There’s a problem with music industry advice and best practices. None of it will help you build a flourishing career in music if you don’t bring your magic. And in fact, the inspired actions of great artists destroy the conventions of “what it takes to make it” constantly. Of course, some great artists have successfully put good advice to use, but best practices have never made an artist great. Not even one.
Hello! Dedicate Your Life To Music, is a new channel where I’ll post each week about the practice of nurturing your own creative spark, following your intuition, and building a thriving career around your music that prioritizes and supports your creative spark and intuition. My hope is to help you harness the boundless power of your own joy so you can keep dedicating your life to music for decades to come instead of burning out, getting jaded, and throwing your guitar off a cliff, and going to law school.
As a music industry coach, former music publicist, artist manager, A&R, touring artist, etc., I will be sharing actionable advice, but more importantly, I want to help each of you learn to follow your own compass and give you all the context you need about the industry to respect yourself as the single most trusted expert on your career. After all, pushing any art through a paint-by-numbers promotion formula will never move the needle as much as inspired actions that are connected deeply to the art, the artist, and the people who love their work.
For the last few months I’ve been posting nearly daily on TikTok, a platform where you can quickly reach new people if they’re interested in your topic of expertise. That might even be where most of you learned about me and the work I do! I decided this week to quit TikTok after a few profound sessions with some of the artists I coach privately.
Before I tell you about my decision to quit, I want to tell you something about almost every 1:1 client I see. When artists come to me, many of them are feeling fed up and a little bit frantic. They’re suffering from overwhelm and decision paralysis. They’ve got “someone just tell me what to do already!” vibes. I’ve had this feeling many times throughout the twenty-years-and-counting I’ve spent working in music. It’s the miserable, sickly feeling of being disconnected from your own creative intuition.
And while most artists don’t know what they should do, every artist I’ve worked with knows what they want to do. They know what they love to do. And almost all of them are afraid to trust their instincts. They think that if it sounds fun and rewarding, it probably won’t be beneficial to their career in the long run. Fortunately, they’re completely wrong. But more about that in a bit.
Let’s Begin
My first priority as music career coach is to get to the core of what my clients want to be doing. What part of making music feels good to them? Where do they feel relaxed and powerful? What cool ideas do they have? What does their dream life as an artist look like? What does their dream life as a person look like?
Following their own delight gives artists the motivation and inspiration they need to make music that connects, invent novel solutions to their biggest challenges, and achieve the impossible. Read that back, because it’s important.
That thing in your belly that makes you want to play music? That’s your rocket fuel and nothing, nothing, nothing, and certainly not *Good Music Industry Advice* should come before that. Why? Because like I said before, music industry advice won’t move you forward if there’s no magic in what you’re doing. Without the magic that can ONLY be created by following your own inspiration and joy, you have nothing to offer your fans. Nobody will fall in love with your music and nobody will want to champion it.
The Plan
My next job is to help my clients situate their creative bliss at the center of a plan that works with the existing structures within the music industry.
Will there be promotional avenues we don’t take advantage of? YES.
Will the artist throw themselves into every opportunity? NO.
This is essential because it saves the artist’s energy so that they can show up for the opportunities that align most with their creativity.
There might also be ways that we take on short not-so-fun projects to make sure we’re not leaving opportunities on the table before shifting focus. An example of this might be that an artist really doesn’t like showing up and making reels. We might plan to get some strategic, high-quality video content made and pinned up on an artists’ IG so new fans and industry people can easily understand what the project is and then setting up the IG to direct new fans to join an artist’s Patreon, where the artist prefers to spend their time making voice notes and drawings for their fans.
My role is to offer context, a little bit of creative problem solving, and a lot of permission to make changes that help them reclaim their authority. As they put to rest ideas, practices, and sometimes even styles of music, assumed roles or creative relationships that aren’t nourishing them on their journey, they can turn their efforts toward new practices that fill their hearts and energize them and bring them closer to the kind of success they’re craving.
Two Kinds of Fear
It’s such a cliche to follow your internal compass, but how do you actually do it?
Acting out of fear requires that you justify it to yourself and most of the time it requires a sacrifice. Typically I associate it with a busy-feeling energy of just wanting to get something done and looking forward to the result. Like this:
“I should make a TikTok because it’ll be easy for people to find me — it’s ok that I high key hate being online all the time like that, I’m gonna tough it out and get the word out about my thing!”
