with no income and some very expensive ski-resort-town rent prices to keep up with. Ah, back to the day job. I took a job as a projectionist at the local theater, which was an older theater with two 35mm projectors; each film came to us in segments of 6 or more reels, part of my job was loading each projector while the other was running, and switching seamlessly as each segment ran out so the audience wouldn't notice anything going on behind the scenes. I also had a job as a ski lift operator during my year in Telluride, but that was more for the free ski pass than anything else.
Looking back on that year, I earned money by providing a service for which there was a demand. People came to that town to ski or fish or hike or bike during the day, but at night they wanted to be entertained by live music. We were employed by the club to provide that service. When the club closed and the demand for that service went away, we had to find other jobs providing services there was more demand for, and that took us out of the music realm temporarily, but for the better part of a year, we were full-time musicians without a
My first "day career" started to happen about the time I started to get tired of the retail rat race. I was working for a well-known computer store chain at the time, assistant-managing the cashier staff, counting register drawers and such, when an opening came for an entry-level position in the tech repair department. This company had a Squad of Geeks several years before that other company started driving around in black and white volkswagens. I have always been fascinated by computers - in 1981 I was part of a program at my school to be one of the lucky few to get out of regular math class and take computer programming classes learning BASIC on Radio Shack TRS-80s. I took the job in the tech department and began accumulating certifications. CompTIA A+, Apple ServiceSource, IBM, HP, Compaq, I took the exams and got the certifications and with every certification my value to the company rose. We wore red shirts (distantly foreshadowing the fact of our inevitable expendability) and for a while we were able to maintain the illusion that we were more than just the sales department's bitches. For three years I repaired Macs, PCs, laser printers, laptops, CRT's, and everything else, and by that time I was the Lead Technician (their version of an assisstant manager, or AssMan) in the department. I was able to make car payments, rent payments, and actually even put away some money.
But there was a dark side. I was neglecting my horn. I would wake in the morning and go to work, spend 8 to 10 hours dismantling laptop computers, replacing parts and reassembling them complete with a new "do not remove this sticker or warranty void" sticker courtesy of the manufacturers whose new parts we were replacing, and I would leave directly from work with my horn in the car, barely making it to the gig on time each night. And each night I would sound worse than the night before due to having not practiced. I was frequently late to gigs due to the fact that when you have a laptop in a million pieces on your bench, it can't be left alone overnight until it's put back together. I was also becoming more and more misanthropic. Customers who have broken computers were generally not very nice to the people who are trying to help fix their computers. And to top it off, we were but one department in one store that was part of a national chain - meaning I had about eight different bosses with eight different agendas. The tech manager was concerned that our department was not making the company enough money from repairs. The sales manager was concerned that our technicians were not "keeping our place" as the sales department's bitches. The original GM who had hired me was a former tech himself, but he got promoted to be a regional manager over all the stores in southern California, and his replacement the new GM was a sales guy, not a tech guy at all, so guess which department won that power struggle? I think the new GM had been the captain of his football team in high school and probably was one of those guys who liked to stuff nerds in lockers, so he clearly had a healthy amount of respect for all of us geeks in the tech department. (sarcasm).
I finally had enough when the sales manager came to us and told us we needed to start "finding" things wrong with people's computers so we could sell them hard drives, memory, and etc. Yeah, I don't like it when mechanics do that to me, why would I assume that it would be okay to do that to our computer repair customers? So I quit.
For a while I tried to stay with the tech field. I put an ad out, I mailed out flyers, I walked to local area businesses, and I got some tech clients together. All of a sudden instead of being paid $18/hour to do repairs that the company was charging $125/hour for, I was the one charging $125/hour. I paid my own taxes, bought my own supplies, and did my own one-man operation repairing PCs, laptops, laser printers, and etc. Meanwhile I was also accepting private music students and spending more time practicing again. Sooner or later another company offered me a job; this time it was a locally-owned Mac-specific sales and service company. They were, in fact, my dream job; I had submitted a resume to them years earlier and gotten no response; now they wanted me to be the manager in charge of their entire tech services department. And they were offering me a $50k/year starting salary, which, in 2002 was not too bad. I would've had to give up my own side tech business, but so what: I would be working on macs only, I would be around creative mac people in a fun work environment for a local company -- what's not to like?
