The Best Music Career Backup Plan For Leaving Your Day Job
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Do you want to break into the music industry and become a professional musician, but don’t know where and how to start in order to grow a career in the music business?
Do you really want a music career, but your fear of failure in the music industry is holding you back?
Are you unsure about what to do if your music business plan doesn’t work?
Most aspiring musicians receive a lot of advice from friends and family about building a music career backup plan.
Let's discuss the idea of having a music career backup plan in-depth.
Many people give advice about “the need to have a music career backup plan in case it doesn’t work out”.
Typically, musicians are encouraged to go to school and get a degree in something they can easily find a job in.
Then – you build a music career on the side, in your “free time”.
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By submitting your info, you agree to send it to Tom Hess Music Corporation who will process and use it according to their privacy policy.
When your career in the music business begins to develop...
... you are probably advised to work less in your day job and focus more on the music business until you can leave the day job and make a music career work for you.
This music industry advice sounds good in theory...
...but in reality fails to work as intended in almost every case.
Why?
Usually the job that most musicians get to support themselves as they try to break into the music industry, has nothing to do with music in general or a career in the music business specifically.
As a result, most end up in a very frustrating situation that makes leaving your day job (and achieve lasting success as a professional musician) virtually impossible.
5 reasons why this kind of “music career backup plan” is usually doomed to fail
Before I go into detail about some reasons why this kind of “music career backup plan” is usually not working as intended...
I want you to test yourself and the effectiveness of your “break into the music industry” strategy.
It will really help you to take this test BEFORE reading the rest of this music industry article, so that you are not biased in your answers.
Do you think that a music career backup plan will work and will lead you to a rewarding and stable long term music career?
Take this music business survey to find out before reading further.
Why Building A Music Career Backup Plan Fails - Reason #1: Not having an effective exit strategy while pursuing your career in the music business.
The idea of slowly phasing out your day job while trying to break into the music industry is good, but in order to work...
... it needs to be done in the right way.
Most musicians have nothing planned or prepared that will allow them to gradually decrease the time spent at their day job and focus more on their career in the music business.
When choosing a “music career backup plan”, musicians typically find a job that is the most “safe and secure” and the one that pays the most money.
However...
... most people fail to plan the “exit strategy” and think ahead to the time when their music career situation will make leaving your day job a real possibility.
When they finally reach that point...
...they realize that leaving their day job is very hard as they are unable to “gradually” phase it out to pursue a life in the music industry.
Thus, they are faced with the choice of either quitting the job entirely, or sticking to it until retirement (with no chance for a career in the music business).
The best exit plan is to have a job that will allow you to gradually decrease the number of hours you spend on it: from 40 hours per week to 30, from 30 hours to 20, from 20 to 10, until eventually you reach the goal of leaving your day job altogether!
That means you need to be careful to select an occupation that allows a lot of flexibility in work schedule.
This way, you can make a “gradual” transition into a music career.
Unfortunately, most traditional occupations do not allow this flexibility.
Remember, your boss at work will not all of a sudden allow you to “work 3-4 days per week instead of 5”, simply because you want to work on your new music business project an extra few days per week.
It is possible to begin by working in a non-music industry related job at first...
... BUT do not select “any” job offer without considering the exit strategy (how you plan on leaving your day job) first.
An ideal job for building a music career is teaching guitar.
Not only can you make very good money doing it, but you are in complete control over how many hours you choose to work.
Not everyone may desire to teach full time for the rest of their life (and this is fine).
But as long as you are going to be working anyway, why not do something that is already related to what you enjoy, help students reach their goals faster and make money in the process?
In addition, teaching is already a music career related activity that is probably much more fun to do than sitting in an office!
Another possibility (that makes leaving your day job easy) is to work as an independent contractor in sales or marketing or doing consulting work for hire.
Always check about the flexibility of work schedule before accepting a job offer.
Remember that in most industries, the 40-60 hour work week is the norm, with little or no possibility for part time employment.
This makes it impossible to make a smooth transition to a full time music career. (Keep that in mind as you think about leaving your day job down the road.)
Why Building A Music Career Backup Plan Fails - Reason #2: There is too much risk involved.
Slowly leaving your day job seems to be a very ‘safe and secure’ approach for building a career in the music business,
...but it can actually backfire and “trap” you by its sense of security.
If you are making $60,000 per year at your day job, and have managed (through working nights and weekends) to build up a music career income to $25,000 per year.
Then, all together, you have a total income of $85,000 for the year.
Here is where the reality catches up to you (and gets in the way of your plans to build a career in the music business).
Should you decide to go full time with a music career, leaving your day job will be a necessary step in that process.
But until you can recover and build a music career to higher and higher levels....
....you will be making $60,000 less per year than before!
This kind of risk is uncomfortable to think about for most people (especially those who get married, have kids and/or have significant expenses), and keeps them trapped at their day jobs their whole lives.
Why Building A Music Career Backup Plan Fails - Reason #3: You are often not able to take advantage of music career opportunities.
Imagine that put extraordinary effort on nights and weekends into recording a great sounding CD with your band,
... spend a lot of time promoting it in hopes of getting signed by a record company and go on tour...
... and then you really get the opportunity to do a 10 week tour in another country in the world.
It is VERY probable that you would NOT get paid a lot of money while on a first tour, but as a whole, this kind of tour is exactly the kind of breakthrough you have been searching for.
What are you going to do?
Are you going to turn down a huge opportunity to advance with a music career?
