Hi everyone, it's been a few weeks since my last post. I hope some of you are finding the recent information/resources useful! Feel free to contact me anytime with feedback or if you'd like advice on anything. My email: hanes81@gmail. (don't abuse it, please!)Anyways, I've been thinking a lot lately about how I can approve my approach to the ever daunting task of becoming a "professional musician". I tried the "appeal to everyone all the time" approach with my brass group and I can say with 100% confidence that is does not work. I seriously sent about 500 emails out to churches and wedding planners alone. The original intention was to drum up some wedding gigs for me and my friends to generate some cash. Care to guess how many of those we've gotten?
Zero. I have literally no wedding gigs in the books for my group.
Now, before I throw a pity party for myself, I will point out that we have actually managed to get a handful of other gigs that have been great. I have recently been reading a lot about strategy and how to successfully identify what works and what doesn't. With this in mind, I encourage those of you trying to figure out what your next move is to explore the marketplace and find a niche you can fill. Really invest some time poking around the internet learning about what others are doing. In the process of this, you will slowly but surely start to realize what ISN'T being done. Once you can start finding these gaps in the marketplace, you can really start getting an idea of what you can do to fill in the blanks.
I understand that this will be very difficult most of us creative folks. I've said this many times before but it's worth repeating: Take advantage of the lack of action in others! There are opportunities out there just waiting to be created. If I had to guess, I would say that most of the people reading this will do absolutely nothing that I encourage my readers to do. This totally fine, but I really hope that some of you really do get crackin' with this stuff.
Again, please let me know if there is anything I can do to help any of you. I'm really interested in this stuff and get really excited when I have to opportunity to help others start this process.
One thing I wanted to share this time is an interview about business stuff for creatives with Ramit Sethi and Chase Jarvis. It's about an hour and a half, but well worth the time. While you're there, take a look at other episodes on Chase Jarvis Live. They're all really great!
http://www.youtube.com/embed/KJeoyckQn3A
Seth, Regarding the 500 plus emails...you might want to cast the net again. Perhaps once a year? Include photos, new video/audio clips etc. As long as your sending them new info/reminders, I think they'll appreciate it. Many of them will loose track of the email when they need it most. You might want to consider hard copy materials at bridal shops. Once you get started up it will continue to build. You're doing the right thing to keep plugging along! Chris Griffin
ReplyDeleteThank you for bringing more information to this topic for me. I’m truly grateful and really impressed.
ReplyDeleteWork at Robert Greene Books Corp.