Having the wrong mindset about situations can lead you in to making the wrong decisions for your music career.
In this episode of The Music Industry podcast we discuss the personality traits to watch out for including how you react to those who you dislike or have taken a disliking to you.
Having the wrong mindset about situations can lead you in to making the wrong decisions for your music career.
In this episode of The Music Industry podcast we discuss the personality traits to watch out for including how you react to those who you dislike or have taken a disliking to you.
Welcome back to the Music Industry podcast. This is another episode of one of our solo episodes where today we're going to discuss what personality traits do artists often have which is holding them back in their career and stopping them from breaking? Now you might find that not all of these apply to you, but maybe one of them will apply to you, and that one thing is so powerful and almost toxic it is holding you back from making the right decisions in your career which will allow you to progress, and if you are making the mistake, it's going to stop you from breaking. And these points have all come from years and years of working with artists, because at Bustamo we're a music marketing agency, and how it's evolved is not about just getting artists' music in the right places, growing their following. It's also become about the artist's mindset and correcting their thinking in how they're thinking about the music industry, how they're thinking about music marketing, how they're thinking about themselves. Because all of these things add up and allow you to express yourself, express your true self, and allow audiences to truly fall in love with who you are as an artist. And that leads me nicely onto my first point, which is the inability to express your true self as an artist.
Speaker 1:If you're constantly thinking about what your potential audience or your existing audience is going to think of you and you're trying to manipulate that to make them think a specific thing, to make them love you, to make them listen to your music, then it's going to make it a lot more difficult for you to break, because you can't keep up that consistency, because what you are putting out into the world is not who you truly are. You need and this is the key word when you're thinking about putting things out, thinking about your content, your social media strategy, you need to be unapologetic about yourself, and what I mean by that is that you should never feel like you need to apologize for being who you are. In terms of how you dress your opinions on things, what you put on your stories, how your music is or your genre of music None of it matters and you have to be unapologetic, because that polarization and filtering out the people quickly who aren't going to like you and aren't going to like your music is going to help you break quicker, because those who do like you are going to connect at a stronger level than any other artist. Therefore, you are going to build those very dedicated fans who are going to share your music, who are going to show up to live events, who are going to give you that initial momentum to start to make you break, to start to spread the word and therefore you'll find that other people in the music industry are starting to support you, simply because the amount of waves you are making.
Speaker 1:The second trait is expecting to be good at something from the very beginning, or even just wanting to be good at something from the very beginning, because I thought artists would be good at this, because when you first start your music career, you start learning that first instrument or you start to develop your singing voice, then you're not going to be good at it from the very beginning. However, when it comes to the likes of social media, the likes of giving interviews and answering questions, you're expecting yourself to be brilliant at it from the very beginning, as if all of that should come naturally to a human being, and it doesn't. You've got to start slowly and understand that you're going to make mistakes and understand that with every interview, with every social media content, with every live performance, the first one's not going to be your best. You're going to be able to start to understand yourself, start to understand your strengths and weaknesses in every area, and then you're going to get better and better and better at it. And, artists, why this is holding you back is because this thinking stops you from doing those things. You start to shy away from them. You shy away from putting out social media content because maybe you're worried about people thinking that you're not actually that good at it, for example. Or you're not going to want to do interviews live on YouTube, for example, because you're worried about what people are going to think of you because you're not very good at it. The fact is, you're not going to be very good at it from the beginning, compared to where you're going to be in a couple of years time. So don't expect to be perfect every time. Start doing it and start improving incrementally, and then you will find that you're going to make a huge amount of progress.
