What I Would Do If I Started Over Today

Good morning, I hope you’re having a great start of the day. Today I’ll talk about what I would do if I would start being an independent artist today. What would be my one year game plan knowing what I know. Hopefully this can be valuable in some way to someone who is starting out and is looking for some guidance. Also if I miss anything that you would do, please let me know. I’m always trying to learn.

So the first thing that I would do is get a mentor, someone who can teach me the basics of what I need to know to make the music that I want to make. This will allow me to learn the basics much faster than if I would just go and search for YouTube tutorials on my own because of a couple reasons. One because of accountability and two because of the more curated and structured way of learning that a mentor would be able to provide. I would try to find someone who is at a high enough level to get inspired by but it has to be someone who actually has some time for me. Because of this I’m probably going to have to invest some money into the mentorship. Because I would want to put in as many hours as possible and have someone within reach. And I can’t expect someone to have all this time for me for free. But paying for something is great. For me that has always resulted in me paying more attention to the thing and actually learn something deeply, because I’m invested in it.

When I’ve found my mentor I would dedicate some time every day to apply the things that I learn from them. I’m assuming I still have a day job at this point so I would make the time to that at the start of the day. So I can put my first, best, most focused energy of the day into practice. I would wake up two hours earlier, and boom I would have made the two extra hours to do it. Before I go and do my work to earn some money. I think doing it before your day-job is better than after you’re finished working. Because of a couple things. One is that, mentally, you’re making it a priority. If you make it the first thing you do every day you’re saying to yourself that it’s important. Even more important than your job. This is a great I idea in general I believe. To do something for yourself first every day. Before you give your time to other people. Another reason to do this is simply because of energy. After your job you might be tired and less motivated to do some practice. One thing about doing this is that you’re going to have less time in the evenings to do stuff with people. For me, that would be a sacrifice I’d be willing to make if I really want to learn something. But for you it might not be, so that’s a question you can ask yourself.

Ok so with a mentor and a schedule that allows me to put two hours of daily practice in I think I can get the basics down in maybe two weeks. And I’m going to aim to release my first song at the end of the first month after starting. And then I’d release every other week after that. My strategy for this would be to use the two hours in the morning to make as much beats as possible. I wouldn’t want to finish every idea and try to make it perfect because I’d want to get as much repetition as possible so I’d really just make 30 minute song starters. In two hours I can make four of those every day. I would do that for 6 days in the week and then take the last day of the week to pick my favourite beat of the 24 beats that I made that week. I’m assuming that I’m going to like at least one of those. And then I’m going to use the two hours of the last day to finish my favourite idea and upload it.

I wouldn’t worry too much about promotion and the reception of the music. I think that it’s a great idea to start publishing your songs as soon as possible. Because of a bunch of reasons. One, it creates healthy pressure to improve. When it’s out there publicly you’re going to put much more energy into improving as fast as you can. Because you’re going to feel some, what I call healthy embarrassment. Two, you’re going to see much more clearly where improvement is needed if it’s out there in the context that it was meant for. On the Spotify between all other music that’s out there. Three, you are going to learn to let go and move on the next thing immediately. Fear of judgement, or that music is not going to be received well is something that holds so many artists back. I think it’s a great to kill that fear right in the beginning so it doesn’t hold you back later. And how to do that better than to share your imperfect work with everyone. It can only get better after that, and then you’re going to have real confidence about your work. Four, it creates a discipline of consistency. If you tell yourself that you’re going to release every other week no matter what, you’ll build up a sequence, a rhythm, a pendulum, a wave, a snowball of releases of which the impact going to compound over time. Algorithms and people as well really like this. And five. It’s an investment in assets that can generate income. Every song you create you can look at as an asset that you have all the shares for. And you just created that asset out of thin air. You don’t know what’s going to happen to it but it has the probability of generating income for eternity. Nowadays, some famous kid can use your song in their TikTok and it can blow up overnight years after releasing it. So that’s why it’s smart to have as many of those assets as possible. Big companies buy the rights to big catalogs of songs in bulk because they know this. Songs are assets.

Ok so when I have my schedule to practice and create and I keep regular contact with my mentor to improve. I would start to find people to collaborate with. I would just hit up people on instagram who are at my level. I wouldn’t waste my time hitting up people who are established, because what do I have to bring to the table at this point. They’re not going to want to work with me, yet. I don’t have any music online and I don’t have any numbers that prove anything. This first year is a year of growing. And so I’m just going to make tons of beats and release every other week. I would create a releasing schedule where I would alternate between solo releases and collabs. Every collab I would do with someone new to widen reach on the streaming services and maybe attract some early fans from other people. For the collabs I can keep doing the same strategy, I would just pick my favourite song-starter out of the 24 beats that I made that week and send that to the collaborator to finish.

Then, because I finish one beat every week, but I release every two weeks. I can plan my releases ahead in time. So in one month, I’m going to have 4 beats to release in two months. And in two moths I’m going to have 8 beats that I can release in four months and so on. I can do a couple things with this surplus of beats that I’m creating. One, I can plan really far ahead. Like over a year, this is nice because then I’ll never be worried that I’m not going to have a release. Or, I can start a second artist name and release the extra music on that one. Now I’m building two artist profiles. This is a bit of an advanced strategy, and it depends on how much time and effort you’re willing to put in this but it’s a great way of kind of diversifying your music assets and doubling your chances.

So this would be part of my game plan for the first year of being an independent artist. There’s definitely more to this but I’m going to leave it at this for today. I’ll probably go more in depth on all of the steps of this at some point. But for now, thank you so much for your attention. I really hope you enjoyed it and I wish you an amazing day. Much love.