How to be a Professional Musician

What makes some musicians extremely successful with a long term music industry career, while so many others struggle to make ends meet and end up working non-music related day jobs? In my previous music career articles, I explained that a huge part of the answer lies in the ability of successful music business professionals to offer “maximum value with minimum risk” to every company, band, person or organization they come into contact with (if you haven't read my previous articles and aren’t familiar with this concept, take this short music career test to learn more before reading the rest of this article). Obviously there is a LOT that goes into this seemingly simple concept, but ultimately all things you do must tie into this idea in one way or another if you want to be a professional musician. However, as you may have already guessed, there is a big difference between ‘knowing’ a simple idea and actually ‘making it a reality’ in your music career.

As a music career mentor, I spend a great deal of time training musicians how to build maximum value with minimum risk in everything they do in their music industry careers. I have observed that most people can easily understand the need to minimize their risk in obvious, common sense ways. However, most musicians have a hard time seeing how their positive skillsets and elements of music career value ALSO bring with them some unexpected elements of risk. Not understanding this fact is a crippling flaw in the music career plans of most people, preventing even those with very high potential from succeeding as professional musicians.

If you want to be one of the few musicians who DO become successful versus ending up among the majority who fail, it is critical to learn how to minimize the hidden risks/weaknesses that exist ‘beneath the surface’ of your strengths as a professional musician. In this article, I will show you how to dramatically boost your chances of having a thriving music career by getting a much clearer picture of your inner profile of values and risks.

The Inner Profile Of A Professional Musician

As musicians (and as people), we spend a lot of time developing a variety of skills and areas of expertise that we hope will help us in our chosen field (of having a music career). However, if you are like most musicians (who have never received specific music business training), then all the skills you have achieved were developed largely ‘at random’ (without clear planning and understanding of how they fit into the big picture of your long term goals). Because of this, every skill or strength you possess (both as a musician on your instrument and in your experience of working in the music industry) contains an ‘opposing’ weakness that can be perceived (by others) as an element of ‘risk’. This can often overshadow your strengths if left unchecked. I have seen this happen to musicians VERY frequently (regardless of their work ethic or motivation)… and the worst part is, they are often totally unaware of

To speed up the process of growing your music career, you MUST know how to maximize the strengths you already possess while recognizing (and eliminating) the opposing risks that they bring to your music career plan. This is done by ALL successful professional musicians (whether they consciously realize this or not), while everybody else struggles to understand ‘what they are doing wrong’ in their pursuit of a music industry career. Fortunately, this analysis is possible for anybody to do, and I'm going to show you how to begin this process in the rest of this article.

To help you do the above analysis for yourself, look at the table below to see several seemingly positive skills/strengths that many musicians have (listed in the left column of the table). In the right column of the table is an explanation of how that same strength can very often be a risk factor in your music career efforts. When I train musicians to start a career in music, these are some of the common problems I help them to correct after they come to me frustrated with getting nowhere in the industry despite having achieved many impressive credentials. There are actually DOZENS of examples I could write here, but to avoid making this article too long, I will limit my list to the items you see below.

It's important to recognize that the strengths listed in the left column of the table below ARE of course ‘good’ things to have and in most cases they DO help you in some way to grow your music career. However, it is critical to recognize how each of these items can ALSO become your weakness UNLESS you find out how to stop this from happening.

Source: tomhess.net