When Should You Quit Your Job? (2 of 2)

(Part 1)

When (if) you decide to make the leap into being self employed, you'll want to be as prepared as possible. It'll be stressful adjusting to your new job now that your electric bill depends on success. A band is a startup company, and 60-70% of startups fail within six years.

Lets think through some considerations that will help you figure out when the time is right.

1) Figure out your burn rate.
Also known as your monthly expenses. This number will determine whether you're sinking or swimming in your new career. If you've got dependents, they need to be factored here in too.

Its a simple concept, but bears repeating. If you earn slower than you burn, you'll burn (out).

2) Build up an emergency fund.

Since you'll be self employed now, there's no such thing as paid sick days. If you get struck with a bad case of the AxlRoseitis, you won't be pulling in any cash. What if your van breaks down the day before a tour? Or what if you have to post bail to get out of jail in Prague?

Random bad luck is inevitible.

An emergency fund is the difference between an inconvenience and a catastrophy.

At bare minimum you want at least two months worth of living expenses saved up before taking the plunge.

3) Figure out your expected income.
How much will you realistically make in the span of a month? Estimate this by seeing how much merch and music you sell, your income from shows, and any side income like teaching or session playing.

Now try estimating how much you'd make during a tour. Since you won't always be on tour, estimate your monthly expected income somewhere between the two numbers.

4) Figure out how to increase your expected income.
This is where the hustle comes in.

Yes, you can cut your monthly expenses to make it easier to start making money, but that's a temporary solution. There's a limit to how much you can cut but there's no limit on how much you can make. (shout out to Ramit Sethi's excellent money blog I Will Teach You To Be Rich)

Should you do vinyl releases? Private house shows? Festivals? Song licensing? Keep your eyes and mind open.

There's a million other considerations to make before going full time, but the hard numbers of "can I support myself and my family?" underly everything.

This post isn't intended to dissuade you from going full time, its about information. If you're going to make the leap, it helps to know where you want to land.

When Should You Quit Your Job? (1 of 2)

Musicians I talk to seem to view being a full-time musician as the be-all, end-all metric of success.

I get that. Playing music all day is a big slab of groovy in my book.

But we're defining success in the wrong way.

Defining success as having music as your only job is dangerous. Going full-time as an artist before you're financially ready will wreck both your art and your sanity. What you've effectively done is given up a low-paying stressful job with a low-paying stressful job without benefits or stability. Music is not an easy living. Unless your creativity is fired solely through desperation  making yourself miserable because you didn't plan ahead is silly. Ask anyone who has let The Hunger consume them.

Real success is about being happy with your only job being music.

Before you decide to make the leap, consider a few things.

1) Stability allows you to be more experimental with your music.
Experimenting with new sounds and styles in inherently risky. Failure is a very real prospect. Once the band establishes a "sound" and becomes full time musicians, everyone's ability to pay the bills relies on that sound. Would it be easier or more difficult to completely revamp your sound if your rent depending on success? (This is strictly conjecture, but I suspect this may be one reason why some bands peak on their first album.)

2) Growth eats cash
This is a cardinal rule of business. Even if going on tour will score you a tasty lump of cash, you have to pay expenses like van rentals, merch, promoters, and venues before you're able to earn that cash. You've got to eat and pay for places to sleep while on tour. Will you burn all your cash before you can earn it? Yes, you can use credit cards to delay paying for a month, but mistake with credit cards are expensive and eat into your profits.

3) Burnout
Working at a restaurant can kill the joy of its food with boredom. The same could be said of playing your top 3 hits for years on end. For some, music is an escape from boring reality. Changing music from an escape to an obligation can have a profound effect on how you view your music. The life of a full time musician is about hustle. If you're not naturally inclined to that lifestyle in addition to the process of creating and performing music, it'll be easy to get burned out.

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Before making a big decision like this, you need to do serious soul searching into what you actually want out of your music.
   -Do you like writing and recording but hate performing?
   -Do you value stability over creativity?
   -How much am I wiling to cater to my fans?
   -Will I only be happy with a sold out stadium, or would I be happy having a few dedicated fans buying music through bandcamp?
   -Would I actually enjoy the musician lifestyle?

There are big questions.

Next week we'll talk about how to prepare.

(Part 2)

Will "The Hunger" Consume You?

I've yet to meet an artist who was immune to The Hunger. It strikes artists young and old, established and amatuer.

