Nobody’s going to help you. It’s all up to you.
Does hearing that discourage you or motivate you?
The reason I’m asking is that a musician friend emailed me two questions last week (December 2008):
How can I find a great/major booking agent?
And how can I find an investor? I need someone to invest $500,000 into my band for radio, touring, recording, videos, PR, payola, etc.
My answer was:
Sorry, but when it comes to this stuff, I think the healthiest attitude is the most cynical one:
There are no great agents that would want to take you on unless you’re already earning $5000 a month gigging, so that their 10% cut (only $500) would be worth their time.
There are absolutely no investors that would invest in a musician now. Even solid profitable businesses with customers and employees can’t find investors these days, (December 2008), so just assume you will not.
So: No agent. No investor. No one’s going to help you until you’re already successful. So how do you get successful with no help from anyone?
How can you make $5000/month from gigging, so that an agent will be interested enough to take it to the next level? Only you know.
How can you call so much attention to your music online, that a company will gamble on you, and finance the expensive offline campaign?
Those are the healthy questions to ask.
Unfortunately that’s not the answer he wanted.
To him, my answer was really discouraging.
To me, (if I was receiving that answer from someone else), it would be really encouraging.
I like being reminded that nobody’s going to help me - that it’s all up to me. It puts my focus back on the things I can control - not waiting for outside circumstances.
But it got me wondering: is that just me?
When you think that nobody’s going to help you, does that encourage you or discourage you?
I’m really interested to hear everyone’s honest answer. Please leave a reply in the comments here. Thanks!
