Fix Your Focus

So ultimately, you would love to get your music out to millions of people, go on a huge tour and make a nice chunk of money from your music career…right? So in order for this to happen, whenever you make short term decisions, be sure to always keep the long term goals in the back of your mind.

Here’s a small example that happens more often than not: In the last 6 months you’ve recorded and released 2 mixtapes with an average of 15 songs per tape, yet for some reason there’s not much of a difference in your progress. You haven’t had any paid gigs or radio play; any video’s that you put on YouTube have an average of around 2,000 views, and now you’re getting a bit frustrated and wondering what the problem is. There could be a bunch of reasons why you’re not progressing at the rate that you would like, but the main reason is because you’re doing too much (without doing enough). You’re focus is off. You have lost sight of the bigger picture.

Let me explain…there is such thing as music overload. You’re so excited to get a bunch of material out there that you’ve slacked in the quality and promotion department. Understand that sometimes less is more. You have to learn how to play hard to get with the music industry. It’s a known fact that people want what they can’t have, however instead of running with that, you’re giving everyone loads of music (and I can bet that most of the material are not original, well thought out songs with great concepts and catchy hooks). This goes back to doing things with a purpose. You want to put your effort into the things that are going to get you the best results. When you are an indie artist and you’re only a few months to a few years into the business, the goal isn’t to get as much music out as possible to a tiny bit of people, the goal is to get a tiny bit of music out to as many people as possible!

The key is taking your time out to make the best product that you can. Make a product that you KNOW someone will love. That’s the kind of music that sells. The more confident you are about your product, the more excited you will be to get it out there. If you’re long term goal is to get your music out to millions of people and go on tour, you have to start doing the things that can really get you to where you want to be. Get out of the habit of recording and releasing constantly. I’m sure fans won’t mind waiting a bit for a quality product. Don’t put all of your cards on the table at once.  Give a little bit at a time. Keep the suspense going. Let your promotion start to kick in before you move on to the next.

Instead of recording a whole mixtape full of mediocre music, focus on 3-8 quality (original) songs that you can use to launch your brand properly. Instead of having fans skim through 15 tracks that they might love, give them 3-8 tracks that you knowthey will enjoy. Quality Music almost SELLS itself. The better your product is the easier it will be to get it out there.