When it comes down to it, the life of a creative is a beautiful, fun, exciting, and yet deeply challenging one. For those who love to create things like music, art, or online content there is always a tension between investing in their passion – but also moving toward it becoming their job. One of the most common roads to walk for many creatives is that journey between ‘real life’ and the joy of getting to do and create what they love.
This is especially true for musicians who want to break into the music industry. Living in the tension of having to pay for your bills but also wanting to invest in your future as an artist is something that almost any musician can relate to. Even the most successful musicians and artists can sympathize with this kind of lifestyle. Before any artist ‘makes it’ they have to figure out how to make a living that can provide for them and their dream career. While this is no easy task, the good news is that it’s a road that has been trodden by many people – and what’s more, many successful people.
Most artists have heroes they look up to that also went through the rigors of figuring out how to ‘make it’, and these stories are a source of inspiration and hope. If you are a music artist wanting to expand your audience and grow your fan base, there are a lot of factors to take into consideration. Here are some tips for how you can make 2023 the year you take big steps toward realizing your dreams and working toward goals when it comes to expanding your audience and growing your fan base!
Take Inventory
Here’s the deal, the opening of a new year means there are all kinds of new possibilities. Not only will hard work and consistency help you grow as an artist, but they can also help you grow your audience and fan base. One of the most important things you can do as you set out to peruse your goals is to take time to get clarity and take inventory of yourself and your ambition. A lot can happen in a year, and you will definitely grow, but you want to make sure you are optimizing that time to get the most growth possible.
This means taking some time to pump the breaks, pull out the journal, and explore where you are at and what you want to accomplish. Take a look back as you do this and realistically gauge how the last year, two years, and more have gone. What big accomplishments have encouraged you and pushed you forward? What setbacks have been hard to work through? Where have you experienced the most freedom and reward – where have you experienced the most challenge?
As you work through this, turn your attention to the future. There are 52 weeks in a year, that’s 12 months, or four quarters, however, you want to look at it – break your year up as best makes sense, and then ask yourself what you want to accomplish.
Setting large goals for your overall year is a great place to start, and then work backward by breaking the road map of those goals into quarterly, monthly, and even weekly accomplishments. This is going to be time well spent as it can give you clarity for where you really think you can grow and expand!
Explore The Options
Here is the fun part – spend a good amount of time dreaming and exploring. Yes, your goals should set you up for success over the long run, so making accomplishable goals that scale into your future is key – however, creatively daydreaming is crucial. This can help you understand creative options that you may not have explored. For example, maybe you have garnered a solid online streaming community, but you have very little video content for your fans. So, maybe this is the year you work with a creative team to create a music video, then use a music video distribution to get your video on all the major platforms.
This could also look like investing into merch, or maybe putting out a new EP or series of singles. Taking time to creatively think through accomplishments is important.
Conclusion
The most important thing to remember is that planning and consistency are key. No one simply ‘makes it’ overnight, and 2023 can be the year that you take big steps toward your dreams in realistic, scalable ways.
Leave a Reply