by George Howard
The Goal
I want to now attempt to discern a sort of universal goal for all people engaged in the music business; either as artists themselves or as those who act as the support team for the artists. Put simply, the goals for anyone in the music business are simple:
• Make enough money via your music to make more music
• Release music that impacts the culture over the long term
That’s really it. If you do both of these things, you will not only have a long and profitable career, but you will also create a legacy for yourself that will stand the test of time. This simply must be the goal of all those in the music business. Any other goal will not result in long-term success, and will eventually end in either artistic or financial failure (or both).
Looking at each of these goals individually, it becomes clear how they work together. The goal of making enough money via your music in order to make more music can seem simplistic. It’s not. Making money in music is decidedly a non-trivial matter. It ain’t easy, and most people do not make money. Even fewer make enough money to keep putting out music, and fewer still make enough money to make the music they do on their own terms. There are a million reasons why most people fail at making enough money to keep making music, but all of them have one thing in common: lack of disciplined strategy. While there is a world of strategy beyond the above referenced Hedgehog Concept, most artists don’t even achieve that level of strategic thinking.
The lack of disciplined strategy causes artists to engage in the Cardinal Sin of business: random acts of improvement. You’ve heard the expression, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” and nowhere is this more true than in the music business. Most artists, managers, and even labels got into the music business for the most virtuous of reasons, and genuinely tried to do the right things. However, because they lacked the training, discipline, or experience, their efforts were nothing more than a hodgepodge of mis-guided, disconnected efforts that added up to nothing. An artist, for instance, determines that they need a Facebook presence. They spend a good amount of time and effort creating this Facebook presence, and then wait for the success to come. It doesn’t. The artist determines that perhaps a MySpace presence is needed. More time, more effort…perhaps some money spent having someone pimp out their page. Again, the success is elusive. Undaunted, the artist decides that they must get their name out to a wider audience, borrows some money, and takes an advertisement out in Performing Songwriter magazine. More time spent designing the ad (something the artist has no experience doing, and thus does a less-than-satisfactory job), more money being spent, and, again, nothing to show for it.
None of these things—a Facebook or MySpace presence, or an ad in Performing Songwriter—are bad things. On the contrary, when part of a cogent strategic plan, each of these things can be very beneficial in helping an artist connect with an audience. In the absence of a plan, however, these are random acts of improvement.
These are precisely the types of things that, when they fail to generate any result, erroneously convince the artist that their music is incapable of connecting with an audience. In point of fact, they tell the artists nothing of the sort; in fact, they tell the artist nothing at all. Because these acts are not connected to any sort of over-arching strategy, nor are they able to be measured or gauged, they are devoid of any informational value. Artists, however erroneously interpret their strategic ineptitude as musical ineptitude, and throw in the towel out of discouragement.
I find this heartbreaking; particularly when I consider all of the incredibly talented artists who wrongly discerned that their music was no good by viewing the lack of reaction to their random acts of improvement as an indictment against their art.
The Hedgehog Concept is the first step in avoiding random acts of improvement. It keeps you from veering too far away from your core abilities. By combining this with the deceptively simple goal of making enough money to ensure that you will be able to make more music, you begin to create parameters for yourself. You can, for example, determine just how much money is enough money to allow you to put out more music. For instance, if you’re an artist who is ready to put out an album, you should be able to determine precisely how many CDs or downloads you must sell of this album to make the money back you spent producing and marketing, as well as how many you will need to sell to fund the next record’s creation and marketing. The numbers will vary, but by setting goals, you can begin to create strategy to achieve those goals. Perhaps you determine that because you need to make $10,000 to produce and market your next release, you will need to sell 2,000 copies of your album at an average price of $5 per CD. You now have a goal. The next step is a strategy for wow are you going to achieve these sales? You can begin calculating how many CDs you must sell at gigs, how many downloads you must sell via iTunes, etc. From there, you create strategy to achieve these sales. We’ll look closely at specific strategy in future lessons, but the point for now is to simply introduce the concept of strategy, and how it relates to being able to continue creating music.
