Making a Living as a Musician: Do You Have the Right Frame of Mind to Break New Ground?

As an amateur musician CPA, I marvel at the musician who can not only make a decent living, but break new ground.  Take Jazz for instance.  I have learned a lot about jazz from my son, a UCI jazz piano freshman.  He’s picked up that jazz attitude that jazz guys write and perform really technically advanced music, and should be placed on a level above R&B, and Blues.  Now, before writing hate mail, remember, he is 19.

My response to him is that as an artist, you may be right from an technical point of view, but art needs to be appreciated by society in order to be woven into the culture.  Otherwise, your “high-brow” music is just academic.

This is why I am blown away by those who broke new ground in their genres: The Beatles, Elvis, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, George Gershwin, and many more.  Not all of them became rich, but they enriched our culture for generations to come.

But there is a money problem.  How does a musician break new ground, and make it big? Bruce Houghton tried to quanitify this in his article A Musician’s Minimum Sustainable Scale.  I commend him for trying to help the musician quantify “success,” but the article begs the biggest question: How does a musician make it big in this new industry.

If you are a reader, I will recommend two books.  If you are not a reader, I will explain their main points, and maybe you’ll become a reader.

1. Good to Great by Jim Collins explains how a company can be the world’s greatest at if they develop three things: a) A passion, b) Something that can make money, c) Something that you can do which will make you the world’s best at it.
2. Blue Ocean Strategy by Kim and Mauborgne outlines the attributes you need to work in an industry where the competition becomes irrelevant.  In a nutshell, focus on what your customer wants and is not getting, and eliminate what you are giving the customer that is not wanted.

What does this mean to a musician who wants to make a great living?  Good question.  I can’t tell you the answer because you’ll have to develop that.  But I can point you in a good direction using the principles outline in the books:

1. Play your passion.  If you are a jazz artist, don’t write hip hop because it is selling.  If you are going to be the greatest in the world, it will have to be within your passion.
2. Listen to your audience within your passion.  Dylan said that he was not leading the 60’s revolution, but just reflecting what was happening.  Of course, this resonated with the 60’s youth, and fed more into his art to be the best.
3. In order to make a great living, you have to expand your passion’s reaches to a bigger audience.  Let’s take  Arnold Schoenberg and his 12-tone music system.  Some say it was the most influential music of the 20th century, but if you play it for the masses, most will plug their ears.
4. Now, let’s compare that to Paul Desmond’s Take 5 with the Dave Brubeck Quartet.  Now, here was a 5/4 time signature that was not common in pop music, but Desmond was able to take his passion, of which he was one of the best, and write it to where the album Time Out became the top jazz album and a top pop album.  The Dave Brubeck Quartet, partially under the writing of Desmond, unknowingly fulfilled of the Good to Great and Blue Ocean Strategy theories of business.  They hit all of the points mentioned above.

The question is, what is your artistic-business strategy?  You can sit there and moan about piracy, bad record deals, and shallow listeners, or you can be the greatest at what your passion is and make a lot of money.