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.