Except:
It would've been a 70 to 80 hour/week time commitment. I would have had zero time to practice, and I would've had to give up all my students after spending the past 2 years developing rapport and seeing them progress from beginners to players of woodwind instruments. This was my dream job, but was the sacrifice too great? I agonized over the decision and during a conversation with my wife, I realized just in fact why she is awesome: "What would make you happy?" she asked. Of course, being able to perform and teach music full-time would make me happy. It's what I got my degree in, it's always been there, every day job I had ever had, including the past several years as an erstwhile geek, had been secondary to the fact that I am first and foremost a player of woodwind instruments.
So I called the nice people at the mac-only sales and service company, gave my apologies, and turned down my dream job so I could focus all my energy on being a musician.
The other thing that my amazingly awesome wife said to me was this: "If you put as much time and energy into your music as you did when you ran your own computer repair business, you will succeed." And she was right; I had put a full-time amount of work into advertising, bookkeeping, parts-ordering in addition to the actually repairing-the-computers part. Those things translate to the music biz as well. I spend time on the phone trying to book myself, I design flyers and advertisements, I go out and spend time networking with other music professionals, and that's all in addition to the time I spend actually practicing the 7 instruments I actively play on a regular basis.
And here is what I have learned in the ten years since I quit my day job: Any career worth any amount of reward is a hell of a lot of work. Music is no exception. There are certainly ways to enjoy music without making a career out of it, and there are large numbers of people who do just that. There are also people who like to throw a football or shoot a basketball at a hoop, some of whom are quite good at it but who would never dream of becoming a professional athlete. So I address this to those who choose to pursue music as a career, above and beyond the "hobbyist" level:
Firstly and foremostly, Be Better at it Than Everyone Else. "Good Enough" is not. There are so many music hobbyists who play instruments, who do one or two gigs a month and don't care if they get paid. Our job as professional musicians is to work hard to be better at it than the hobbyists, but beyond that our job is to be so good at it that we're justified in asking people to pay us to do it. There is no substitute for putting the necessary time in; most professionals spend at minimum 2 to 3 hours a day practicing scales, arpeggios and other exercises. This should be as regular as any other hourly-wage job. If you're going to expect to be paid to do a service, you need to be better at it than those other people who are offering to do the same service for free, otherwise why should anyone bother to pay you?
Secondly, we need to necessarily do a certain amount of selling. Any business will only succeed if there is demand for the product or service they are putting out. No demand = no dollars. In the music business, as in any entertainment-based industry, there isn't the same sense of necessity as there would be for food, clothing, or toilet paper. So we need to create that demand. Convince the nightclub owner why they would be better off hiring your band than a DJ or some other group of amateurs. Convince the concert promoter why they should take a risk on you when they put on their show. Convince the bandleader why they should hire you to play in their horn section. Convince the parents why they should hire you to teach their kids to play an instrument. Create demand for your product and people will buy it.
Thirdly, Diversify. There is no one road to success in the music business. You'll need to play in several bands at once, or play in one band that tours to several cities, and you'll also need to teach private lessons and more. All of these things added together make a career. The more instruments you play and/or teach, the better your chances of working. Professional musicians can't afford to be specialists. This also goes for the musical content or style of music you play. Sure, you might love to play avant-garde jazz, but if you want to work as a professional musician you'll also need to be able to play pop R&B dance music for weddings and corporate parties, and maybe do a few commercial jingles too. You don't have the luxury of being able to say "no" to a gig that's going to pay the bills just because you don't like that style of music. Your full-time job is to sound good at every style of music, so much so that people will never even suspect that you're out of your element.
