What are must haves to gain success in being a semi-pro musician?
There are countless of small elements to build up this puzzle and I’ll try to explain my vision, gained through personal experience over the past years.
Before that, let’s define who is a musician-hobbyist, semi-pro and pro?
A hobby is something where you enjoy the process more than the result. You don’t expect any other return of your investments than joy and happiness. For example, If you like snowboarding and rock climbing like me, you need to spend hundreds of euros on special clothes, equipment, book trips to mountains once in a while, have lots and lots of fun and you will never see your invested money back.
A pro musician is the one who makes a living mainly from making music and music related activities.
These people play in several bands or in one but a very successful band (which is a more rare case nowadays, they just don’t tell us everything).
Semi-pros are those like me, who already understand, consider or wants to consider music as a second job or a private business. This means that your set of skills is already sellable but the momentum is not just there yet to make a decent living out of it. Also you can drop music at any moment and do something else without significant harm to financial sustainability of your life.
Now let’s get to what I think is needed to turn from a hobbyist into semi-pro and hopefully into a pro.
How many legs does a chair need to stand?
Most common answer is 4 but I will keep it even more simple and say 3.
Less legs also possible but then we will need to complicate the construction that holds the legs together… so, keeping it as simple as possible.
To build a successful and stable music career we need 3 main legs:
- High quality product (music and video productions);
- Smart online marketing (social media and advertisement);
- Memorable live shows (small and big gigs).
My musician’s cockpit chair has exactly these 3 legs and I will share my thoughts on every of these with examples, tell you what works, what doesn’t work and hopefully help you understand if these worth your time and effort.
Cheers!
Dima Sounder – music and video producer from Austria