What do you think successful musicians do to achieve success in their music careers? Surely, not all great musicians accomplish the same goals, but every one of them has taken the same fundamental steps to grow long-lasting careers.
Next are the five key steps every successful musician has taken to achieve success:
Professional Musician Principle #1: Posses A Winning Mindset
What distinguishes successful musicians from average musicians is a winner’s mindset. Successful musicians know very well that music industry is a business that works through nurturing relationships and exchanging value between music companies and musicians. Understanding this core principle will help you speed up the growth process of your music career.
This what professional musicians do:
- They learn how to reduce the risk music companies might take on by working with them. This turns them into a valuable investment with low risk and high return.
- They learn how to apply a winning mindset to help music companies and musicians while also achieving their own goals.
As soon as you develop a winning mindset and start applying it to any music career related action you take, you’ll see massive results begin to manifest. Learn how to do this and other valuable things in this article about the best way to achieve success as a professional musician.
Professional Musician Secret #2: Do Not Invest Time Exclusively Into Your Musical Skills While Ignoring Other Important Skills
The vast majority of musicians invest almost all their time into building better musical skills, but forget to invest an appropriate amount of time into developing other skills that are crucial for making it in the music industry. Here is why they do this:
1. They think their chances for making it in the music industry depend almost entirely on how good their musical skills are. Even though this is true to some extent, musical skills alone are not enough to become a highly successful pro musician. If you never invest time into developing all the elements needed for building and sustaining a successful career in music, you will have good musical skills, but no music career at all.
2. Many musicians haven’t got a clue about what record companies are looking for in them. More on this later.
Musicians who have already reached their goals and made it in the music industry understand how they were able to do these things by doing more than just practice music. While they were practicing their musical skills, they were also taking action to work on all the elements needed for music career success.
If you’ve already got very good musical skills or even if you’re at an intermediate level, you must start investing at least 50% of your practice time into understanding how to grow your music career. Be sure not to waste your time on things that will not grow your music career by finding a music industry mentor.
Professional Musician Secret #3: Do Not Let Your Fears Hold You Back
Professional musicians concentrate mainly on their musical goals and take action in order to achieve them.
Non-professional musicians think about what they do not want to happen to them. Instead of focusing on their goals, they focus on what they want to avoid. They hope to get discovered by an A&R rep, and think the only way to do this is to get lucky or find the right connections in the music business.
The two types of mindsets above are massively different. The goals oriented / positive mindset encourages you to do what you need to do, learn what you need to learn and develop anything you need to develop in order to reach your goals…while the negative type of mindset prevents you from ever moving forward.
Discover how to conquer all your music career fears in order to achieve your desired dreams.
Professional Musician Secret #4: Start From The Last Step
Many musicians think they need to design their long term musical goals starting from where they are now … all the way up to their end goals. Professional musicians do NOT do this.
Successful musicians start designing their strategy from their end goal. They imagine themselves with their goal already achieved and then find out the last step required for reaching that goal. Then, they find the step needed before the last step and so on. They literally create their music career success strategy from the end to where they are currently.
Professional Musician Principle #5: Have A Clear Understanding Of What Music Companies Need From You
Very often, musicians only think about ‘making it’, ‘getting signed’, ‘getting people to like their music’ and so on. All they can think about is themselves. This sort of mindset sends the wrong message to others in the music industry.
Professional musicians have committed their time to learning what music companies look for in a musician. They have focused on building the necessary skills for turning themselves into the best possible musicians to work with. When YOU understand this principle and apply it, your music career success will be inevitable.
What about you?
You now understand the key principles all successful musicians share in common. It’s time to apply them to achieve your own musical growth. Take this free music industry assessment and find out how close you are to making it in the music business.
After taking the assessment, I will give you my feedback on it so you can know how to improve your music career strategy and become a successful musician.
About The Author:
Tom Hess is a recording artist, music career mentor and virtuoso guitar player. He trains and mentors musicians of all different experience levels on how to develop a successful career in music. Visit his musician website to get free music career building tools and read professional music business columns.
