If you’re spending most of your time working on your music, you may often find yourself wondering where your next paycheck is coming from in your musical career.  Musicians are not alone in this struggle, however; I’ve seen hundreds of entrepreneurs, artists, and small businesses struggle with the same basic problems.  While the ‘starving artist,’ stereotype continues to perpetuate itself, you can walk a different path with some basic business skills – but where do you start?

Level-up Your Mindset: You Deserve it!

One of my biggest problems with entrepreneurship courses and business degrees is that most of them don’t teach anything about mindset, despite the fact that it’s a total make-or-break asset to have on your side.  Before taking any tactical steps to improving your situation, you need to make sure you have your head in the game (like, REALLY in the game).  I don’t mean that you need to be dedicated (although you do) or that you need to have an overly-optimistic outlook that will make your friends and family want to punch you in the face just to see if it bothers you.  I’m talking about having the right mindset – the right parameters – in place in your mind so that you can be successful.

One example of this would be truly believing that you provide value, and that the value you create is worth someone else’s money.  A purchase or an employment is simply an exchange of value – that’s it!  If you’re creating music from thin air, you know more than at least 95% of the world out there who are most certainly not creating music out of thin air.  This makes you uniquely valuable, and you have to believe in this value yourself if you ever hope to convince someone else of your value.

If You’re a Video Game Music Composer, You’re an Entrepreneur

Do you have dreams of being a full-time musician or sound designer?  Unless you’re looking to land an in-house position at a game studio, guess what:  You want to be an entrepreneur!  Woohoo!  Now what?

While many of the brick-and-mortar businesses I’ve worked with seem to avoid this trap, a lot of the service-based solo-entrepreneurs tumble into this trap one after another.  That trap is focusing too much on your trade and neglecting the other 50% of your business.  It’s easy to accidentally walk down this path and not even realize it, so read on.  Typically, this neglect will not be completely obvious but will present with the following symptoms:

• Feelings of being overworked and underpaid;
• Large gaps between paid work with no consistent way to land the next gig;
• Living paycheck to paycheck with a ‘feast or famine’ lifestyle – $2,000 check this month, no money coming in the next, repeat;
• Willingness to take whatever work comes your way.

Any of this sound familiar?  If so, know that you are not alone.  Anyone who pursues making their passion into their full-time living can fall victim to these emotionally- and physically-draining strains on their personal brand.  If you are truly serious about making your music into your full-time passion, then you need to understand and commit to the other business-y stuff that comes along with it: marketing, sales, a professional website, financial crap, etc.  In the case of a video game music composer, your product is your music, your composing services and expertise – but a product alone does not a business make.

Marketing: The Art of Attraction

Marketing essentially means promoting your services, but I like to think about it in terms of attracting the right people at the right time and preparing them to become customers.  For example, if you’d prefer to work on video games you don’t necessarily want to have a bunch of TV and film directors hanging around on your website.  You want game studios and game developers visiting your website – and you want them on your site when they need your services (or before they need your services).  Fans are cool, too – but they aren’t the ones looking to hire a composer, are they?

While most of us didn’t go to school for business or marketing, the core concepts are simple enough:

• Define who you’re targeting;
• Find those people;
• Get in front of them;
• Reel ’em in;
• Convert a small percentage of them to paying customers.

Imagine if Nintendo or Square Enix released their next blockbuster hit, but didn’t tell anyone.  Sales would be terrible!  While they use mediums like TV commercials, fancy window displays, and expensive magazine advertisements to let the world know what’s coming and where to buy.  TV commercials and fancy window displays won’t do us much good, but the same mechanic applies: you need to have a product, you need people to know that your product exists, and you need to motivate them to buy your product.  Which brings us to the elephant in the room…

Selling: Getting Paid for the Value you Create

While composing is a passion and an art, it is also a valuable trade skill – and you deserve to be paid in exchange for the value you’re creating for clients and their customers (the gamers!). You definitely need some basic sales skills to be successful in any business, but when you’re selling your services things tend to feel a little… well… personal. I’ve seen this happen with many solo entrepreneurs – myself included – because our sense of self-worth is unavoidably tied to the price tag on our services. To make matters even trickier, our price tag happens to be unavoidably tied to our paycheck. And our food budget. And rent.

I’ll go into sales skills in more detail in another article, suffice it to say that this part of the process is as critical as it is uncomfortable. If you haven’t spent any time working on your sales skills, I would highly recommend it. Note: When I say “sales skills,” I don’t mean any over-the-top deal-closing lines or poker faces. I’m primarily talking about understanding your value to the client, communicating that value effectively, and overcoming any objections that come up along the way.

Managing your Money

‘Freelancing’ and contract work lends itself to one-time or lump sum payments that come before or after a lot of work has been done. During that working time, it is typical to have no cash flow. This is totally fine, but can lend itself to poor spending and financial habits which end up making you feel like you’re spread paper-thin in between paychecks. And that sucks. It’s important to establish good habits early in your career to save yourself a lot of time, money, and stress. This includes things like keeping proper records, setting aside money for taxes in advance, and having clear financial goals.  Without clear goals, you can’t define what you actually need to sustain yourself and your music business.

One of my consulting customers, a post-production audio engineer, had been struggling with making ends meet for a couple of years before we popped the hood on his business.  After he defined an annual revenue goal for himself to live comfortably, we reverse engineered his hourly rate and discovered that he would only needed about 17 hours of billable time each week to reach that annual goal.  This came as quite a shock, as he was working 40-60 hours every week and getting nowhere!  However, with a clearly-defined goal and a little math we were able to work backwards to find the holes in his business.  As it happens, he wasn’t billing his time accurately and rounding down to avoid price-shocking his paying clients.  While he was aware that he was doing this every now and then, he didn’t see the enormous negative impact it was having on his business.

In Conclusion: Mind your own business

Seriously, don’t neglect the business side of your music career or you could end up feeling like a hamster on a wheel.  Remember that your mindset is the most important part of this whole process: If you think like a business, act like a business, and treat your services like a valuable product and the rest will come much easier.

Which area do you struggle with most?  Do you have any tips to share with the VGM Academy community?  Leave a comment below or comment on the Facebook post for this article at www.facebook.com/vgmacademy.  I’ll see you there!