As musician you want your music to be heard, you want to reach an audience. In the past, the best tool was to record your music and sell it, and than get played on the radio. Booking a tour was a tool to sell more albums. You needed an expensive studio to record your music, labels and distributors to distribute it throughout the country and record shops to sell it.
The infrastructure is still in place, though the situation has changed completely. You don’t need a studio anymore to record your music. Some basic stuff in the basement might already do the trick. With social media and websites like Bandcamp, ReverbNation, Soundcloud or the old Myspace it’s easy to distribute your music directly to the audience.
And here comes the tricky part. How do you reach the audience? Or, to start with: what audience do you want? And if you know that, you can ask the next question: how do you reach them?
Everything seems to be about live shows nowadays. With albums you don’t make enough money anymore, so you have to make it with performing live. Though there is a decline of attendance in the last couple of years. This is not only with new artists, also established artists suffer. Last year Barbara Streisand had to cancel her Irish shows for lack of ticket sales.
The main challenge for any musician is to reach the right audience and know how to tempt them to buy a ticket to your shows. And there we are again with the marketing questions: who would like your music and how do you reach those people? And than you have to think about what makes you interesting to them, how you can tempt them or seduce them to buy a ticket to a live show.
I don’t have the answer for that. Still, I’m good at asking the right questions 😉