Fourthly, Always Be Networking. This business is all about who you know. The more people you meet, the more opportunities you'll be able to make for yourself. As a bassist friend of mine says: "If you aren't appearing, you're dis-appearing."
Fifthly, Never Work For Free. It's the other side of "be good enough to justify your price". Once you have determined that your time and talent is worth money, you should never settle for less than the amount you're worth. Sometimes the actual amount will vary depending on the situation and it's important to be realistic and realize that nightclubs can't afford to pay as much as the big wedding and corporate clients, but there is no reason to ever give away your work.
Sixthly, however, there's also nothing wrong with handing out a sample once in a while if it makes intelligent business sense to do so. Costco stocks their lunch hour with dozens of people handing out samples of free food; they do this to increase demand and it works - They sell a lot of product that way. Other professionals hand out pens and fridge magnets with their business name and address on it, the local coffee stand uses punch cards to keep track of every five drinks you buy so they can give you the sixth one for free, retailers are always bringing customers in with "buy one get one free" specials. Guess what: there is nothing wrong with giving away a free sample if you do it in a way that brings in business. Most jazz musicians accomplish this by sitting in with other jazz musicians. It's also good to play a benefit show once in a while for a good cause if you can work it into a networking opportunity. Don't get carried away, your goal is to make money and you'll never do that if you're playing for free all the time, but it's okay to let people hear a sample of your work for free once in a while if you're doing it as part of a well thought-out business plan to increase demand for your services.
And seventhly, Be Professional. Show up on time, dress appropriately, have a good attitude and be easy to get along with and play nice with others. There is a big difference between getting a gig and keeping a gig. You get the gig based on your talent and networking abilities, but you'll keep the gig based on your ability to be a team player. This includes doing your homework and taking the time to learn the music ahead of the rehearsal. You're expecting people to pay you to do a service for them. Just like any other contractor or employee, part of what they're paying for is your professionalism. You wouldn't hold a job for very long in any other company if you constantly showed up late with a bad attitude and never put any attention into the quality of your work - So why would you expect it to be any different in the music business?
The bottom line is this: any career, in any field, takes a lot of focus and diligence to make it pan out and turn into dollars. The music business is no exception. Music has acquired an unfortunate reputation of being a hobby or pastime rather than a career, but it is definitely possible to earn a living as a music-industry worker. The key is to treat it like a career and work hard at it.
Actually, I have had a lot of day jobs over the years. I've sold cutlery and vacuum cleaners, I've done my required tenure among the barista ranks (which I think is required to qualify as a Pacific Northwest resident), I've flipped burgers and I've served hot dogs at a venerable locally-owned fast food joint near the Denver University campus, I've delivered pizzas. With any career in the arts, one gets used to doing whatever one needs to do to pay the bills and keep a roof over one's head. I manned a call center for a while (yes, you too can activate your brand new MaestroCard which gives you reward points and free gasoline every time you use it at the pump!) I've done retail in clothing stores, shoe stores, computer stores and more, worked for awhile as a projectionist at a movie theater, and I was even a ski lift operator for awhile. Through all this I was also playing gigs for money and making a solid attempt to find the hours each day to practice and improve myself as a player.
The unfortunate reality is that a path to a lucrative career in the music industry doesn't ever start out immediately with a six-figure income. Or even a five- or four-figure income. Almost all musicians need to work multiple day jobs to afford to live while they develop their skills and do the requisite networking in order to hopefully eventually begin to earn some income as a music worker. The ones who can manage to stay focused on continuing to develop their musical skills while doing something else for money will eventually succeed, while those who choose to focus instead on doing something non-musical as a career will still hopefully be able to do music as a hobby and find some enjoyment, but that's never been enough for me. I have always had a drive to be the best musician I can be, and I have always found it incredibly frustrating when my skills aren't quite up to the level I think they should be; I don't think I would ever be able to be satisfied as a "hobbyist". For me it's never been any question about whether making music should be my number one priority; I see every day job as only a temporary means to finance my music habit, and I expect it will always be so. But the reality is that the bills need to get paid somehow, so we do what we must. Or at least we do what we think we must.
