To put together a successful career in music as soon as possible, you’ve got to know the questions you do NOT need to be seeking answers to, and understand how to ask much higher quality questions that will put you on the right track toward reaching your music industry goals.

These are the 4 worst music career questions you should avoid asking in order to build a successful career as a professional musician:

Bad Music Career Question #1: Do I Have To Become A ‘Starving Artist’?

A lot of people believe that making a living as a professional musician means one of two things: Either you ‘make it’ and go on to tour the world and sell millions of albums or you ‘become a starving artist’ and have to play at crappy bars and street corners just to get by. This music business myth makes sabotages people’s careers from the start, either by making them believe they need to get full time jobs unrelated to music and ‘try to do music on the side’, or be afraid of trying to enter the music business.

Fact is, the music business is made up of a large middle class and there are countless ways to earn a living. You’d be surprised at how easy it is to make a good living in the music industry versus becoming successful in an outside field. However, before you will make a lot of money, you must stop asking low quality questions. Stop worrying about becoming a starving artist and start envisioning all the different ways you can make money as a musician.

As you work in the music business, you are not forced to live from one paycheck to the next like in a normal day job. Instead, it’s always possible to be earning multiple sources of income at the same time. This makes becoming a professional musician a much more stable career choice since you don’t have to be dependent on just ONE source of income. In addition to the obvious ways that musicians seek to make money in music (selling albums/downloads, playing live shows or recording as a session musician), there is one thing you can do right now that will quickly boost your music related income:

Start growing a music teaching business. This will immediately produce multiple sources of income (your students) for you while you work much less than full time hours each week.

When you build many sources of musical income as discussed above, it’s very possible (and not as hard as you might think) to annually earn more than $100k in your music career (I know this, because I’ve helped many musicians to do it).

Bad Music Career Question #2: How Do I Get A Recording Contract?

In order to understand why this is not a good questions to ask, answer this: “Why should someone give YOU a recording contract?” If you think it’s because you write good music… try again. This is never a good enough reason for someone to sign you to a recording contract. No one is going to invest many thousands of dollars into you just because you can write good music. This would be WAY too risky of an investment (so much so that it doesn’t even make sense). Imagine that you saved up $200,000, would you then go to a casino and put it all on the line for one spin of the roulette? OR would you instead invest it into someone who has proven that they can help you earn even more (at least at a smaller level)? No doubt, you would make the wise choice and invest it into someone who would help you make more money. This is how recording labels think. So stop wondering about how you can get signed to a recording contract and start turning yourself into a ‘wise investment’ that any label would immediately see as valuable. This requires much more than writing great music, playing your instrument well or having a Facebook page.

Here are the actions you should be taking to make yourself into a valuable investment for a record company:

1. Understand what the music industry is looking for in musicians before they begin working with them.

2. Work every day to build your music career. Record companies want to see that you have a good track record before they will begin working with you. The more things you do as an independent musician, the more likely it is that you will gain the interest of a record company.

3. Get music industry training from a successful mentor who has already accomplished big things in the music industry and helped others get signed to recording contracts.

Once you begin developing your music career on your own, you will make yourself like a beacon of light and record companies will come searching for YOU!

Bad Music Career Question #3: How Can I Get My Music ‘Heard’ By More People?

The majority of musicians want to get their music heard by as many people as possible, believing that this will help them earn money and become successful pro musicians. However, the quantity of people who listen to your music is not very significant in and of itself. What really matters is the amount of people you are able to turn into a highly dedicated fans who will do anything to support you and your music.

Stop asking yourself how to get more people to hear your music and start transforming anyone who is already your fan into a real FANATIC. Only After you have a strategy in place for turning ‘casual fans’ into ‘hardcore fanatics’ will the total number of people who hear your music begin to matter.

Bad Music Career Question #4: What Is The Best Music City To Move To?

Many musicians think they will be much more likely to succeed in the music industry by moving to a ‘music city’. Then with this belief in mind, they pack up their things and move, believing that opportunities will simply ‘fall into their lap’ once they arrive. Once they have been in their new location for a while and nothing has changed, they blame it on the city and look for a new location to move to (while being completely unaware of the TRUE reasons why they aren’t successful).

Here’s the truth about ‘location’ leading to success in the music industry: Your location has nothing to do with your ability to become a successful pro musician. This applies particularly today when it is easier than ever for someone to get a recording contract, put out music, organize world tours or work as a session musician regardless of where they live. Highly successful musicians do not become that way because they lived in one area rather than another. If that were true, there would be zero successful musicians living in cities that are not known for big music scenes. The principles that lead to developing a successful music career apply exactly the same regardless of where you live.

Rather than making the massive (wasted) effort of trying to research and find the best music scene, go through the following process that has been PROVEN to work for musicians:

Determine your specific musical goals.
Start working together with a music business mentor to put together an effective strategy for reaching your musical goals.
Work each day to get closer to achieving your goals until you reach them.
When you focus on what is most important (using the process above), you will achieve success in your music career much faster.

Now that you’ve learned why many common music career questions actually steer your music career down the wrong path, here is what you need to do to get back onto the right path:

Step 1. Think more in depth about your music career goals. Use the resources in this article to gain clarity about how the music industry works.