But when you’re doing something you like, you can settle into enjoying the process. You’re good with taking your time because you’re happy when you’re doing the thing. Like me right now, sitting in a cafe on a tree-lined street, working on this post for the third day in a row, blissfully downing another oat milk matcha latte.
But, and this truly sucks: taking this kind of leap (i.e. breaking up with what you hate doing) can also cause a huge amount of fear. Fear of being judged for your poor decision making, judged as lazy, judged for changing your mind or your plan. There’s also plain old fear of the unknown. What if the thing you like doing doesn’t work the way you hoped it would? Scary thoughts indeed!
It’s important to look at what kind of fear you’re having. Are you acting from a place of fear or having fear come up as a result of deciding to follow your joy? The best way to distinguish the two is to pay attention to how the action itself feels. Aligned action feels calm, fun, playful, un-rushed. It feels like flow. Intense fear can follow that, but the action itself feels rad. Whereas, acting from a place of fear always carries a subtle feeling of unease and wackness.
It makes sense to feel scared as you turn toward your passion! Venturing into a new endeavor means new challenges will arise that you haven’t thought of. So many new opportunities for failure. All these new devils you don’t know.
Blossoming into a new era of your life requires that you trust your future self to handle the new challenges that your success produces with grace. It might help to remember that your odds of success are always higher when you’re fueled by excitement and passion and that trusting your joy is actually the safest bet you can make.
If You Can’t Find The Flow
I’ve had a few distinct periods in my life where I couldn’t find my creative intuition. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been through at least one of these stages. I’ve come to believe that these stages are essential periods where we’re forced to experience disconnection so that we can cultivate more of it than we ever have before. If you’re here and thinking what the fuck how do I connect to my joy, I have some suggestions.
Step 1. Get Safe
It’s almost impossible to get into a state of play when you’re feeling scared or rushed. If you’re hitting a wall creatively and you can’t find your own true north, turn your attention to developing your own sense of safety and resourcedness. Stop dieting. Stop grinding. Stop scrolling. Stop improving. Start focusing on taking loving care of your body as though you were a baby. Eat. Sleep. Journal. Go look at the water and cry. Go lay down among the redwoods and look up at their branches moving around in the breeze. Spend time with people and animals you love, even if you feel like self-isolating. Make a list of people who will love you even if you fail at every single thing you’ll ever attempt. Even if that list is just yourself, write your name over and over again because that’s truly the most important person! Write a letter promising to yourself that you’ll always be there with love for yourself even when you face failure, judgement, rejection, shaming, and unfortunate bangs.
Late stage capitalism is real. Many, probably most artists face real economic threats to their wellbeing. The system we live in is working against you finding your internal sense of safety and access to your own warm inner glow. But you’ve made it this far, which means that there is warmth and goodness and groundedness in your life, even if right now it’s only coming from inside of you. Find it, hold onto it, strengthen your connection to it.
Step 2. Clear Out Fear Actions
Once you’ve established some coziness for yourself, break up with the work you’re doing for your music that you’re doing out of fear. Start with just one action to quit! Clearing out those practices will allow you to rest and make space for new magical ideas to come in to take their place. Even the emotional experience of quitting a fear-based action will show your subconscious that you’re on your own side and that you’re committed to nourishing your own creative happiness. This can be a great way to enforce your sense of inner safety which will help start to bring you closer to flow.
Most artists have to work day jobs while they’re getting their careers off the ground. I’m not advocating for you to quit your job that you do out of fear of not having money. This post is about how to handle stuff you’re doing—that you feel you ought to do for your music career that doesn’t feed you creatively. But if you hate your job, it’s definitely worth looking for one that sucks your soul less.
Step 3. Collect Joy
Start to build your joy collection. Make a list on your phone and update it often. It can include songs, people, places, memories of things you’ve done that filled you with a deep felt sense of connection to life and to yourself. Your list will probably shift based on where you’re at in life and what you need.
