What you do is your career. But what about when you have multiple ways to earn? What if you have a vision and it may or may not include having money? What if within the music industry, you had multiple streams of income?
The most effective way to start a singing career is to have complete control of the creative process from composing to the final mastering of your music. The way to achieve this control is through learning music production and letting other important things like marketing and advertising be done by people who are better at it than you.
Phew! That’s a lot to unpack with just words, but we must do so as well. As easy as it is to list yourself as a professional it requires a harder working ethic to cut it in the music industry. Not impossible though.
Are You Good Enough?
The first thing that you need to know about yourself as a singer is to know that you’re good enough as a singer. That may not be a very easy thing to do since we are so biased toward our own selves. We can very easily misjudge how good and even how bad we are. And it’s usually the extremes.
You’re only good until you hear yourself after you’ve been recorded. That’s a surprise you don’t want to find out about.
In the same way, you don’t really want to jump the gun during a live performance as well. If you don’t sing well, you simply don’t sing well. So, having the assurance that you sing well and are able to meet the industry standards is quite an important way before you start thinking about singing professionally.
Another thing that you need to keep in mind is your goals as a professional, there are as many ways to tackle them as there are people. So how you proceed with your professional life is a matter of aligning yourself with those goals and working towards them a step at a time.
How to Make Sure You Can Sing
I am quite passionate about how singers can learn how to sing and I believe that the answer lies with online courses. I have outlined their importance and how you’ll benefit from them in this article here.
If you’d like to jump directly to the page where I tell people which course they can buy then this is the page here.
How to Know
There are a lot of various ways for you to know whether you sing well enough or not.
One of the best ways to know if you know you sound good is to know by having a really good ear. Which you do need to train. You need to practice it to the point that you are able to distinguish between whether you’re singing well or not.
That’s an oversimplification. Of course, knowing whether you sing well or not means being able to listen to the nuances of the techniques of singing and even music.
Sometimes when you’re still learning and developing, your ear can be more developed than your actual skills. Let me give you an example, if you were a piano player learning music since your childhood and you decided to learn how to sing as an adult, you can imagine that your ear will be far more developed than your ability to sing.
So, you do need to have an ear. Don’t worry if you don’t have it yet, we all need to work on it someday. It gets easier, I promise.
To get better at it takes experience, as in our example you were a piano player for a long time in a similar way you need to get experience at ear training by practicing ear training.
If you’re anything like me, you’re going to fail at it pretty hard. Over and over again. That’s what practice is. That’s how my ear improved and that’s how yours can too.
If you’ve just started music I would like to encourage you to take a long look at what you need to develop, how you’re going to develop certain skills, what responsibilities you hold currently, and how hard you can enter the music industry.
It’s possible, it always has been, you just need to find your way.
Various Ways to Start
As I said earlier, there are as many ways to start your career as there are people.
Being in a band, YouTuber, social media, music producer (producing your own tracks), and even freelancing.
Where you want to start will depend on you. While some ways are better than others, I would like to say this. Always build your network. You never know how, when, and where knowing someone will come in handy. If you want to be successful you can’t do it without people.
So, be in a professional network with people who are professionals.
The One Skill You Need
But I will let you in on a little secret that will help you tremendously and will allow you to take your singing and musical career to the next level and while this may have a little bit of a learning curve, it’s definitely worth it.
The skill you need to have for that is music production.
Learning how to produce your own music will open avenues that you didn’t think were possible before. You will be able to release your own songs. Your ear will be trained to listen to nuances of arrangement, composition, and even timbre.
You’ll leave people who don’t know how to produce music behind without a thought.
If you don’t believe me, call your nearest studio and say you have a 10-song album composed and ready to be recorded. The instrumentation is mainly drums, bass guitar, guitar, and vocals. Ask how much they are going to charge you for it and see if you can sustain it over prolonged periods of time.
It’ll take a while but when you are done recording your band, or yourself. You’d be a better musician.
Where’s The Downside?
So, ask yourself this.
What are you losing out on and in what area?
If the need ever arises, you can mix your own songs for YouTube or any other occasion.
If you write or compose your own songs, you can mix and master them yourself. I dare you to defy this logic.
The best and most effective way to launch your singing career is to have control over the creative process from the beginning till the end.
From conception till production.
Not The First Ones
To prove my point, bands like Periphery do this. That’s just one band though, there are thousands out there right now. So, it’s already happening.
So, I’ve already jumped onto that bandwagon, you should come too.
Money
If you don’t learn music production, how do you plan to record and release your songs? I mentioned earlier trying to get a quote from the nearest studio you have.
But that requires you to have the instrumentation and other things figured out. It’s a very expensive affair if you try to get into it without the right set of skills.
If you’re not financially well-off then you are in a paradox. You need money to pay the studio so you can record but you can’t earn from music yet because you haven’t released a song. Does it make sense? But not in a financial or productivity sense.
Paying someone binds you to a business contract. You pay them to do something in return.
This is my personal bias but, you’ve taken something that requires creative freedom and tied it into a formal contract. There is a place for those kinds of things but I don’t believe they need to exist in an environment where creative solutions aren’t the priority.
Think About The Savings
Think about the savings.
You’ll save so much by starting your own home studio that it’s going to be unbelievable how the numbers work out.
You Need Help
You need help when it comes to marketing yourself. You can only do so much so if you wish to know how to make money from your craft and how to monetize yourself, then you need to educate yourself on topics such as marketing, advertising, brand management, and other things.
Though you may not exercise these things, knowing about them is a very good thing.
Social Media is Mandatory
Posting on social media is just mandatory.
Likes, comments, and sharing are the new currency through which people are gaining status and exposure.
Doesn’t matter how well you produce, compose, or how tight you are as a band, if there are no social media following you aren’t going to go anywhere.
Why?
Because that is where your potential fans are.
Released a new song? Post it.
Working on something new and exciting? Have to share it.
The Biggest Issue
There is also a sense of permanence in your work these days. Once it’s out it’s your job to publicize it.
In some sense, you don’t need a marketing or advertising team if you gain instant fame but also remember that things that rise instantly come down just as quickly.
But how you plan to keep your work relevant depends on you and your end goals as an artist.
You can also try to have a social media manager if you really want to push your luck.
What It Actually Takes
Technically speaking? Not that much.
If you have a song that is released, your career has begun.
It takes very little money to promote and release a song these days. Distrokid can take your song and release it on every major streaming platform. As soon as this happens and even before it happens you can always start to promote it.
How you tackle it is going to be your decision. Where you want to take it and how you plan to monetize it because there are various ways to do that as well.
Why You Need Other People
Fans or someone who will market what you’ve done, you need people.
You need people who will help you and you need people who will listen to you. There is no escaping that fact.
Making sure you have good singing and production skills will make sure you’re ready to release songs and having people to take care of marketing and other things will make sure you can do things.
While I do believe that modern-day musicians need and do indeed wear a lot of hats, there is only so much a single person can do.
If you wish to reach creative highs you need to have a network that is capable of that and is willing to grow with you on that journey and in return, you’re going to help them with the same for them.
Another reason you need to have a great network is that this industry is highly dynamic. Who knows what will change and how much? You need to make sure you are caught up with the trends.
Speaking of which, I hope you end up setting a trend one day.