The truth of the matter is, music is a day job, or can be so if we treat it as such.
The first time I can remember not needing to work a day job at all was in 1993. I was part of a quartet that was the house band at a jazz club in the bustling mountain town of Telluride, Colorado. In the opening lines of the NPR JazzSet broadcast we were on, Branford Marsalis quipped "Welcome to Telluride, Colorado, a town that's so small that the number of jazz musicians who actually live here is small enough to fit into a quartet." In reality, Telluride was, at the time, getting the reputation of being the next Aspen. Or rather, the Aspen for those people who think Aspen has become too "celebrity mainstream". Our neighbors were movie stars, but they were the kind of movie stars who didn't want people to know where they were. One particular star, a famous director, had a house up on the hill with no roads leading to it; the only access was by helipad. Our gig in town was four nights a week, often the Telluride Jazz Festival people would bring a big name into town and we would be their band for the weekend, and the rest of the time we hiked, biked, skied, fished, and generally enjoyed the picturesque outdoor setting -- until, as all things do eventually, the gig ended, the club folded due to badly idiotic mismanagement and left us with no income and some very expensive ski-resort-town rent prices to keep up with. Ah, back to the day job. I took a job as a projectionist at the local theater, which was an older theater with two 35mm projectors; each film came to us in segments of 6 or more reels, part of my job was loading each projector while the other was running, and switching seamlessly as each segment ran out so the audience wouldn't notice anything going on behind the scenes. I also had a job as a ski lift operator during my year in Telluride, but that was more for the free ski pass than anything else.
Looking back on that year, I earned money by providing a service for which there was a demand. People came to that town to ski or fish or hike or bike during the day, but at night they wanted to be entertained by live music. We were employed by the club to provide that service. When the club closed and the demand for that service went away, we had to find other jobs providing services there was more demand for, and that took us out of the music realm temporarily, but for the better part of a year, we were full-time musicians without a
My first "day career" started to happen about the time I started to get tired of the retail rat race. I was working for a well-known computer store chain at the time, assistant-managing the cashier staff, counting register drawers and such, when an opening came for an entry-level position in the tech repair department. This company had a Squad of Geeks several years before that other company started driving around in black and white volkswagens. I have always been fascinated by computers - in 1981 I was part of a program at my school to be one of the lucky few to get out of regular math class and take computer programming classes learning BASIC on Radio Shack TRS-80s. I took the job in the tech department and began accumulating certifications. CompTIA A+, Apple ServiceSource, IBM, HP, Compaq, I took the exams and got the certifications and with every certification my value to the company rose. We wore red shirts (distantly foreshadowing the fact of our inevitable expendability) and for a while we were able to maintain the illusion that we were more than just the sales department's bitches. For three years I repaired Macs, PCs, laser printers, laptops, CRT's, and everything else, and by that time I was the Lead Technician (their version of an assisstant manager, or AssMan) in the department. I was able to make car payments, rent payments, and actually even put away some money.
