Musicians and Marketing: Why You Can’t Wait For Your Teacher’s Approval

In the last 20 years or so there has been a major shift in classical music when it comes to self-promotion, fundraising and audience engagement.

This goes hand in hand with the invention of the internet, the smart phone, the ability to design your own website and social media.

Think this through for a moment.

If you or your teacher are 4o years old and up, it means that you know life before the internet and your musical upbringing and psychological development were informed in a pre-smart phone world (I didn’t get my first cell phone until I was 25 years old, created my first website in 2008, and signed up for facebook in 2007 when the first iPhone came out.) It means that your approach to career development was completely different than life with the internet.

WHY does this matter?

Parallel to these technological advances is a shift in communication, connection and availability, which means that as a musician, you have the power of using the internet to reach your audience directly around the globe, at any time in the palm of their hand.

As musicians focus on entrepreneurism and taking their career paths in their own hands, it is a completely different mindset than those of the 1940s-1990s, where the focus was still very much on career building based on professional outcomes and personal connections. Self-promotion was in a different form entirely.

The pandemic has been the great equalizer and suddenly young teens and 20-somethings are in the same field with their teachers, mentors and musical idols-all trying to find space and get heard in the virtual world.

Understanding that the internet is an opportunity to help you reach your audience, get your work out to those that would love to hear it, and monetize your product, service or ideas is essential as classical music evolves and reorganizes post-pandemic.

Your teachers may struggle in adapting to this new reality that challenges everything they knew growing up. Change can be threatening to many.

It is up to you to decide what you want your life in music to be, how you want to create it, how to monetize it and who you’d love to create for.

Welcome to musical entrepreneurship in the 21st century. It’s not the world your teachers grew up in. Don’t expect them to understand or get it-learn from what they are masterful in and turn to the experts who really understand marketing. This applies to business, finance, health and wellness as well.

Know what your mentors’ mastery is and also what they don’t know.

You may need to go outside the narrow lense of classical music and find experts in other niches.

Your career path is up to you. There is infinite resource and experts out there who can help you with every step along the way.

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