The second goal is to create music that impacts the culture over the long term. Beyond the karmic virtues of impacting the culture in a positive way, there are concrete business reasons to strive for this goal, and they very much relate to our first goal of making enough money to keep putting out music. Specifically, if you succeed in your goal of creating music that impacts the culture over the long term, you will create a catalog that generates long-term revenue. This, of course, will have a significant affect on your ability to keep putting out music. On the contrary, if you simply try to identify trends that you feel you can profit from, you will most likely be wrong; the market moves too quickly for anyone to jump on the trend bandwagon, and so by the time you enter the market it will have moved. Certainly, people have profited from trends and novelties, but these profits are typically ephemeral. Additionally, trying to capitalize on trends is diametrically opposed to a central conceit of the Hedgehog Concept; no one can honestly say that they are passionate about a sequence of trends. You may be passionate about a specific trend, but you can’t be equally passionate about the next trend. Therefore, these trend-mongers lack focus, and necessarily engage in one random act of improvement after another. Eventually, this results in the only place it can: failure.
By avoiding trends, and instead focusing on creating music that impacts the culture over the long term, and by combining this with the first goal of making enough money to keep releasing more music, you are guaranteed to create a body of work that will provide you the steady stream of income needed to create the music you believe in on your own terms.
Much like the Hedgehog Concept, if you fail at either of the two goals above, you will likely fail entirely. While, as mentioned, people have profited in the short-term by following trends, it never lasts. They will eventually not make enough money to keep creating music. Similarly, even if you are making music that you believe will stand the test of time, but you are not able to make enough money, you will not be able to release more music that you believe will stand the test of time.
Put simply, these two goals force you to confront the delicate balance of art and commerce. Sadly, there are many, many very worthy artists capable of impacting the culture, but because they didn’t make enough money, they never achieved the potential impact they could have had they been able to put out more music. And, of course, there are artists who shot up like a roman candle, selling a ton of music, only to flare out almost immediately because they failed to impact the culture in a meaningful way.
Our first strategic lesson, therefore, is to begin thinking about precisely what it will take to make enough money with our music to keep doing it, and to make certain that the music we make truly is capable of impacting the culture over the long term.
Summary
When asked what the most important quality for success is you hear a range of answers; from talent to perseverance to luck. Certainly, all of those, and many more, are important qualities. However, the one quality that looms above all others is the unwavering belief by the artist that his music must be heard. This belief is the only thing that can sustain an artist through the inevitable travails that they will axiomatically confront. From disinterested audiences to disbelieving spouses, and everything in between, the path from writing songs to having those songs heard by a wide audience is an uphill and treacherous one. Without this internal belief that your music must be heard, you simply will not make it.
Once you have determined you have this belief, and that nothing will cause you to waiver in your belief that your songs must be heard, you must begin focusing on precisely how you will get this music heard. The foundation for this type of strategic thinking is what Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, calls “The Hedgehog Concept.” The Hedgehog Concept forces you to focus by determining three specific things: what you are passionate about, what you can do better than anyone else, and what can make you money. As we noted, it’s the confluence or overlap of these three circles that truly provides focus. While you may be passionate about something, for example, and you may even be the best at it, if it doesn’t provide you with enough income to keep doing it, the passion and ability don’t matter. The Hedgehog Concept provides an illuminating and instructive view on the adage of simply doing what you love. Doing what you love is an oversimplification, and—as many artists have found—just because they love to play guitar, it doesn’t guarantee they’ll ever be the best at it, or be able to make a living doing it. The goal is to find the balance between the three circles. This requires trade-offs, compromises, and maturity. However, the payoff is potentially huge.
This understanding in place, the artist must then dedicate themselves to the true goals: 1. Make enough money with your current record in order to have the opportunity to make another one, and 2. Make music that will have a long-term impact on the culture. By focusing on these elements, you decrease the chances that you will engage in the Cardinal mistake of the music business (or any business) engaging in random acts of improvement which don’t connect to your fundamental goals.
In essence, what all of the above advice points to relates back to focus. You must focus internally to understand your beliefs and motivation, and you must have strategic focus to build a career based upon these beliefs. Is this easy? No. Is there any other real alternative? No.
