Your Music Is A Restaurant

(John Mayer voice)

The way we market music is broken.

And we can fix it.

But first, I need you to indulge me on this.

Your music?

It’s a restaurant.

The decade I spent working as a music publicist lead me to believe strongly that the majority of artists will make more money and waste less time by treating their businesses more like restaurants and less like a celebrity brand.

Restaurants are most often focused on attracting local and regional patrons.

They serve a regular clientele, whom they value and reward for their patronage.

They keep their offerings fresh and give people reasons to return again and again.

They are known for quality and they deliver consistently.

Don’t be fooled (be a restaurant)

The value of fame has been massively oversold.

We take for granted that we have to be famous or famousish if we’re going to realize our dream of having a successful career in music.

Come on, you may be thinking, you need lots of fans in order to make money.

But how many fans? And how much money do you need?

That depends on many factors, but one figure I find helpful is that you only need 1000 fans who spend $8.3333/month on your music in order to gross $100,000/year.

That’s like. Not that many.

Do you have systems in place to make it easy for fans to support you? Probably not, but I bet you could figure it out.

Do you have that many fans now? Probably not, but imagine if you went out and stood on the street corner with your guitar every single weekend and talk to people and shine your freakin’ light at them. I bet you could get to that first 100 in six months.

Even if those people don’t sign up for monthly donations, those would be 100 people in your local market who have seen your beautiful face in person and smiled at you and left a buck in your guitar case who remember you a hell of a lot better than if they saw a promoted post for your show on IG.

Restaurant artists are real!

And this isn’t just theory! I have had the extreme pleasure of working with a good handful of artists who are not famous and who make comfortable livings from their music.

They do this because they have done the following:

1. created music that connects deeply, even if it’s only with a small group of people

2. built relationships with these people, who continue to support their work

How you do this will vary widely based on your music and who you are as a person. But one hint I’ll offer is that most of your competitors are wasting their lives trying to be famous on TikTok. Acts of taking up space in the real world are subversive and radical and dangerous.

There’s more than enough business to go around

And speaking of only needing 1000 fans at $8.33/month to make six figures, I did some really janky math were I determined that roughly 1 in 1000 people upload music to Spotify. (The number is actually smaller than that since many of the artists who have music on Spotify are now dead or otherwise inactive.)

But say 1 in 1000 people are somewhat serious musicians. Think about that in terms of your neighborhood. If you’re there, there are roughly 1000 people around you who aren’t serious musicians. You could be the closest musician to them geographically.

People need music

As Susan Rogers writes in her amazing book This Is What It Sounds Like, early speech in humans developed alongside music. It’s deeply innate and necessary to most of our wellbeing.

Now imagine those 1000 nearest non-musicians. What do you have in common? What have you been through together? What kind of community togetherness and release do they need? What kind of experience do you want to give them?

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Thanks for reading today!

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Best friends forever,

Cassidy (seen here inside a real live restaurant bathroom)