But there was a dark side. I was neglecting my horn. I would wake in the morning and go to work, spend 8 to 10 hours dismantling laptop computers, replacing parts and reassembling them complete with a new "do not remove this sticker or warranty void" sticker courtesy of the manufacturers whose new parts we were replacing, and I would leave directly from work with my horn in the car, barely making it to the gig on time each night. And each night I would sound worse than the night before due to having not practiced. I was frequently late to gigs due to the fact that when you have a laptop in a million pieces on your bench, it can't be left alone overnight until it's put back together. I was also becoming more and more misanthropic. Customers who have broken computers were generally not very nice to the people who are trying to help fix their computers. And to top it off, we were but one department in one store that was part of a national chain - meaning I had about eight different bosses with eight different agendas. The tech manager was concerned that our department was not making the company enough money from repairs. The sales manager was concerned that our technicians were not "keeping our place" as the sales department's bitches. The original GM who had hired me was a former tech himself, but he got promoted to be a regional manager over all the stores in southern California, and his replacement the new GM was a sales guy, not a tech guy at all, so guess which department won that power struggle? I think the new GM had been the captain of his football team in high school and probably was one of those guys who liked to stuff nerds in lockers, so he clearly had a healthy amount of respect for all of us geeks in the tech department. (sarcasm).
I finally had enough when the sales manager came to us and told us we needed to start "finding" things wrong with people's computers so we could sell them hard drives, memory, and etc. Yeah, I don't like it when mechanics do that to me, why would I assume that it would be okay to do that to our computer repair customers? So I quit.
For a while I tried to stay with the tech field. I put an ad out, I mailed out flyers, I walked to local area businesses, and I got some tech clients together. All of a sudden instead of being paid $18/hour to do repairs that the company was charging $125/hour for, I was the one charging $125/hour. I paid my own taxes, bought my own supplies, and did my own one-man operation repairing PCs, laptops, laser printers, and etc. Meanwhile I was also accepting private music students and spending more time practicing again. Sooner or later another company offered me a job; this time it was a locally-owned Mac-specific sales and service company. They were, in fact, my dream job; I had submitted a resume to them years earlier and gotten no response; now they wanted me to be the manager in charge of their entire tech services department. And they were offering me a $50k/year starting salary, which, in 2002 was not too bad. I would've had to give up my own side tech business, but so what: I would be working on macs only, I would be around creative mac people in a fun work environment for a local company -- what's not to like?
Except:
It would've been a 70 to 80 hour/week time commitment. I would have had zero time to practice, and I would've had to give up all my students after spending the past 2 years developing rapport and seeing them progress from beginners to players of woodwind instruments. This was my dream job, but was the sacrifice too great? I agonized over the decision and during a conversation with my wife, I realized just in fact why she is awesome: "What would make you happy?" she asked. Of course, being able to perform and teach music full-time would make me happy. It's what I got my degree in, it's always been there, every day job I had ever had, including the past several years as an erstwhile geek, had been secondary to the fact that I am first and foremost a player of woodwind instruments.
So I called the nice people at the mac-only sales and service company, gave my apologies, and turned down my dream job so I could focus all my energy on being a musician.
The other thing that my amazingly awesome wife said to me was this: "If you put as much time and energy into your music as you did when you ran your own computer repair business, you will succeed." And she was right; I had put a full-time amount of work into advertising, bookkeeping, parts-ordering in addition to the actually repairing-the-computers part. Those things translate to the music biz as well. I spend time on the phone trying to book myself, I design flyers and advertisements, I go out and spend time networking with other music professionals, and that's all in addition to the time I spend actually practicing the 7 instruments I actively play on a regular basis.
And here is what I have learned in the ten years since I quit my day job: Any career worth any amount of reward is a hell of a lot of work. Music is no exception. There are certainly ways to enjoy music without making a career out of it, and there are large numbers of people who do just that. There are also people who like to throw a football or shoot a basketball at a hoop, some of whom are quite good at it but who would never dream of becoming a professional athlete. So I address this to those who choose to pursue music as a career, above and beyond the "hobbyist" level:
Firstly and foremostly, Be Better at it Than Everyone Else. "Good Enough" is not. There are so many music hobbyists who play instruments, who do one or two gigs a month and don't care if they get paid. Our job as professional musicians is to work hard to be better at it than the hobbyists, but beyond that our job is to be so good at it that we're justified in asking people to pay us to do it. There is no substitute for putting the necessary time in; most professionals spend at minimum 2 to 3 hours a day practicing scales, arpeggios and other exercises. This should be as regular as any other hourly-wage job. If you're going to expect to be paid to do a service, you need to be better at it than those other people who are offering to do the same service for free, otherwise why should anyone bother to pay you?
