Using Your Strengths

A lot of people are striving for the dream to get out of the day job and move full time into a career in making music.  I’ve sure you’ve heard stories of people using wild and crazy marketing ideas to get attention, big name bands breaking away from major labels and weekend warriors leaving the desk job behind to become full time musicians.

So how do you do it, with your band, with your strengths? Well there is no single answer, every artist is going to need their own unique approach and it’s up to them to find what that is. Obviously having great music is first and foremost, but you also need to get people to listen. One trick is using the skills you develop in your day to day jobs to your advantage, and design your marketing campaign around those strengths.  Things like getting the grammar nut in the band working on copy and the really friendly one working the email list after the show is obvious. However thinking outside the box is the best way to survive in a music business whose box is constantly changing.  One thing to think about is combining skills sets of the different members of your musical team to create something greater than the separate items. For example if you’re a web designer and your guitar player works in sales. You can design a functional and effective way of selling music online more so then most. If you have a carpenter, an electrician, and an artist, you can design your own lighting system, and a killer, totally unique light show.

Last example I’ll throw out; if you have a auto mechanic, welder, and someone with a love of spray paint, build your own trailer and save yourself a few grand, and have it be custom designed to the band when you drive around, we call that a functional moving billboard.

Take a look at the members of your team who work with your music business, and figure out what skills these people have, besides being a killer bass player, and try to see if you can combine those skills into something you can use in conjunction with the music. A unique merch display, creative cd packaging with an interesting email campaign, fundraising events for recording an album, a treasure hunt for the new album, any number of ideas that you can combine using your skill set will not only be as unique as the people in your band, but will also be of quality much closer to quality of your music.

If anyone has any creative combos, post em.