What’s the right way to look at building a music career? How do you make sure that you create long-term results for yourself?

That’s what we’re going to be looking at in this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast.

Podcast Highlights:

00:26 – Exciting new course (now available)

00:53 – Christopher Sutton’s masterclass introduction

05:05 – Entrepreneurial essentials for musicians

05:29 – A musician is a small business owner

07:35 – A statement that could change your life

10:37 – Adopting a long-term mindset

13:55 – What can you accomplish in 10 years?

16:44 – Episode summary

Transcription:

Hey, it's David Andrew Wiebe.

What you're about to hear is a segment of my course, the Entrepreneurial Essentials for Musicians Masterclass. You can find it at davidandrewwiebe.com/Masterclass.

The price goes up every week, so if you'd like to save a bit of money, head on over there sooner rather than later. It's davidandrewwiebe.com/Masterclass.

Enjoy this segment from the Entrepreneurial Essentials for Musicians Masterclass.

This is Christopher Sutton, director of Musical U, a community dedicated to teaching musicians the inner skills that grant them the confidence they need to improvise, perform, and more. We LOVE what Musical U is up to!

Christopher Sutton: Hello and welcome. We are live. Sorry for the short delay and thank you for your patience, we were fighting some technical gremlins. Technology is incredible when it works and incredibly annoying when it doesn't. Thanks for bearing with us. Sorry to be starting a little bit late. I guarantee it will be worth your while waiting a few minutes. Very welcome. Very warm welcome to you all here today, whether you are a Musical U fan or even a Musical U member, if we have any members give a shout out in the chat box. I'm sure we have a few who have come along. Today we are joined by a very special guest. I am delighted to say we have David Andrew Wiebe, author of The New Music Industry and The Essential Guide to Music Entrepreneurship. David say hello.

David Andrew Wiebe: Hello everybody.

Christopher: David is the man behind The Music Entrepreneur HQ website, which is a fantastic blog and also hosts a podcast, and he is himself a guitarist and songwriter based in Canada, but he's really made a name for himself online with his writing on modern music entrepreneurship and what it means to try and make a living with music in this day and age. I recently grabbed a copy of David's new book, which I highly recommend. It's The Essential Guide to Music Entrepreneurship and I just totally loved the way he talks about this topic of entrepreneurship.

If you've come along today, then I know that that word entrepreneurship didn't totally put you off, which is good, but I know that a lot of people assume a lot of things about it, and so I hope you've come today with an open mind because what I love so much about David's book was that it wasn't kind of the traditional just how to make money or how to make a business kind of entrepreneurship teaching. He really goes into the mindset, and the habits that make for success in life in general, to be honest. It's definitely framed as entrepreneurship, but there is a ton packed in there that's useful for any musician whether you consider yourself an entrepreneur or not.

So I was super excited to have David come and present this masterclass for Musical U members and anyone who's joining us live today, because this is stuff that will help you transform your success in any musical endeavor, I think. In a minute I'm going to hand over to David to share his insights with you, and before we do, I'll just explain the structure of today's call. In a second I'll hand over to David and then at the end of his presentation we're going to do some Q&A. So you should be seeing a chat box on your screen live chat thing, so if you're watching Musical U, I think it'll appear to the right hand side of the video. If you're watching on the public website, I think it might be below, and if you're watching on YouTube it'll be wherever YouTube decided to put it today, but look around and you should see a white live chat box.

Please don't be shy. Do say hello. We've had a bunch of people saying helloin there already, which is fantastic. I will give a few shout outs to Glenn from Minnesota, [Meddy 00:02:51] from Europe, Scott from Texas, USA. You look familiar, Scott, maybe from a previous masterclass. Peter Pool from the Netherlands, Jamie from San Francisco, Maximiliano from Venezuela. Terrific crowd here from all around the world today. You're all very welcome, Stephanie and Jim as well, and that MC Nick, you're all very welcome. Thank you for joining us today, and I can see we have a ton more tuned in live that haven't yet said hello in the chat. So if you're feeling shy, or you haven't said hello yet, please do say a quick hello and tell us where you're from or what instrument you play, and we'd love to hear from you.

That live chat will be running throughout today's session. So please do use it. You can make comments, and you can ask questions. If it's a certain type of question, I might throw it at David and interrupt him midstream, but most likely I will be holding them back until the end of his presentation and then we'll have some time for Q&A at the end. That's it for me, without any further ado, I will hand over to our speaker and presenter today, David Andrew Wiebe. Thank you David.

David: Thank you so much for the great introduction, Christopher. I will say that Christopher has quickly become one of my favorite human beings even in the few interactions that we've had. He's such a kind and wonderful person and so it's a real honor, and a pleasure to be presenting here a masterclass for Musical U, which I would definitely recommend checking out. Today, of course, we'll talking about entrepreneurial essentials for musicians and I'm going to be covering the basics here, so do not be intimidated. Can everybody see the slides okay?

Christopher: Yep. Showing up well.

David: Okay, perfect. Yeah, so don't be intimidated. I think any information that I share with you today is totally applicable, and I am going to have a little challenge for you later on if you choose to accept it, so as an introduction to this material, a musician is effectively a small business owner, whether they know it or not. When you're first getting started, no one knows who you are or what you're about. They don't know what you sound like. They don't know what kind of music you play, basically, you have to begin creating your fan base, but if you want to sell your music, first you must record it, then publish it and then market it to your prospects, or at least that's the traditional way of thinking about it. I'm going to present a different way of thinking about that whole process. If you want to book gigs, of course you must approach venues and event organizers and strike up a deal, which can be nerve wracking and pretty scary at first.

When you begin reaching out, you realize a lot of people are friendlier than you might expect them to be, but when you're ... It's easy to conjure up in your mind images of failure or rejection as you're going about that process. So similarly, a small business owner doesn't have customers when first getting started and no one knows who they are or what they offer, what kind of products or services they have for them. Maybe their immediate friends or partners or affiliates might know something about what they're offering, but most people don't know who they are, what they're up to, especially if they're new to the entrepreneurship. So a small business owner must determine what their product or service is going to be and then market it to their target audience. Similarly, musicians must market their music to their target audience, which if you're just starting to make music, you have no idea who that is, and you may take a while to decide on a direction whether that's country music for people that live on farms, or rock music for people that love city life or things like that.

So if you understand the core fundamentals of running a small business, I believe that you'll achieve more in your music career, that's certainly been the case for me. There's a lot of stuff that I really didn't know, especially mindset wise, and that's some of the stuff that we're going to be talking about today. So even if your only goal right now is to learn an instrument, this information could change the way you think about practice, and the rate at which you progress, and that's what we're going to look at today.

If you understand the core fundamentals of running a small business, you'll achieve more in your music career,Share on X

This is the statement that absolutely changed my life. Employees work for money and other people, entrepreneurs have money and people work for them. I believe I first heard it from Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. When I first heard it, I was getting into a business model called network marketing, but it ultimately led me down the path of creating The Music Entrepreneur HQ and that's because I realized the value in what I was learning and how pertinent it was to building a music career. I got an education, what I was missing, which was primary mindset, and I'll be covering a lot of that here.

I had been pursuing a music career for over 10 years at that point without any major success, and gradually I began to realize why that was. I was missing a lot of keys to getting to where I want it to go and so many bands that I joined and participated in and been a part of had ended up breaking up usually within a year to a year and a half, and that's going to happen to you too if you choose to go that route with being in a band.

The key point there is that you can't give up. You have to keep looking for people,