Speaker 1:Point number three is getting married to your ideal path to breaking, and I think this is a very common one, and it's what keeps those older artists from breaking the most, because they have in their head how they should break as an artist whether you should be picked up by a big manager who is going to allow you to collaborate with a bigger artist, whether a major radio DJ is going to pick up your track and put you on rotation for the next month because he loves the track so much, or whether you're going to get a support slot If you get married to. How you're going to get that initial exposure and how you're going to break is going to limit you, because the environment of the music industry and how people are discovering your artist is constantly changing and therefore what you find is artists saying well, I don't want to break on TikTok. I don't want to do TikTok because in my head, that's not how I'm going to break. I'm going to break by doing this, this and this, because that's how true artists break. But the fact is, if you are a true artist from your core, then people are going to discover you and understand you as an artist. It doesn't matter how they discovered you. But if you want to be romantic about this path, then the chances are you might find that those paths are a lot narrower and have less opportunities, possibly because the audience isn't there anymore. They've moved on, trends have moved on, people in the industry have moved on. Therefore, you shouldn't be setting your ways, on how you want to break. You should be moving with the times, trying different things, and then, when you find something is working, you can double down on it and, like I said, it doesn't change who you are as an artist.
Speaker 1:Thing number four is obsessing over the politics in the music industry because, as an emerging artist, you have very little power over the music industry. Therefore, complaining or consuming your mind over what is happening in the music industry and why it's more unfair for this person or why it's difficult for this person, if you truly Want to make a difference, then the answer is to concentrate on your own career and then, when you've got the fans and then when you've got the influence, that is when you can make a difference. You can't make a difference by getting a hundred emerging artists together with no audience, no fans, and if they disappeared tomorrow, nobody would care and Try and make a stand against the industry or try to way raise awareness for it. So, therefore, keep with your principles, keep it in mind, but don't try and change the music industry from the bottom. You need to change the music industry from the top.
Speaker 1:Therefore, if you think that Spotify doesn't pay enough money to their artists, then Don't try and change that and don't sit on Twitter, sit reading articles or the comment section of Instagram Talking about it and and letting yourself get stressed about it and therefore you start to believe in your head that you have these Obstacles that might not even exist, because if an artist has broken from your position, then it is possible. Nobody is making it impossible. So, therefore, if you can name an artist who has exactly your position and has exactly your Problems and obstacles and has broken, then you can break as well. And then, when you've got your audience, when you got your millions of streams, then you can pull your music from Spotify and saying I'm not getting paid enough, and Spotify will listen to you and they will make a difference. Therefore, whatever it is in your head, don't let the media coerce you into Consuming their content and making you feel bad, because they are simply just making money from the readers and then it makes you feel bad and makes everything feel Impossible and it doesn't make any sense and that is the only outcome. It's just your time and Emotional energy that gets wasted. That's the only outcome that comes from this. So, anything that you're thinking about, move on and that that doesn't have to be in the music industry. It can be about the world. You need to get your power first. You need to get your audience first, and then you can start to change the world trade.
Speaker 1:Number five is is thinking that your next release has to be bigger than your last release, which is not true at all, and it can really stress artists out. So if you got picked up by the algorithm and a few Spotify editorial playlists on one release, then you've got a million streams. That means that you need to get more than a million streams on your next release. That makes absolutely, absolutely no sense in music terms. What you should look to be growing is steadily growing your core fan base, release after release, not your streams. So if you release some music and your core fans like it but of course you might out of those million streams you might actually only have 5000 Dedicated fans and you've released it just for them and it's only them that hears it. That's absolutely fine. It just didn't get picked up by the algorithm. As long as it's a good track, then those 5000 fans on have now been Injected with more of you as an artist and you have enforced them more. So if you were to then get 10,000 streams or 50,000 streams, then that's absolutely fine, because that is still more exposure.
Speaker 1:In fact, I would rather that you weren't looking at the streams, release on release. I'd rather you look at the other metrics, such as how many DMs you're getting, how many people are showing up to your live shows, how many people are interacting with your Instagram posts. That is a much better measurement of how many true fans you have and how quickly you are growing. And I know you're going to look at how many streams you have on Spotify. I get it. It's just a natural thing that you're going to do, but in an ideal world I would rather you didn't. I would rather you look two months afterwards to see how many streams you happen to be getting, because how many streams you have on Spotify actually doesn't matter and there's not much you can control. And if you start panicking that you haven't got enough streams on your latest track, you start cutting corners, you start to worry about things or look for solutions to boost those streams, when actually there isn't that much you can do once it's been released and out for a few weeks, apart from what you've already done. So if it wasn't part of your plan in the first place. The chances are any other solutions don't deserve a place in your plan going forward.