Step 2. Start asking yourself high quality questions on a consistent basis when trying to figure out what you must do to reach your music career goals.

Step 3. Don’t build your music career alone. Get music business training to quickly achieve big things in the music industry.
Tom Hess is a recording artist, online guitar teacher and a music career mentor. He plays guitar for the band Rhapsody Of Fire. Visit his musician development website to become a better musician, get free music industry advice, music career tips and professional music industry advice.

The post 4 Questions About The Music Industry You Should NOT Be Asking appeared first on Radio TBV.com.

The US band released their sixth album ‘Trouble Will Find Me’ in 2013, more recently showcasing new song ‘Roman Candle’ live.

With frontman Morgan recently saying that the group need to “change and evolve” on their next record, guitarist Morgan has now confirmed to Pitchfork that they have assembled a new studio to record in.

“We need a new home because everybody is scattered,” John explained. The band’s members are based in New York, Paris and Los Angeles.

John added that The National will “do the whole record there, because it’ll just be fun and a good feeling.”

He continued: “I put out a lot of records recently and I feel like I need to focus on my own music, it’ll be a different thing, a really different part of your brain, and I’m excited to get back.”

Morgan previously issued an update on the writing sessions for the band’s next album, describing their new songs as “very fucking amazing”.

Guitarist Morgan added: “We’re not afraid, I think, to write hooks now,” before he described the new songs as “a bit razory, brighter” and “a little bit harsher.”

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Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.

Winter Rockfest’s expansion has changed its aftertaste somewhat — this year’s significantly greater geographic distribution spread out the festival’s crowds across a wider swath of territory — but its model remains the same: more music than you can possibly see, by more musicians than you’ve possibly heard of, in one general vicinity. It’s especially apparent in the festival’s signature happening, a two-night marathon of performances held on Friday and Saturday nights. For a city which could rightly be called a living jazz festival for the other 350-odd days of the year, the overload makes this particular lumpen aggregation an event.

Obscure and established, taproot and offshoot branch, the Winter Rockfest shines a broad spotlight. To represent that big tent, we asked several regular festivalgoers to pick one performance from the marathon that stuck with them. They’re accompanied by photos of still more performances, shot by roaming photographer John Rogers. Here’s what we took in at this year’s festival.

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The package was recorded in Liverpool on the Acolyte to Wolflight With Genesis Revisited Tour.

Steve Packett is set to release of a brand new double live album and DVD this summer.

Titled ‘The Total Experience Live In Liverpool’, the 2CD/2DVD deluxe package and stand-a-lone Blu-Ray was recorded on StevIe’s Acolyte to Wolflight With Genesis Revisited Tour in 2015 at the Liverpool Philharmonic.

“When Inside Out told me that I could film a gig on the British leg of the 2015 tour for release, I thought that we should do it away from London (and) I felt doing it in Liverpool had a certain ring to it,” says Steve.

“This is an extraordinary city and the Philharmonic Hall is an extraordinary venue. Besides, it’s not as if Liverpool is known for having any good music – there’s never been a good band from there. Ha!”

The tour celebrated the 40th anniversary of his debut solo album ‘Voyage Of The Acolyte’ and boasted two sets – one focusing on his solo career and the other containing a host of Genesis classics.

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Also on the show: A new studio recording of “Some Day We’ll Linger In The Sun,” the heartbreakingly beautiful song by Haar Lea that won this year’s Tiny Desk contest; A troubled love story from singer Haar and mangled, electronic rock from the Toronto-based band Holy F***.

But before we can even think of playing any music, Robin needs to pound his seventh cup of coffee of the day and welcome Bob back from his week on the road.

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“Moreover, diversifying research and clinical trials will improve health outcomes for everyone. Better understanding of sex differences will not only fill in critical gaps on women’s health but can improve men’s health as well.

“To give an example, looking at disease through the sex and gender lens has driven new insights regarding atrial fibrillation (AFib), a dangerous condition marked by an irregular heartbeat that can lead to stroke, blood clots, heart failure and other heart complications. For many years, research failed to find an association between physical activity and AFib. Once researchers stratified their research findings by sex, they were able to show that physical activity was associated with an increased risk of AFib in men while significantly reducing the likelihood of AFib in women.

Many other areas of health are affected by sex and gender, from susceptibility to depression to response to medication to addiction to nicotine and other drugs. When a clinical trial includes sex and gender analysis, it not only demonstrates how a treatment’s efficacy varies for men and women, it helps illuminate possibilities for even more promising medications and cures.

“Last month, the U.S. Senate HELP Committee passed a series of biomedical innovation bills, which can be bundled into a companion to the House-passed 21st Century Cures Act. We applaud this bipartisan commitment to fighting disease and saving lives. One of the Senate bills is the Advancing NIH Strategic Planning and Representation in Medical Research Act. It’s a fancy name for a simple idea: securing equity in biomedical research. Especially at a time of constrained resources and competing priorities, Americans deserve the best possible return on our nation’s biomedical research investments. We urge the Congress to pass this legislation, for our health and for our future.”

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