Paying for Your Music Career

A music career might not exactly fall into the "luxury item" category, but when you're trying to get started, it sure seems to cost as much as one. So, what is a poor, struggling musician or budding label owner/manager/agent/PR company/etc to do? There are two things you need to concern yourself with: finding the money and spending it wisely.

In terms of finding the money, unless you have a wealthy benefactor, you have a few options - the more traditional day job (or day job + night job) method of saving up the money you need, relying on credit or seeking investment or grants. Let's take the credit first. Try to avoid it. It seems so easy to just swipe your card - over and over again - but building a music career is a long and risky project. Using credit to fund it amounts to borrowing money at a very high rate of interest for a very high risk gamble. Plus, once the bills start rolling in, you may end up having to sacrifice future investment to cover them - which could stand in the way of promoting and selling what you put on your card in the first place. And that is assuming you can keep up with the bill at all. If you think you resent that big box of unsold merch in your spare room now, just wait until it stops you from getting a loan for a new car or forces you to pay a huge deposit to get a cell phone.

So now, working. Working full time while trying to build another career in your spare time is, well, hard work. If you can find a job doing something music related, that helps, but it isn't always possible. Paying for your music career this way requires lots of sacrifice - working long hours, giving up nights out to work and to save money to invest in your music goals, and don't forget sleep deprivation.  On the upside, you remain in control of your own destiny and debt free. Grants are great if you can them, but we don't all live in a place where arts grants are on the table. The trick with investors is to find someone who can bring lots of valuable knowledge to the table but who doesn't want to get overly involved with your creative vision. That's not as easy as it sounds.

Posted via email from Music Business Information