We may not realize it, but when we determine to share our music outside the confines of our own living rooms, we shift from being a songwriter to being an entrepreneur. Our music and our very selves are our product, and the way we reach out to and relate to our customers and business partners affects the future of our small business. Though it may feel cold and calculating to consider our music and our person a product, what we are selling is the experience of our music and our impact on people’s lives. Our audience pays for this experience with their time, attention, and money—things they could choose to spend elsewhere.

The path to growing and maintaining our small business differs from artist to artist, just as it does in any other profession that has a unique product or service to offer. Just knowing how the music industry works isn’t enough to properly plan how we will design a career within it. A chef may know she likes to cook, and know that restaurants hire chefs, but without a clear mission and motivation, could find herself serving up ribs and coleslaw five days a week instead of laying the finishing touches on a perfectly baked souffle in the uptown district on a Saturday night. Where the industry teaches us the paths others have blazed, we alone know the path we would blaze if we had the chance.

So what keeps us artists and songwriters from having the chance? We all have a limited supply of time and money, and life circumstances we can’t escape even if we wanted to. We may be unwilling to move to a city in which we can regularly get to know highly trained musicians, publishers, or other writers. We may be willing to invest a certain number of hours or dollars into our music and no more.

We may have aspirations of writing for other artists, writing for ourselves, or becoming self-sufficient when recording demos. All these things define the parameters of our business plan, and should be laid out just like they would in an actual entrepreneurial pursuit. Many musicians get stuck in wishful thinking, wanting the parameters to be different. But instead of seeing the parameters as roadblocks, it is much more effective to accept the parameters you can see, and then design a business plan that accommodates those parameters and sets realistic goals within them.

Many musicians move about the world of music accepting whatever opportunities come into view. With unlimited time and enough workers to accommodate the unpredictable influx of opportunities, this is a perfectly reasonable plan. But for many of us, music is the icing on an already baked cake, layered with family, financial, and other obligations. Any opportunity that doesn’t agree with our motivations simply steals time from the opportunities that could come, had we put effort towards the opportunities we really want. 

Take time to establish your motivations when it comes to your music. Write a mission statement. Visualize what activities your business would be engaged in in 6 months, 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years from now. Break those down into small steps that seem reasonable, looking from the outside in at your path. If you want to strengthen your writing skills, design a plan and put that into action. If you see the need to record simple demos at home and need the skills or equipment to make that happen, break that project down into reasonable steps and add it to your action plan. Make a list of all the people and resources you have who can help you actualize your vision. 

Joining a community of other writers can be a wonderful resource for clarifying and acting on your musical aspirations. A constant source of inspiration and direction, other musicians know the challenge of refining their path toward a sustainable hobby or career in the industry. When we don’t even know what questions to ask, a community helps us express our instincts, feelings, hesitations, doubts and desires into words. 

For any songwriter who is looking for community, we have a retreat alumni network of hundreds of exceptional songwriters around the US and beyond. If you’d like to join, click here to apply for one of my upcoming songwriting retreats.

I look forward to being part of the support system that helps you to achieve your musical aspirations.

Stay creative,

Andrea Stolpe