If you want to own a McDonald’s franchise you are going to have to invest some money in the franchisee contract.
If you don’t own a McDonald’s franchise and you work for McDonald’s, you’re an employee of the person who does own the franchise.
If you want to look decent at a professional job interview you are going to have to invest in some business attire.
What are the odds of landing the gig if you show up in tattered cargo shorts, a stained Hawaiian shirt, and moldy plastic flip flops?
If you buy a beautiful brand new car you are going to have to invest in the purchase of the car or monthly payments, gasoline, tires, and occasional maintenance to keep it running.
If you don’t invest in these things your ownership of the car will be quite short, either because it was repossessed or because the engine will freeze up.
If you are going to play guitar you are going to have to invest in a guitar, amplification if it’s electric, strings, regular maintenance on the truss rods, frets, and wood to keep it humming consistently throughout the seasons.
Can you really learn to play guitar without investing in one?
Can you really put up a lemonade stand unless you invest in the lemonade first?
What if you put up a lemonade stand with the hope of finding someone to purchase the lemonade for you?
What would consumers and potential business associates think if they stopped by your lemonade stand only to find you had no lemonade?
What would you tell those consumers and potential business associates about your hopes and dreams of a profitable lemonade stand that would remove the sting and 1st impression that you simply don’t have any lemonade?
You can’t expect a fat retirement account when you retire unless you invest a portion of every paycheck while you’re working throughout your career.
Dave Ramsey makes the thought of investing painfully simple…if you want to grow corn you are going to HAVE TO PLANT CORN!!!
Why are so many of you trying to launch your music careers without really investing?
Without investing time?
Without investing money?
This is a fantasy.
As with anything in life, relationships, careers, equipment, domiciles, hobbies, pets, you are going to get out of it what you put in.
In plain English YOU HAVE TO PUT IN.
It’s going to cost money to get this career of yours off the ground.
Excuses as to why you can’t or more appropriately why you won’t invest in yourself are just that; they’re excuses.
Yes, I’m sure they are valid but they are, in fact, excuses.
Excuses are reasons to forgive yourself for not doing something. They act as a pardon of sorts, making us feel ok that a certain objective wasn’t met.
Do you ever make excuses for not breathing?
Do you ever pardon yourself for not eating?
No, somehow, some way, you find a way to breathe, you find a way to eat because your life depends on it.
If your breathing or eating is curtailed for too long you will fight to make it happen.
Many of you say that your life depends on your music, but you find excuses as to why you won’t advance your career intelligently.
This suggests that your life actually doesn’t depend on making music.
Doesn’t it? (Pun intended)
I’m certain there is a great deal of self-sabotage embedded in this dichotomy.
We all come by it honestly because the people that love us are fearful we’ll be broke, so they tell us to get a “backup planâ€. In order to frame and sell the backup plan scenario correctly, they need to tell us that the music business is hard.
It is.
If it was easy EVERYONE would be a rock star.
Life on the hamster wheel is hard too.
It’s hard getting up every day to go work at a job that you just don’t have any passion for.
That’ll suck your soul, man.
And all this for the sake of being responsible and falling into line with society?
All for the sake of making your parents and/or other people happy?
This is where they want you by the way. Don’t blame the messenger(s) in your life. Whether the message comes from love or from nasty, bitter, jealousy they are regurgitating what they have been taught their whole lives.
It’s what THEY believe and sometimes they really don’t like being reminded there are other more attractive avenues.
The talking points are clear and obvious, the question is are you drinking the Kool-Aid?
What you invest in this scenario is far more valuable than money; it’s your TIME.
Where there is a will there is a way.
I can assure you that every artist’s path to success is unique so the only manner in which you can discover yours is to actually start walking down it.
In other words, you won’t be able to research all the remedies in advance of all the challenges you are going to incur with your artist career.
There is a scene in the movie Apollo 13 where the NASA expert gives the astronauts a red cyanide pill. The NASA expert says, “We can think of 1002 reasons why you would need this, but mostly it’s for the reasons we can’t think of.â€
I think of artist careers like this.
You won’t be able to research how to avoid new ways of falling off your horse. You won’t research your way to a painless and mistake-free outcome.
This is the main issue I see all of you grappling with.
Let me save you the suspense, YOU WILL FALL OFF YOUR HORSE.
Everyone does, so that’s a real easy statement to make.
The trick to life is learning how to get back up on the horse and learning how to avoid falling off again in the same manner.
The more you get back up on the horse, the longer you stick around, the more contacts you make, the deeper you get into the business, the more relationships you will make, the more successful you will be.
While every detail to every artist’s recipe for success is unique, this basic formula is ubiquitous.
This will require an investment of time and money. You pay for food, you pay more for bottled tap water than you do for gasoline, so why not find a way to pay for your career?
Have you invested enough in:
Lessons?
Instruments?
Amplification?
Practice space?
A website?
Professional recordings?
Marketing?
Education for marketing, recording, and writing?
I seriously suspect that the most overlooked item on the preceding list, for every independent artist, was marketing.
What haven’t you invested in?
Why haven’t you invested in it?
Is it because you think marketing is too expensive?
A nationwide radio promo campaign is going to cost $500,000 to purchase the opportunity to crack the top 50.
You don’t need radio to get the fire started and create serious attention from the industry.
Is it because you don’t understand how to market online?
You can learn.
These days the music business is hard, don’t get me wrong. You’ll invest more than you get back initially.
There are different kinds of investments. When you invest 40 hours of your time at your day job you get a regular paycheck every week in return.
INSTANT GRATIFICATION.
When huge venture capital companies invest large sums of money into tech companies they are not expecting to get an immediate return on their investment.
They are not expecting instant gratification.
The good news is it’s not rocket science.
I’m a smart guy but I assure you, I’m no genius.
All my knowledge with this online marketing stuff I obtained via trial and error and a bunch of education.Â
I paid for both either with time, money, or time AND money.
My company essentially has 2 revenue streams, recording revenue and marketing revenue.
- In 2012 Daredevil Production, LLC made money from recording artists and made ZERO dollars from marketing artists.
- In 2013 we again made recording revenue and we made a little revenue from marketing artists.
- In 2014 we again made money recording artists and we made far more revenue from marketing artists than we did in 2013.
- By mid-2015 we continue to generate cash flow recording artists and we have already surpassed the 2014 revenue from marketing artists.
Clearly you see an obvious trend with the revenue, but there is a trend you don’t see.
The unseen trend is that the amount of work required to create that momentum in the new marketing department was same in 2012 as it is in 2015.
Get it?
My dream is to make a dent in the Universe creating and refining new methodologies for exposing and marketing talented artists.
I’m sharing this general financial information with you so you can see clearly that if my plan was to require “instant financial gratification†I would have failed.
I’ve been called a failure.
By people who are close enough that it stung even when I knew the information was incorrect.
I submit to you that the only sensible business plan for instant gratification is work for someone else.
You’ll get paid every week.
If you plan on being your own boss, you will have to invest a huge amount of time, faith, grit, and some money to make it happen.
It won’t happen right away.
Thinking intelligently about how and when your investment will be realistically recouped is equally as important is the investment itself.
Who better to invest in than yourself?
In
Tune
PS: If you haven’t already downloaded my free Music Marketing On Twitter book, please enjoy it on me. Go to GiftFromJohnny.com put  in your name and tell us where to send it. It’ll teach you how to get 1,000 new targeted followers every month for just 15 minutes per day.
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