Speaker 1:And that moves me on nicely to point number six, which is getting your time wasted by people and believing their bullshit. Because if you are in a panicky frame of mind or you feel like you should be moving quicker as an artist, then you actually are. Especially when, say, a manager's come along and said actually, I can build your streams, you don't have that many streams Then it hits you like a dagger in the heart because that's all you've been concentrating on. So therefore, you get easily manipulated into thinking that this person is going to solve all of your problems and for one, for a better expression, you have rose tinted glasses on because this person has been able to know what you are, where your sore points are and how to then push your buttons into signing a contract or paying the money. Whereas if you have kept calm and understanding that you are progressing, then it's not going to be this flat line of success with every single release, but it is going to be up and down. That will allow you to have a better frame of mind of who you should be working with and who you shouldn't be working with, because you know which parts are important to your career and which parts are essentially just vanity metrics.
Speaker 1:And point number seven. Six months ago, I didn't think I would ever be including something like this, because I see all this stuff online about manifestation for success and what you put out into the universe. The universe then gives you back and as if the universe controls you, which is not true at all. You control what you put out into the universe. However, the lack of visualization for success can hold you back and I got this from a very famous book called Psycho-Cybernetics, which is a very interesting book if you wanted to read further on it which is that your unconscious mind is like a homing missile it will find its destination, no matter how, and therefore, if you can constantly be thinking about the target, every single day, your unconscious mind will make sure you get there.
Speaker 1:And what that means is that your unconscious mind is a lot more powerful than you actually think and it can change the decisions you make and how motivated you feel and what you actually do in your everyday life to make sure you get to where you want to be. So, every day, you want to be thinking, you want to spend about 15 to 30 minutes just thinking about where you want to be as an artist and how you're going to get there and what you need to do on a daily basis to actually be able to succeed and be good at this thing. And that visualization is enough to get you to your destination, because your unconscious mind will put you in the right emotional state and it will guide you to the right decisions to help you get to that destination. And that is the most airy fairy thing I will ever put in a piece of content. But I've put it there because I know myself it works and I can see artists who don't necessarily view themselves as ever becoming a success. Even though they're kind of trying, they can't visualize in their mind being successful and therefore it affects everything else they do that day because of that lack of vision and being able to place themselves there. Therefore, it comes across in their music, it comes across in their strategies, it comes across in their social media content that they have a lack of belief and you need that lack of belief to be able to Express yourself and therefore get to where you want to be as an artist. And if you want another analogy of how this works if you think about a sports team or any kind of sports person, when you are behind your visual, your ability to visualize yourself winning a game or a match Starts to dwindle and it makes it a lot more difficult to perform because you have that lack of vision. So if it is a cup final and say football or soccer players in the UK here that some of them are paid up to a quarter of a million A week, and if they go to goals down, suddenly they can't perform, they fit the. No amount of money or bonuses or financial incentive can make them perform to their highest level, and that's because they've lost that vision of winning the game. They've lost the momentum and therefore they start to make different decisions, they start to play more conservatively, they start to expect to lose possession of the ball and all of this adds up to having no vision of success and therefore their ability to perform at the highest level.
Speaker 1:Point number eight is your motivation is for revenge, to prove somebody wrong or to impress somebody you don't like. And I think this is a fascinating one to pass. I got this from Gary Vee, gary Vaynerchuk if you haven't heard of him it, this one hit me hard, because have you ever noticed that when you want to impress someone, whether it's with money, whether it's with your ability to do something, when you want to impress them For the wrong reasons and quickly, it's because you don't like them very much? And the only time you ever want to, the only time you ever want to Impress whether that's to make them feel bad, whether that's to take revenge or whether that is simply just to show off it's always the people that don't matter and shouldn't matter.
