5 Must-Do’s for Pro-Musicians In-Training

Guest blogger Iris Siemons is a songwriter and vocalist who recently released her debut EP, but becoming a self-sufficient full-time musician was a long journey, and during that journey, she picked up a few nuggets of wisdom and even founded a musical collective in her home town. Having spent years immersing herself in study, including a course in how to become an entrepreneur, Iris has finally come to a point where she can confidently answer the question: “How can I become a professional musician?” Here she offers five must-do’s for the pro-musician in training.

#1. Start Before You’re Ready

There will always be reasons not to do something right now. If you want to be known for your own work, it’s not the best idea to immediately make a live video and post it on Instagram. If you want to be a teacher, you don’t immediately take on a student and start teaching tomorrow and, if you want to be a composer, you don’t immediately launch headlong into writing a grandiose orchestral piece. If you have a good idea of where you want to go, then it makes sense to start from where you’re at right now.

“First, I’ll learn to play that riff. Yeah, but I still don’t have that amplifier yet. But who’s going to perform my piece?” These are all the little voices in your head that want to stop you from doing something really exciting: starting work and making it visible. Don’t keep it to yourself. Instead, share your process with the people around you. This will help to make things feel more real and keep you switched on and motivated to keep going. Gradually, you will start discovering the things that you still need to learn which, believe it or not, is best done in public.

#2. Surround Yourself With People You Can Learn From

Sting, former lead singer and bassist from The Police, once said in an interview that: “My strategy was always to work with people who were better than me.” At that time I was hanging on every word of any professional musician, trying to find out what the secret was to doing what they do. That was the moment I realised that being seen as a master of your art will only ever hold you back. It’s far better to maintain the thought that you always have something to learn and never to have the idea that you are there already. Try to love the process of getting better and remain a student in every situation. This is something I always had in mind when choosing the people I’ve wanted to work with along the way. To record my first EP, I looked for a producer who had already made work that I loved; I paid out for good musicians to work on my numbers in the studio; and I made sure that I had a really good singing coach and friend around to support me through the entire process.

5 Must-Do’s for Pro-Musicians In-Training

#3. Partner Up

Through an economical lens, the music industry can easily be seen as an oversaturated market. I’ve noticed that this leaves a lot of musicians feeling like they’re up against a lot of competition. After all, everyone wants to be a success. There are undoubtedly some musicians who’ve managed to elbow their way up, but in general, all musicians benefit from the success of their colleagues. We all need each other and there is no one – absolutely no one – who is able to do it alone in music. Above all, any musician who dares to stay true to themselves has the biggest chance of carving out a career which makes them truly happy. So keep sharing what you’re doing, spin a web of good people around you and be sensitive to what’s happening in your world of work. Make sure you know people and that you are known. This will only make things easier and more fun.

#4. Dare to Ask For What You Need

It’s logical to believe that, especially in the beginning, you need to do everything yourself but there will come a point when you realise that the time you spend on things like administration is depriving you of the opportunity to grow. Back at school, if you were bad at spelling then you had to spend extra time on it. Maybe you’d get remedial teaching, extra homework and a furrowed brow. When you’re an entrepreneur out in the world, things work differently. Now, you learn that there are some things you can do with ease and those are the things you can build your business around. As for the rest, that’s the stuff you can outsource to the people who can do those things ‘with ease’. Nice, right? I am a chaotic creative, so I am terrible at planning and staying on track. If I need to launch my debut EP, I immediately start writing new songs or working on a painting. I quickly realised that I needed help: someone who could meet me maybe every Monday morning for a coffee and help highlight what my priorities should be and make a plan for the week. I needed someone who could also help me monitor the growth of my business and rap me on the knuckles when I got distracted by things that I didn’t need to be doing at that moment. I found this person by simply putting a notice on a website and asked for any volunteers – guess what? I now sit at the kitchen table every Monday morning with a successful businessman who has since sold his business and retired and, besides golfing, wanted to share his expertise with a beginner entrepreneur. It’s an arrangement I’m so thankful for and it’s even better than what I first imagined when I put out the notice.

#5. Think About Your Revenue Model

For the – how shall I put it? – less creative entrepreneurs, this bit is ridiculously obvious. You look at your costs and use that as an indication of what kind of price you can put on your product or services. Do you offer a free sample to bring clients in? Do you sell a little lower or go higher to seem more high-end? Are there any additional services you can offer for an additional fee? If you’re drawn to music and become a musician, it’s rarely because you see it as a route to boundless riches. It’s an inner drive, an urge that feels far more important than money. But that doesn’t mean that it’s unwise to make some good business decisions. How can you best organise things so that you’re not spending all of your time doing things that yield the most revenue rather than the things you wanted to do as a full-time musician? I had the idea to offer my songs as streams and downloads and, having shared this with my business coach (my Monday morning coffee date) he gave me the insight that I need to gather around 4,000 streams a month to make minimum wage. So I thought, ‘What if I could find a way of doing the thing I loved without having to gather 4,000 customers a month?’

This is what I did: I put up another notice looking for someone willing to try out my new service where I offer to write a bespoke song for a specific person and for a specific reason. I set a deadline and asked anyone interested to simply send me a message and then, after the deadline, I picked a name out of a hat and wrote them a tailor-made song for free.