#ListenUp: Troy Carter
Occasionally we feel less than inspired and like we're stuck in a rut. Usually when that happens, I (Blair) like to dive into stories of other artists/managers/execs that I admire to look for inspiration. I want to share one with you that I found particularly great.
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Get and Stay Organized
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Welcome to Friday, people! We made it through another week (hopefully with some live music or at least some good tunes in your earbuds). Today’s post is going to be relatively short and sweet, but it can affect your entire business. It seems to be a common misconception that successful artists can have a shitshow of a business model. Creativity demands no organization, right? Actually, you’re pretty wrong. Unless you have someone to run your entire life for you, you’ve GOT to get your business organized and running professionally.
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Should You Take The Gig?
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Recently we had a reader request a topic that is relevant to every up and coming artist/band. So genius we were surprised we hadn’t thought of it ourselves! (kidding) (mostly). His question stemmed from how to phase his artist out of playing bar gigs. So this brought up a few more questions -- How do you say no to easy money? How do you turn casual, lean back listeners into actual fans? How do you even brand the bar gig? Should you take a gig with bands that don’t line up sonically? So let’s dive into it!
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Pay Attention To Other Bands & Their Brands!
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Ok, so we want to bring up branding AGAIN. Why? Because it’s really freaking important. End of story. Ok, you get that (sorry). We’re diving back into it because there are almost endless aspects of it to bring to your attention. We’ve talked about branding yourself. In that post we established that your brand is your identity. We’ve also talked about doing your homework as a general concept. This post is intended to take that a step farther. This is a specific task that you should constantly have on your to-do list: pay attention to what’s going on around you.
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Think Before Adding Team Members
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Growing your team is an important and necessary part of your career as a new artist. However, when and how you do that is the tricky part. We’ve already talked about being strategic with your partnerships, so today we’re going to dig deeper into when you should think about adding team members and who they should be. I’ve come across too many artists with too many people working with them but not enough happening to justify them all. On the flip side, I’ve seen artists drowning in day to day work, struggling to keep everything on track when their careers are starting to really take off. Here are a few steps and questions to help guide you!
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