The Artist Rise #031
Welcome to your weekly resource for all things branding, release strategy, and overall artist development.
Every week I'll help you strengthen your artistry through sustainable strategies that will help you build your career rather than force you into burnout.
Let's get into it.
The "Power"
The true "power" in the music industry as an independent artist is just that:
Being independent.
While without having a team or financial backing like you would at a label, in the current industry landscape I'm convinced that the blessings outweigh the curses.
Let's dive in.
The Curses
The biggest thing standing in the way of independent artists breaking through the noise is their resources.
Time, money, a team, etc.
It's hard to compete with artists backed by full teams and financed projects, let alone ones that get to do music full-time.
If you don't have the funds, it's hard to get projects completed, or you're limited on how often you can get a new song produced or promoted.
If you don't have a team, you have to do everything yourself and wear the 15 different hats that would usually make up an artist's team.
And if you don't have the funds or the team, you may also be in a position where you have to work a regular job to fund your artist project, which takes quite a bit of your time away.
Making it even harder to get all the jobs done that you have to take on yourself.
Sound familiar?
But while all that is stacked against you, there's one major benefit (and a few ways to make it feel a lot more tanigble and simple).
The Blessings
The biggest benefit from being independent is that there's only one person who decides who you are as an artist and what art your create: YOU.
You write the music, you decide what makes the cut, you decide how it turns out, and you choose how it gets shown to the world.
While that's a hefty task when taken on, it's also extremely empowering.
You can thrive in authenticity, direct your energy where you want it to go, and while there are some roadblocks, that doesn't mean it's not tangible.
And here's why.
Required: selective attention
One of the biggest things I see that stands in the way of artists making their growth a reality is the amount of noise that's out there.
Playlisting services, ad pushes, PR promotionalists, you name it.
Everyone is trying to sell you their way of getting the one thing they know every artist wants: growth (specifically in numbers).
And while I think all those avenues are great and it's always great to have options, it also creates this sense of FOMO that makes the artist feel like they have to be doing all of those things to make it work.
Or the narrative turns into a constant bouncing from one method to the next, never landing in one place long enough to stay consistent and reap the results.
And that's just it: all of those options are nothing more than options.
They're all ways to try and achieve the result you're after, the path just looks a little different and the growth sometimes varies in form.
All that to say, you don't need to be everywhere all at once.
Focused efforts get you a lot further than spreading yourself thin.
There are success stories in any and every avenue, but that comes from people putting in the time, learning the systems, and maximizing their efforts to get that.
They're not from casual campaigns from misfocused artists.
And when you pair this with the other piece of the puzzle, the "blessings" side of being independent gets even clearer.
Finding a flow
Every artist is different.
Every artist's schedule is built differently, their creative flow comes in different waves, and their overall interests are in different places.
So there's no one-size-fits-all, and there never will be.
The other piece of this is finding what works for YOU.
Just like different sodas or chips are different people's favorites, your go-to promotional or creative method is the same.
It's about navigating what works best for you in terms of method, but also in terms of time and budget.
For example, you can focus heavy on social and give that your top to bottom effort, but you might not have the capacity to create new content multiple times a day like some of these algorithms seem to ask of you.
Maybe all you have time for is 5x a week.
Well then you take that limit and build your strategy around that.
If you're only posting X times a week, build out your plan in a way that's going to work with that limit and make the most of it.
You don't ever have to do more than what you have the bandwidth for. Honestly that's where the burnout happens and where you start to run into trouble.
The growth ends where the friction begins.
All in all
The bottom line is that while it can feel defeating to lack the resources you feel like you need to make things happen for yourself, there's always another way to look at it.
There will always be another option on the table for you, and hopefully you see that option as something empowering like I do.
Being independent has its hardships, I will not deny that, but there are ways to make progress without signing your rights away.
(Indie labels are another conversation, but the big ones are what we're talking about here)
All you really need to do is determine how you want to approach your artistry, and build a plan that works for you around that.
Don't try to bite off more than you can chew, because that'll only slow you down in the long run.
Find a manageable balance and execute it.
Hopefully this gives you a good place to start, but if you aren't really sure where to start, let's talk. I'll help you figure it out.
Until next time,
-Ava
That's it for this week! Hopefully this helped you take the next step in developing yourself as an artist and a brand. Stay tuned for more next week.
If you have any topics you want to see more of or any questions you'd love for me to answer, simply reply to this email.
Keep learning and growing,
Ava Rose Lynch
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