This is about The Hunger for success and recognition we feel when we're at the end of our ropes.

It will consume you if you don't manage it.

The Hunger manifests itself in different ways among different artists. Some turn the urge inward, others lash outward. I've seen it through:

-Burnout
Watching a talented artist give into despairation and repress their innate artistic nature is a sad march. Some give up art altogether, others

-Bitterness
Some artists will go out of their way to denigrate others and put down new musicians. Everyone began out crappy and it's only through sustained effort that we become good. But bitter artists can serve up steaming bowls of negativity chili nonstop until new artists are full of negativity themselves.

-Drugs
We all know someone who deals with chemicals instead of their stress. What a waste.

-Starting a Predatory Business
This one I find especially irritating. Washed out musicians starting "pay to play" promotional companies or bogus "managers" who skim small bands without doing any work are all too common. They tend to like the phrase "exposure". Yes, it is clearly a sustainable business model to take advantage of inexperienced artists since that is one market that will never disappear. But that doesn't make taking advantage of others right.

The Hunger is a scary beast to confront.

Thankfully, there are ways to help:

-Side Projects
   Creativity comes from assembling disparate sources of inspiration. Take a break from anything that remotely resembles your current project to work on an entirely new skill set. If you're a singer songwriter, start working on a standup comedy routine. If you're a painter, start learning how to breakdance. Everything is connected to the creative mind. Sometimes all you need is the right spark to jump start your main project.

-Structured Hiatus
   You're pushing too hard to allow your mind to wander and make the connections needed to make great music. Choose an exact period of time, say a month, where you don't even so much as look at your instrument. Having to wait for your deadline to get back to your instrument will make you value it more.
If you're as addicted to music as I suspect, you'll soon begin longing to play again and with that renewed passion comes ideas.

-Change Teams
   Some people are toxic to the creative process.

Is someone saying "no" to every new idea? Too much negativity and stonewalling could be choking creativity.

Saying "yes" to everything is just as fatal. Hearing "no" shows us what people value and without this feedback, we can't refine our art. Sometime we need negativity.

You can't run without balance.
Sometimes it sucks kicking someone off the team, but being stuck unproductive and unhappy is even worse.

-Change Strategies
  If you're not getting the results you want, it's counter productive to keep doing the same thing.

-Stop Working For Free / Cheap
   If you've got lots of work but are still struggling, maybe you'er not charging enough. Of course you'll have less customers, but you'll also have more money and time to focus on doing more fulfilling work. The one fatal pricing error is pricing yourself too low to keep making art.

-Day Job
   As romantic as becoming a full time artist right away is, being able to pay rent will severly impact your art whether you like it or not. Having at least one steady source of income gives you much more freedom to explore your art without having to worry about profitability before creativity.

I'll be posting more on this topic soon.

-Find a Positive Mentor / Peer Group
   We become those around us.

If you're surrounded by naysayers, sloths, or haters you're probably one as well.

Scour craigslist, forums, blogs, and friends for meetup groups for artists like you. If there isn't one, start one. Plan on once-a-month coffee / bar meetups, promote a little to attract initial attendees, and trim out negative individuals from the group. Having positive support from peers will keep the negative energy from metastasizing into The Hunger.

This is only a start for such a huge topic.

What are some ways you've seen The Hunger manifest itself, either in yourself or others?

Will Too Much Growth Kill Your Band?

Growth consumes resources.
Whenever an opportunity arises, you have to make an honest assessment not just of the benefits, but of the costs to following through.

Although money is the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about affordability, that's not all we have to consider. Credibility, motivation, man-hours, and even sanity are all limiting factors to growing your band.

Even if you do have the funds and credibility to play a festival show on short notice, would your drummer have to cancel her first vacation in six years?

Burnout is a very real issue, especially for a DIY band that can't offload extra work to a management team. Pushing people beyond their burnout threshhold is dangerous. Push too much and you risk losing band members's effort or, even worse, band members. (Made this mistake.)

Remember how hard it was to find and audition new members of your band? There's a limited supply of musicians who would be a good fit for your band, so constantly churning through members is rarely in your best interest.

As you begin to grow your music career, more and more opportunites will begin to innundate you.

Not every opportunity is a good one; 50 fans in a 50 capacity room is better than 75 fans in a 150 capacity room.

Are you pursuing good growth or bad growth?