How Your Music Finally Takes Off
Everything you need in order to build a thriving career in music--Let's get to work!
Before I dive in, this week I’m giving away a free one-year membership to my weekly live support calls, where I work closely with a small group of musicians and music industry professionals to address the biggest challenges of their careers. Please comment, like and restack this post to enter to win. This is a $120 value, which includes access to replays of our live sessions and opportunities to send me your questions to address ahead of time, regardless of whether you can make the weekly call. I’ll announce a winner at 12 noon Pacific Time on Thursday, Nov 14.
And if you want to get in on the group either way, you can sign up here for $10/month or $100/year.
I began writing DYL2M this summer because I want you to dedicate your life to music. I’ve seen many of you take radical leaps in these last few months.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you.
But there’s something more I want from you.
I want you to be among the next generation of heavy-hitting independent headliners.
I want your music to take off. And if you’ve been reading DYL2M, you know that if you want your music to take off, you’ve got to build it. And I’ve talked to a lot of you — you’re down to do that!
I’ve also heard from many of you that my writing is inspiring, but that you’re overwhelmed with how to implement the stuff I talk about.
What You Need
You need a framework, a bird’s-eye view of what you’re building, more structure on how exactly to roll out everything I talk about.
So I made something for you. A structured regimen of the essential elements you need in order to build your own thriving career in music.
Beginning next week and for the next number of months, I’ll walk you step by step through building the most essential structural pieces of the music career you’re dreaming of. Each week I’ll send out one post going deep on each topic and then do a workshop, helping the individuals in my paid group apply these concepts to their unique careers on our weekly live calls.
These elements exist as a part of a creative cycle so I will roll them out in the order that they need to happen in. For example, going wild with email marketing before you’ve figured out how to achieve brand consistency just won’t work as well as it would if you’d done that foundational branding work first, so I encourage you all to follow along as I roll out these steps.
The Essentials We’ll Cover
Below are the units we will work through. Again, these represent what I’ve identified as the most important components of building a structurally sound career in music.
We will likely spend multiple weeks on each topic.
Creativity
Sadly, many artists are falling short of their own creative dreams, locked up making what is basically proficient, palatable music. Or stuck playing the same old stuff, low key boring even themselves. You’ll learn to embody your most intense emotions and let them run free in your music, to create an electrifying offering for our fans and for your soul.
Branding
Likely we’ll take multiple weeks to cover branding. We will dive deep into understanding your character archetype as a musician, owning and communicating the emotional energy of your music, and applying these concepts to writing copy for your bios, visuals, social media posts, emails, and even fan interactions.
Submission Assets
Later in the program, you’ll be learning to reach out for media placements and show opportunities. But first, let’s get your EPK in order. One for booking, one for upcoming releases. This is going to be airtight, completely elegant and endlessly useful.
Scheduling + Email Correspondence
As we move out of soft skills and into strategic/business topics, you’ll create and commit to a weekly routine to help you juggle everything you’re about to take on! This flexible framework will take the guesswork out of when to prioritize what.
In addition to getting organized, you’ll learn the basic principles for how to write highly effective emails to talent buyers, media outlets, industry professionals, fans, and more. As a former music publicist, I can’t wait to teach you my tricks for not getting your emails ignored.
Booking
Whether you want to just play bigger, better attended shows in your hometown or tour the world, I will teach you how to grow your live draw and build a strong audience without having to take time off work. In this unit we’ll also dive deep into networking, which you will apply to countless other aspects of your career.
Playing in front of bigger artists’ audiences is also the most effective way artists can get discovered by high-value fans (see: local, passionate about music, interested in your general genre, buys concert tickets!). You’ll become an expert in fan retention, show night strategy, and leveraging your new fans for even better show opportunities in the future.
Releasing New Music
This exciting unit will probably be our longest. You’ll learn everything from registering your music with publishing rights organizations and organizing your release timeline, to media outreach, planning release shows, physical release formats, post-release strategy, and so much more! Strap in for this one, it’s gonna get nerdy.
Merch
If we’re going to get you making money, you’re gonna need to sell some merch. We’ll talk about how to make delightful merch your fans (or randoms at the show) can’t wait to buy and how to do it on the cheap.
Email Marketing
If you want to reach your *entire* audience with important announcements, social media’s not it. Want to sell records? Show tickets? T-shirts? Kick off a crowd-funding campaign? Get fans excited about a new record? Email is going to be the cheapest, and most effective way to reach your fans.
You’ll learn how to keep track of audience members by market, do audience segmenting, and most importantly, write emails that are incredibly fun to read and dripping in your creative juices. (ew)
What We Won’t Cover
Friends, I don’t give a shit about social media. It’s evil and it won’t get you high-quality fans. And it wants your money. And your precious time. All of it.
I will not teach you how to growth hack social media to get you a bajillion fans because I think social media is a bad way to try and get fans, period. And you don’t need a bajillion fans anyway. You really just need a few thousand really good ones. And we’re going to get to work on getting you just that.
Lets Roll
I am so excited to work through these steps with you and watch you level up! Just a heads up to paid subscribers, this week on our live call will be our last open-format Q+A session for a while, since we’ll be really focusing on the weekly topics for the next few months at least, so feel free to send in your Q’s ahead of time if you want to make sure I cover them.
If you’re not yet a subscriber, I’d love to have you along for this journey!
I can’t wait to see you all next week,
Love,
Cass