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Many of us love and hold a great passion for music, and some of us might have even considered pursuing music as a career. While doing so might seem like you are embarking on a unique and interesting career, have you seriously thought it through? A career is something that will follow you for more than half of your life, just because you have the talent does not mean that everything will go smoothly. Planning is very important, especially if it is music career. If you are hard bent in pursuing music as a career, here are some of the things to consider.
1. Passion
As mentioned earlier, your career will accompany you for most, if not your entire life. As a musician, it is your undying passion for music that will motivate you to continue pushing no matter how rough the days get. It is this very passion that allows you to constantly learn more and more about music, which is something that every musician have to do in order to stay relevant and do well in the competitive music industry.
I am pretty sure that you have heard of people complaining about how they are working in a field that they have little to no interest for and that their only motivation is to earn enough money to survive. Now, envision yourself practicing and making music for the rest of your lives, where do you see yourself in 5 years time, in 10 years time? Do you truly think that your passion for music will last you through decades, whereby there are bound to be monotonous days whereby you will just spend your whole day practicing and learning about music? If your answer to the previous question is yes, congratulations, you cleared this part of the test!
2. Finance
Now that you are certain that your passion is enough to last you for an entire music career, let's discuss the first few years of your career. Most singers sacrificed a lot to get into the good positioning they have in the music industry today, and most of them got off to a rough start. Finance, in particular, is THE factor that made most aspiring musicians give up their dreams and pursue a normal career.
Take your music career as a business. Every business requires capital to start. Do the math, how much savings do you think you will need in order to survive for the next 3 years in the case that everything that you planned goes haywire? After all, you will want to be putting your full concentration on improving your music capabilities if you want to pursue music as a career. Things such as rental or daily expenses will become huge distractions and cause you to stray from your original plans.
3. Entrepreneurship
As mentioned in the previous factor to consider, you should take your music career as a business. As cliche as it might sound, are you ready to be your own boss in your path to pursue music as a career? You will need to possess a certain amount of entrepreneurship to pursue music, or you might just give up halfway due to the many other things you will need to do apart from music.
Just like starting your own business, you will need to handle many aspects such as the financing and marketing of the product, aka YOURSELF. This means that you will need to be open to picking up new skills that are not related to music. If you are comfortable with this and love the concept of handling your own business, you are one step closer to your dream of making music your career.
4. Social Network
You have great passion, and together with enough capital and entrepreneurship, you are just lacking a final push to get your career on track. Like all businesses, there are definitely things that require certain professional skillsets that you may or may not possess. For example, things such as banking, legal or accounting might be skills that you do not have experience in.
Hence, you will probably require the help of professionals to help you in these aspects. If you already have existing networks which you can tap on to aid you in your music career, that is great! However, if you do not, it is perhaps time to do some social networking.
5. Backup Plan
This is the most important factor to consider! You might have fulfilled the previous 4 things to consider for your music career, but let's be honest, things will not go according to plan most of the time and there is definitely a possibility that you might fail in your attempt to pursue music as your career. Hence, it is always good to have a backup plan. After all, most famous musicians also have additional skillset or external revenue sources that they can tap on should their career come to an end.
It is very important to ask yourself that in the event that your music career did not work out, do you have anything to fall back on?
Now that you have considered your situation, do you think you are ready to embark on your musical journey? If you are, always remember that hard work matters, and everything might not go according to your plan. Even if you failed in the end, well, at least you have a backup plan.
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Wen Feng is a passionate music aficionado. He is constantly on the search for new music to listen to, with a particular interest in classical music. Piano pieces have always been a great companion and kept him calm throughout his school and work life.