Mistakes People Make When Trying To Become Professional Musicians

There are some common mistakes that musicians make when trying to make it in the music business. These mistakes can prevent you from advancing to the next level in your music endeavors and can make you waste valuable time that could be spent elsewhere towards your success as a musician.

1)   The first mistake would be not investing time to construct a musical career. We all know that dedicated musicians spend countless hours practicing their instruments, honing their other musical skills such as ear training and theory and composing music. Sadly, that is not all you need to be successful. Aside from all the music playing, time has to be devoted to all the business and marketing aspects of the music scene. Spend at least 25% of your time developing your musical career. That can mean self-promoting or talking to the right people while trying to get a record deal of some sort.

2)   Being surrounded by people who are not hard workers or are not focused in “making it” is not very good idea because you will feel like you are the only one making an effort to succeed but there are so many people doing just that and you have to compete with them. This one resonates with me a lot because it has happened to me and it really affects your drive to accomplish things. Try to be with people that you know are on the same path to success.

3)   Having good composition abilities is a great skill to have but if you are in a band or are a solo artist, having good live performing skills is a must. Playing mediocrely is not acceptable in a good live performance. People will not have a good memory of your concert if you don’t deliver a good show. Having good performance skills has to be accompanied by stage presence. For some people, stage presence comes naturally to them but for others it has to be developed by practicing with small audiences first and then escalating to more crowded audiences.

4)   Making music is not all in the music business. Image plays a huge rol in a musician or a band’s career. It might be on the same level of music in this era where image is very important because of videos. Creating a unique style and image that go with the type of music you do can really propel your career forward. Most people don’t take this into account and overlook it when building their music career but they have to understand that music is just part of a whole package.

5)   Another important one is that people try to build huge fanbases focusing on the quantity and not the quality and that can be detrimental. Try to build a fanbase with devoted fans. Just paying on Facebook to get more likes is just going to fill your page with more people that aren’t that interested in your music. If that is the case, every time you post something, many of your devoted fans are not going to get notifications of your posts Facebook only shows it to some of the people that liked your face, notifying your “not so devoted fans”, leaving some of your actual fans without knowing your latest news.