Secondly, we need to necessarily do a certain amount of selling. Any business will only succeed if there is demand for the product or service they are putting out. No demand = no dollars. In the music business, as in any entertainment-based industry, there isn't the same sense of necessity as there would be for food, clothing, or toilet paper. So we need to create that demand. Convince the nightclub owner why they would be better off hiring your band than a DJ or some other group of amateurs. Convince the concert promoter why they should take a risk on you when they put on their show. Convince the bandleader why they should hire you to play in their horn section. Convince the parents why they should hire you to teach their kids to play an instrument. Create demand for your product and people will buy it.
Thirdly, Diversify. There is no one road to success in the music business. You'll need to play in several bands at once, or play in one band that tours to several cities, and you'll also need to teach private lessons and more. All of these things added together make a career. The more instruments you play and/or teach, the better your chances of working. Professional musicians can't afford to be specialists. This also goes for the musical content or style of music you play. Sure, you might love to play avant-garde jazz, but if you want to work as a professional musician you'll also need to be able to play pop R&B dance music for weddings and corporate parties, and maybe do a few commercial jingles too. You don't have the luxury of being able to say "no" to a gig that's going to pay the bills just because you don't like that style of music. Your full-time job is to sound good at every style of music, so much so that people will never even suspect that you're out of your element.
Fourthly, Always Be Networking. This business is all about who you know. The more people you meet, the more opportunities you'll be able to make for yourself. As a bassist friend of mine says: "If you aren't appearing, you're dis-appearing."
Fifthly, Never Work For Free. It's the other side of "be good enough to justify your price". Once you have determined that your time and talent is worth money, you should never settle for less than the amount you're worth. Sometimes the actual amount will vary depending on the situation and it's important to be realistic and realize that nightclubs can't afford to pay as much as the big wedding and corporate clients, but there is no reason to ever give away your work.
Sixthly, however, there's also nothing wrong with handing out a sample once in a while if it makes intelligent business sense to do so. Costco stocks their lunch hour with dozens of people handing out samples of free food; they do this to increase demand and it works - They sell a lot of product that way. Other professionals hand out pens and fridge magnets with their business name and address on it, the local coffee stand uses punch cards to keep track of every five drinks you buy so they can give you the sixth one for free, retailers are always bringing customers in with "buy one get one free" specials. Guess what: there is nothing wrong with giving away a free sample if you do it in a way that brings in business. Most jazz musicians accomplish this by sitting in with other jazz musicians. It's also good to play a benefit show once in a while for a good cause if you can work it into a networking opportunity. Don't get carried away, your goal is to make money and you'll never do that if you're playing for free all the time, but it's okay to let people hear a sample of your work for free once in a while if you're doing it as part of a well thought-out business plan to increase demand for your services.
And seventhly, Be Professional. Show up on time, dress appropriately, have a good attitude and be easy to get along with and play nice with others. There is a big difference between getting a gig and keeping a gig. You get the gig based on your talent and networking abilities, but you'll keep the gig based on your ability to be a team player. This includes doing your homework and taking the time to learn the music ahead of the rehearsal. You're expecting people to pay you to do a service for them. Just like any other contractor or employee, part of what they're paying for is your professionalism. You wouldn't hold a job for very long in any other company if you constantly showed up late with a bad attitude and never put any attention into the quality of your work - So why would you expect it to be any different in the music business?
The bottom line is this: any career, in any field, takes a lot of focus and diligence to make it pan out and turn into dollars. The music business is no exception. Music has acquired an unfortunate reputation of being a hobby or pastime rather than a career, but it is definitely possible to earn a living as a music-industry worker. The key is to treat it like a career and work hard at it.
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