My list looks like this right now:
A creek bed in Fairfax, CA (excellent pebbles, redwoods, etc)
Laying on a picnic blanket in the park with my son and feeling him snuggled into my armpit while we look up at the sky
A few specific wonderful friends who always make me feel like I’m the person I want to be
Listening to my old voice notes demos and remembering that even in hard times, there have been moments when I was able to connect to my own creative spark
The feeling of when I first started going to punk shows as a tween
Velodrome by Second Grade
Two Dollar Pistol by Brennan Wedl
The Hidden Cafe in Berkeley, CA
Heavy rain, especially in the morning
Important Stuff That You Hate
On the road to prioritizing your own creative spark, you may realize that there are essential tasks you don’t genuinely connect to doing. Take emailing your fans consistently. Say you hate doing this. You know email lists are an important part of making money as an artist because they’re a way to reach all of your fans for pretty much free and sell them stuff.
In moments like these, your role as the creative director of your own operation is to problem solve and use your joy to spark creative solutions. Is there a way you could connect to your fans that would feel fun? What if instead of writing boring emails, you drew a hilarious and disturbing picture with all the information you wanted to send them and blast that out? What if you wrote a song and sent them a video of you performing it and crying on the floor in front of a pile of unfolded clean laundry? How about a monthly zoom call instead where you share a poem and read your fans’ astrological charts and auction off a t-shirt? What about a text group? Or is there another way you can stay in touch with fans? Or is retaining and selling stuff to your fans something that doesn’t really serve your dream anyway?
Your left brain knows the problem you’re solving for, but your joy is the only thing that can breathe life into what you’re doing. Have you ever gotten an amazing email from an artist who clearly loves writing emails to their fans? I have and it rips.
The Easy Road?
So back to my decision to leave TikTok. It’s probably the fastest way to grow my audience as a music educator. But it’s not the only way. The buzz of that platform is so disruptive to my internal sense of peace and connectedness. And ultimately, that’s what I’m here to offer to you all.
So is TikTok really the fastest way to achieve my goal if by definition it is robbing me of the thing I’m offering? Or is it simply the fastest way to get me to go to law school and give up on sharing what I know with artists.
This is the kind of math I want you to do anytime you consider taking something on in the name of growing your career in music.
A Geriatric Rant
I started playing club shows as a high school freshman and I remember feeling swept away by the emotional rollercoaster of opportunities, attention, disappointment, competition. It was a cocktail of chaos that my little basically-a-kid brain could barely handle. That was 20 years ago, and I’m sad to say that the generation of new artists coming up now are afforded virtually no respite from these addictive, highly competitive and superficial platforms.
Is TikTok evil? I have no idea. Are TikTok personalities bad? Of course not. Should you quit? It depends on what kind of creative journey you’re on and whether you find that platform supportive to your creative joy or not.
Can the promotional outlets you’re using be supportive to your creative joy? If yes, they’re great. If not, find a way to strategically deprioritize them while preserving as much benefit from them as you can. What I find is that often, when we really take the time to assess, we find that we’ve overestimated the actual benefit we’ve received from outlets that are sucking our joy.
The music industry and social media are related, but they are not the same thing. Both of them supply a conveyor belt of opportunities for you to stop what you’re doing and compete in someone else’s race and abandon your true north. Both of them seem to scream at you to be both entirely authentic and *better* than you actually are at the same time.
Your Success
I want to leave you all with a few closing thoughts on this matter.
Whether or not you succeed in the music industry isn’t up to labels or managers or the algorithm. It’s between you and your fans, whoever they are and wherever they come from.
You’d better have magic to offer them when they come across what you’re doing or they'll keep right on looking for magic elsewhere. And you’re not going to have that special something unless you’re doing work that fills up your heart.
Finally, finding and committing to your joy is a process you should start today and continue for the rest of your career. Always be looking for ways to show up in your art that feel deeply satisfying and nourishing to you. This is especially important as more opportunities and success come your way and the pressure to optimize for success and profits increases.
Thank you guys so much for reading my first post! Please feel free to share this with your musician friends or anyone else who you think should join us in dedicating their life to music.
Cassidy
This was a wonderful read. I've only just gotten my social media off the ground in the past few weeks, but I had an "aha" moment when even the notifications coming in from my friends and family were enough to profoundly disrupt my creative work. I am not a casual social media user, so I was genuinely surprised to see how little "success" it would take for that success to undermine the whole creative operation 😂
My main takeaway is that you can't share what you haven't created, so if any form of sharing poses an existential threat to the creative process, you've got to find a way to protect the art. Doing so is not just idealistic. It's pragmatic.
Thanks for a wonderful piece. Looking forward to reading more!