Build Up Your Team as a Musician - The Success Guide for Musicians

Build Up Your Team - The Success Guide for Musicians

Every musician who wants to success in the music industry should hold a team with him. Musicians got a lot to do to in the producing and in the marketing stuff, it’s almost impossible to do everything on your own and I’ve met great singers who failed and gave up eventually because they thought they need to do everything on their own, from time to time without noticing it you will find yourself moving forward a few steps in something but falling backwards even more in something else. When you have a team, every member of it can focus on one responsibility and to make sure you only move forwards.

Note: having a team is awesome but it doesn’t mean you don’t need to know how to market your music, how to create good content or to get updated about your insights. You should have an understanding at all of those things and the team should make it easier on you.

So, how do you build a successful team? How many members do you really need? How do you pay them? Where would you find them? All those questions will get answered soon, but first answer my question: what does keep you to work so hard and not giving up? 

Your answer should be a long list, like:

• I love music and this is what I want to do for a living.

• I can’t imagine myself doing something else.

• I’ve been working and learning for so long that I can’t give up now.

• My dream is to stand on a huge stage and play/sing my music.

• I’m good at this, I only need people to hear me.

• It’s important for me to make a sound in this world and deliver my message to a lot of people.

• …

Maybe I just got you on these points and maybe you got another reasons, get yourself a list and make it as long as you can. Why are we doing that you ask? You don’t have a lot of money to spend and you need members that are passionate about your dream almost like you, you want them to invest their time on your dream although you can’t afford paying a lot of money. Wait, we are moving forward too fast, let’s first talk about the members you need:

Marketer – the guy who understands marketing and distribution to outsource like radios stations.

Social media profile manager – the guy who understands how social media platform works, he is responsible for creating and uploading content.

Producer – the guy who produce the songs.

Graphic designer – the guy who designs your photos, banners, cover arts, videos, etc.

Musician – the musician himself, the one who mostly writes the songs and sings them.

DON’T PANIC! you can do the most of these by yourself or by hiring a freelancer, I’m just putting everything on the table.

Let’s start again:

Musician – you are the musician.

Graphic designer – nowadays it’s not hard to learn graphic design and Photoshop, however, not everyone likes it and it takes some experience to be good at this. If it’s not something you would like to do yourself, you can ask a friend who understands graphic design and would like to do this for you or hire a freelancer on freelancers sites, it’s easy to use and mostly cheap.

Producer – These days musicians learn how to produce themselves and record at home, but if you want something that sounds professional you should pay to an expert to produce your music, your music after all is in the middle of the process, you can’t compromise on it, it what the most of your budget should be spent on.

Social media manager – Now we are being serious and I want to tell you that even if you have a lot of understanding about social medias and marketing on it, I don’t recommend you to do it all by yourself, find a friend who understands the way social media platform works or teach him yourself, it’s really hard to do this only by yourself. Hiring someone for social media management is very expensive, however, finding a friend who will help you with that probably won’t cost that much, you can pay him monthly or for his activity on the platforms, set a budget that you feel comfort with and don’t offer numbers that you can’t afford!

Marketer – marketing and distributing to outsources is also something that I don’t recommend doing yourself but you can do it with someone. Plan your advertisements, your marketing strategies and how and who you send your music to promote it. Building audience and analyzing your insights. This is something that takes a lot of experiment but it’s not something you can’t learn yourself the basics of it. Find a friend, again, that will do all the marketing stuff with you, same as the social media manager, set a price that you can afford to yourself. An important thing to mention is that hiring a freelancer in this case is not relevant (at least in my opinion from my experience), hiring a freelancer for marketing is hard to handle, you can never know what he does behind the screen and it may cost a lot. If you are planning to spend a lot of money, pay to an expert who you can meet face to face.

Before getting a member to your team, try to figure out how much free time he has for it and how serious he is. You don’t want someone who’d leave you in the middle of the process, the list you made before was made to find out if the members you want to hire are on the same mindset as you are, don’t take much risks on someone who might leave it.

To sum up, you need at least 2 members plus you, marketer and social media profile manager. Don’t compromise on it.

About me:

My name is Darel Bens, I'm 19 year old, I've been into music since I was 13, I learned music production and the last 3 years I've spent learning marketing. Making marketing strategies is one of my hobbies and my professions.

Plus, I'm a graphic designer which I learned at home and worked with my brother on a huge project of a horror game called "Denial" (our first game), I was the graphic designer and the sound designer of the game.

My dream is to be a successful singer and to expose my messages to those who care.

Write to me: darelbens1@gmail.com

My Instagram: @officialdarelbens