Speaker 1:So, if you're an artist and you want success and you're doing it because of all of the teachers that said you're not going to amount to anything, or all of your classmates that bullied you at school and they still follow you on Instagram and you can't wait to be successful or have a number of streams or an amount of money just to rub it in their face, firstly, if that is your motivation, you'll never get there. You'll always be cutting the corners, you'll always be making the wrong strategies because you'll want the metrics that will impress people on the outside and actually have nothing to your core. Secondly, it is the most unfulfilling thing in the world and you will never, ever feel good about it and you'll never get what you want and the validation from them, because there's a reason you don't even like these people or they don't like you, and that's because of your values. Therefore, if you're trying to think of what they would value and what would make them jealous, then the chances are you're going to go get that, but it wasn't what you wanted. Therefore, you've got this thing to impress other people and it had actually nothing to do with the objectives that were in your personal interest.
Speaker 1:And if you even do get it, say you really want, you really dislike someone you went to school with and they took the piss out of you all through school and said you were dumb and you're never going to be able to achieve anything and working in music or trying to have a music career is just going to fail. Then, showing up in a Lamborghini in front of their house, you think that it would give you pleasure, but actually it doesn't. And because you will never get the reaction from that person that you were looking for. And secondly, when you get yourself in a position where you can afford a Lamborghini if money was your motivator, for example, or say you wanted to get 10 million streams just to be able to rub it into someone's face. When you get there, you get yourself in such a position that you don't even care about that person anymore Because you've got so much going on and you've grown so much as a person that you don't even seek that validation and you don't even seek that revenge. So keep that in mind.
Speaker 1:If something starts to bubble up where someone rejects you, or someone says that you're not going to make it, or someone says that your music's bad, think about it that you will never be able to get revenge on them or change their mind, and nor will it ever fulfill you. Just move on and attract and try to impress the people that you like and have the same values as you. And I want to end this one on a positive one, which is have fun with everything you are doing. Because if you don't enjoy what you are doing right now, then you're not going to enjoy it when you've made it. Because a lot of people think if I get this, I'll be happy, if I get this amount of money, I'll be happy, if I get this number of streams, I'll be happy. If I get this show slot or a festival slot, I'll be happy.
Speaker 1:And the truth is that if you're not happy right now doing it, you're not going to be happy when you've actually made it. It is what you have today and what you are doing today and your mindset today which is going to be what fulfills you. So happiness is not a permanent state where you achieve it, you don't achieve happiness. In fact, I'm not even convinced that happiness is a word really should exist. It's more of a marketing tactic to keep you on the hamster wheel, just running and running and running to try and get somewhere, just because you saw it in marketing.
Speaker 1:What you should be looking for is something that fulfills you, something where you are content and where you are brought joy in doing it. So the good thing about aiming for joy is it's not permanent. You have a time of joy, but you know that it's going to end at some point and you are okay with that and therefore you go back to being content, fulfilled with what you're doing, and you wait for the next joyous occasion that will keep you happy and it will keep you making the right decisions, and therefore you won't feel miserable because you feel like you are lacking something that doesn't even exist in the first place. It is the media, it's marketing that has made you feel like that. You should be happy and smiling all of the time. If only you could get this big house, this car, this amount of money. You're going to be on stage playing glass, numbery or Coachella. That isn't where your fulfillment will ever come from, especially as those occasions will eventually die or you'll start to have played that show about five times to six times in a row and it's starting to get a bit boring.
Speaker 1:If you want to even have some more insight into this, then I very much recommend looking at documentaries of major artists. If you look at the Bohemian Rhapsody movie, based on Queen and Freddie Mercury, then you'll see that he wasn't very happy throughout his life. Elton John movie he was a drug addict, elvis. Elvis got addicted to the validation that he got from his audience. You've got then the Robbie Williams documentary just gone on Netflix. You'd think he'd have everything in the world and he felt like a failure and he felt like he didn't. And that is because these people are always looking for this state of happiness and it doesn't come. It comes from what you have today and what you're doing today and finding joy and fulfillment and what you're doing on the everyday and that is going to make you successful, along with the other points. Thanks very much for listening. I hope you enjoyed it and we'll see you in the next episode.