The 5 Main Steps to Starting Your Music Career

So your goal is to become a DJ, producer, songwriter or musician, but you’re not sure where to start. It can be hard to break into an industry that seems over saturated, and it’s difficult to navigate the ins and outs of the music industry. It takes a lot more than writing a hit song and waiting for the rewards to roll in, and the process can be a little daunting. Read on for the 5 main steps for starting your music career and what you should be doing as a musician to get your music heard.

Step 1: Discover what makes you unique.

Before you get started on your musical journey, take a step back and consider what you have that makes you different from all the other musicians, producers, DJs, and songwriters out there. Think about it in a business sense, what’s your selling point. Is it your origin story, your image, your style of music, or your brand? As Alice Kingsley, a music blogger at Let’s go and learn and Resumention, explains to her readers,

“you need to be able to offer the world something different or do something that no one else is doing so you can stand out from the crowd. It’s not enough to just think you’ll make cool music that people will like – consider what’s special or different about you.”

Step 2: Establish your brand or identity.

Once you’ve figured out what’s unique about you and your individual selling point, you can focus on how you want to brand yourself and what that will look like. You need to figure out what your image or persona will be, whether it’s outgoing, very bubbly and social media oriented and sharing everything with fans, or opinionated and strong willed and a bit nerdy. You can also be introverted and hide a lot of your private life to the public, even going so far as to avoid appearing as yourself in public like Sia. This portion of your brainstorming involves everything from how you appear on stage to how you communicate with fans, and even what you share about yourself on social media, if anything.

Step 3: Build your network.

Success in the music industry relies heavily on networking and knowing the right people. If you’re not connected with the right people, unfortunately know one will know who you are. This is the stage in starting your music career where you go to industry parties, go to seminars and workshops, attend conferences, and meet as many people from the industry as you can. Talk to them and share with them your goals and who you are as an artist, what kind of music you make. In fact, Karl Freele, a career writer at Student writing services and Easy word count, says to

“do this with everyone, because you never know if that connection will one day be able to take you to the next level as a musician. Sometimes, all you need is one great conversation with someone with no expectations and you might be surprised what comes of it.”

Step 4: Continue to evolve as an artist.

You also want to keep your finger on the pulse of the industry and keep growing as a musician, whether you’re finding new software or tools that can help you as a DJ, discovering new talent to collaborate with, and what artists are trending on social media or on the music charts. There is a constant evolution in music genres and people’s tastes and you need to be ready to evolve too or else you risk being left behind. By spending time looking into what’s trending and what’s new in the world of music, you’ll be able to stay relevant.

Step 5: Act Now Starting Your Music Career

The last step is acting now. Instead of just sharing your dream with your friends and sitting around waiting to be discovered, go out and start acting on your dream now. Go to that event you discovered, hit up that open mic night; whatever it is, act now. The only way anything will happen is for you to work hard, and pursue your dream so you never have any regrets. Good luck!