The Null Device Blog

Continuing my random stream of music-industry/marketing blogging…

Yesterday, I was talking to the good Dr. Goedken regarding all the recent blasts of marketing ideas, sales concepts, promotions, etc etc that I’ve been itching to try.

Eric asked me “so, well…what’s the goal?  What are you trying to accomplish?”

I was nonplussed for a moment.  It’s not merely a fair question, it’s a very, very important question.

There are thousands of blogs, services, marketeers and consultants at the ready to help you “succeed” in the music business.  But how do you define success?  What’s a realistic goal?  Hell, what’s an unrealistic goal?   Do you want to be the biggest band in the world?  The biggest band in your town?  Sell a lot of records?  Play a lot of shows?  Make a lot of money?  Be respected as an artist long after your death?

This is the kind of question everyone needs to ask.  I personally often forget to keep this in mind, but it’s dreadfully important.  If you want to be a great touring band, then all the bandcamp.com’s and TuneCores in the world aren’t going to help, so focusing effort there might be a waste of resources.   If you want to sell a kajillion records, then going the indie twitter-famous route isn’t a good one.  If you want worldwide respect, signing on with a major label isn’t necessarily your best option.  And so forth.

Sure, everyone has the ambition to be the greatest band on earth.  That’s a goal one could set, too, but I think it’s probably just a little unrealistic, at least from a planning perspective.  It’s also ridiculously hard to quantify, which is an important facet of planning.  A goal like “I want to sell 3000 records” is a lot more quantifiable, or even “I want to sell more records than that douchebag from Null Device” (not only is that quantifiable, it’s not all that hard).  A goal that makes sense and isn’t so nebulous that you don’t know if you’ve met it or not is a good thing to have.

Of course, you don’t need to treat it all like a business.  This isn’t the IT industry where you need a small army of project managers, gantt charts, and some guy coming in periodically to teach your band members “Agile” this or “Total Quality” that.  Failing to meet a goal doesn’t mean you’re going to get fired (unless it’s a sales goal set by your label).  Success as a musician is by its nature a moving target.  So you didn’t sell 3000 records, you only sold 2000.  That’s still pretty good, and if you hadn’t been doing all the stuff you did  to try to sell those 3000, you probably wouldn’t have been able to sell those 2000 either.  That’s a success in and of itself, driven by a goal-based plan.

For a lot of musicians, “success” may simply be “I wrote a song that I’m really happy with.”   That might be enough. Everything beyond that is just a bonus.