What To Look For In The People You Work With

Good morning, I hope you’re having a great start of the day. Today I want to talk about collaborating. The importance of collaborating and what are great signs that you found yourself a good collaborator. I hope you find this interesting. Thank you for tuning in, if you want to add some of your thoughts or you have some feedback, I’d love to hear it. I’m trying to make this as valuable and enjoyable to listeners as I can. You can hit me up on WhatsApp. I put my number in the description.

Allright, so why is it a good idea to collaborate? For me there are a couple reasons. One is for creativity reasons. If you work together with someone you just make different things than you would make by yourself. For example, I have a producer friend that I regularly work with. And when we work together some magic happens. The way we produce beats is that we make samples for each other to flip. And my samples aren’t samples that he would usually pick to make beats with. And his samples aren’t usually what I would pick. So we flip each others samples and then we finish them together. Our styles are wildly different. My style is more dusty, sample based, old school inspired. And his style is more modern, clean and with great sound design. When we combine our styles the music that comes out of that sounds like nothing else that exists. People try to compare it to something but they don’t know what to compare it to. They haven’t heard anything like it. But when I play my solo beats for people, people might more easily be able to put it in a category or say ah yeah this kind of sounds like this other producer. But if you combine two or more very different skillsets to make one product. That can compound on the genius of it. So if you find someone, where if you work together, you create something new. That didn’t exist yet and that you couldn’t come up with on your own. That’s a great sign that you found a good collaborator.

Another reason for collaborating is for learning. Not only are skillsets amazing to combine. But if you’re working closely with people who are good at something you can kind of copy the things that they do that work for them. Over the years I’ve learned so much from the people that I’ve worked with. Just by observing them, trying to adopt what they do in my own way in my work. Being around them in the session asking questions. About technical things but also just a lot about how they look at the creative process. A lot of the times I’ve left a session super inspired by how my friends talked about their approach. And by seeing them work. I think that’s another amazing benefit of collaborating. That you just learn so much. I’m mostly talking about in real life collaborations though, when you’re in the same room. Online collaborating is also great, but for different reasons.

One of those is that you expand your reach. If we work together, you introduce me to the people that know you and I introduce you to the people that know me. This is amazing to grow fan bases and find more collaborators. Also, if you release your collaborative works on, for example, streaming services this will create links the in algorithms and might show your music to new fans. I’m not a big fan of focusing too much on playing the algorithm but I really think this is true. So it’s not a bad idea to do as many collaborations as possible, with different people. I’m a big fan of collaborating in sessions, in the same room with the other person. Because of the creativity, learning and social aspects. And you tend just to finish something quicker if you do it that way. But that might not be possible for everyone to always do because, maybe they don’t live in a area where there are a lot of people to work with. I would recommend moving to an area where there’s more going on, but if that’s not an option. We have the internet and that’s awesome.

On the internet we can easily contact some people that we would like to work with. Some advice that I would give if you’re looking for collaborators online is that you don’t waste your time trying to work with very established people from the start. This can feel to them like you’re asking for hand-outs, what’s in it for them? Hit up people that are at your level of success, because they are much more likely to have time for you. Do make sure that you like their music. But there’s so many people who make sick music and a lot of those aren’t famous. So you should be able to find those. Also make sure that when you dm someone, that you make it personal. That you’d love to work with them specifically and why. You don’t have to write a complete cover letter, but just let them know what you love about their stuff and that you’d be super down to work together. Don’t copy and paste the same message to everyone. This will come across as not genuine and needy. A lot of people know each other and they talk. For example I’m in a group chat with a bunch of producers from my country. And one day there was this girl who sent the exact same message to all of us at the same time, well not me, that was kind of insulting. Where was my copy paste message? Anyway in the group chat everyone started sharing screen shots of this message and talking shit about this girl. She just destroyed her reputation for a while, with quite a big group of people. So watch out for that, don’t copy paste. And also, very important, be respectful, be kind, talk to people how you’d want someone to approach you for work. With respect right?

Now, what are some things that you should look for in other people when you’re looking for collaborators. There’s a couple things. First, make sure they have some music out. If you work with someone who doesn’t release their music, chances are they are scared of releasing music and that your collaborative work is not going to be released or it’s going to take a long time before it is. We want consistency and output and we don’t want to be slowed down by other peoples fears. Second, make sure they are excited about the collaboration. If they are super slow to respond. I promise, they are not that excited. And then you should just move on. Maybe they’ll get excited later, that’s cool. Work then. But for now it’s not worth the stress to try to get someone to do something that they are not excited about. You’ll save a lot of time if you immediately stop pursuing the collaboration if someone shows low interest. Three, make sure they are people that you like to be around. Finding a good collaborator is like dating in a way because you’re trying to find someone to have a long lasting relationship with. A work relationship. So it’s good to look for green and red flags on a personal level. How do they treat you? Are they respectful?

Four, look for skillsets that compliment yours. Working with people who can do almost exactly the same thing as you are great to increase immediate reach. But from a creativity and learning aspect. Which I think is even more valuable in the long run. Finding people who are really good at something else than you is the way to go. This way your music is going to have two uniquely great aspects and you are going to learn a lot of new things.

And five, look at what their vision is as an artist. Where are they trying to go? Does it align with what you want? What is important to them? Is that what’s important to you as well? If this doesn’t align, it’s better to see that early on and stop the work relationship. Because it’s going to slow everything down if you have two different artistic visions. If one wants to be consistent with high output and the other one wants a perfect product. If one wants to promote heavily and the other wants to be cool and mysterious. These are some things you can think about.

All right, these were my thoughts on collaborating. Why it’s a good idea, what to look for in collaborators and some advice on how to go about it. I hope you found this interesting and enjoyed listening to this podcast episode. If you want to collaborate with me on this podcast by sharing some of your thoughts with me. Let me know. I’m trying to make this an interesting and valuable experience. My WhatsApp number is in the description. Thank you for giving me your attention this morning. I hope you have an amazing day, much love!