Or are you going to agree to take a huge cut in pay by quitting your day job to do the tour?
I think you can agree that neither of these options sounds entirely appealing.
Wouldn’t it be great to do the tour and not worry about how you are going to feed yourself (and your family) while you are gone?
Why Building A Music Career Backup Plan Fails - Reason #4: There is not much quality time and energy to get anything done.
This may seem like a more subtle issue, but it is actually very important.
If your most productive hours in the day are spent on the least productive activities, then reaching your goals will take MUCH longer than it needs to.
Think about it:
If you wake up at 6:00, get to work by 8:00 or 9:00 and spend 8-10 hours there, and another 1-2 hours commuting back home, by the time you are ready to begin working on your music career, you are already tired!
This is also not taking into account the time taken up by other things in life that you have to tend to.
It will take a truly extraordinary effort to get anything worthwhile accomplished during the time on nights and weekends, to build multiple streams of music related income that will enable you to quit any job not related to building a music career without putting yourself in financial struggle.
Why Building A Music Career Backup Plan Fails - Reason #5: There are too many doubters & naysayers.
Many of the people (whom you’ll meet while pursuing your music career backup plan) will likely not be success-minded entrepreneurs.
Thus, when they see (or hear about) your plans to become a successful professional musician in the music industry, many will likely try to discourage you.
Some of these people mean well and have good intentions.
They may genuinely be happy to see you build a successful career in the music industry... and they simply don’t want to see you get hurt.
Others are much more sinister. They are crazy, sick people who live miserable lives.
These haters DO have bad intentions and would rather see you give up or fail than build a career in music.
The people in this group may be your co-workers, friends and even family.
They’ll laugh at you, try to make fun of you, discourage you, and tell you that you have no chance to build a career in music.
Here is the secret to dealing with this last group of haters as you march on to succeed in the music business:
Often times, everything these haters tell you about getting into the music business is what they know - deep down - to be true about themselves.
They may often project their lack of ambition, laziness and bitterness over their failures in life on you.
They want you to fail in building a career in music to feel better about themselves.
The good news is...
...once you realize that most of these music industry haters are simply projecting their failures onto you, it become easy to ignore them and march ahead to get into the music business.
Use the music industry haters’ hatred, doubts and skepticism to fuel your drive to build your career in music.
Now that you see why a music career backup plan like this isn’t as good as it seems to be, you may ask yourself what you should do instead.
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Well, having no music career backup plan is definitely NOT the solution.
In order to build a music career, you need to be prepared and you cannot simply hope that “things will work out”.
The underlying problem with the conventional music career backup plan I described is that it originates from thinking about how not “to lose”.
This type of thinking lacks ambition and it forces you to stick to that which is “safe and secure”.
As a result...
... you typically end up with what you wish for: a familiar, average, safe and secure life.
However, this attitude rarely leads to significant achievements in your music career.
What the most successful musicians do is arrange a music career backup plan around their MUSIC CAREER GOALS (Plan A).
This requires real ambition and courage, and it is based on thinking about how “to win”.
This also requires you to think how you can integrate Plan B with your present and future life as a professional musician.
There are many possibilities for truly effective “back up” (which are more like “support”) plans for a music career.
In many cases...
... they involve designing systems and multiple income streams coming from music career sources that will support them continuously.
It’s important to put a lot of thought into which kinds of “music career backup plans” and approaches are best suited to your specific goals.
To find the right plan for you, there are two important things you need to do:
First, study how the music business works (this is key!).
Understanding it will greatly help you with designing the most effective strategy for reaching your goals in the fastest period of time.
Building a successful, long term music career takes a lot of focused effort and dedication.
The more you understand about this business, the easier it will be to design the kind of music career backup plan that will help you reach your goals instead of trapping you.
Second, be careful about taking advice from people who may have great intentions, but lack knowledge and experience about how to build a music career or music career backup plan.
If you pay attention, you will notice that advice from these people has a common theme, which is “here is what you must do in order not to lose”.
Very rarely do you get advice about how “to win”!
To make matters worse...
...although your friends and family may have the best intentions in their heart, they aren’t qualified to give advice about growing a music career.
It will be similar to you asking your brother who is a plumber (for example) about how to cure a disease, or asking your uncle who is a carpenter (for example) about how to solve a legal problem.
If you truly want advice that works and if you want to learn the strategies of how to reach all of your music career goals, you need to find a mentor who you can rely on for effective advice.
This means learning from someone who has already done what you want to do in your music career and trained others to do the same.
The most effective, predictable and safe strategies to “phasing in” a music career
Now that you know about the problems with the conventional approaches to music career backup plans, I will show you the characteristics of a good music career backup plan.
Music Career Backup Plan Characteristic #1. Flexibility
Your music career backup plan must be flexible.
This can mean many things.
One of them is having the ability to “gradually” decrease the amount of time you spend working on Plan B and increase the time you invest into Plan A!
This can also mean the ability to integrate (leverage) the skills acquired (or the results earned) from Plan B into Plan A.
Music Career Backup Plan Characteristic #2. Passivity
Your music career backup plan should be mostly passive: it will really help if your Plan B mostly consists of passive income streams that you have created by only investing the work once!
It should be pretty obvious to see how this will free up a lot of time to dedicate to your Plan A! (a music career)
Music Career Backup Plan Characteristic #3. Diversity
The music career backup plan should be diversified: do not become so dependent on only one stream of income!
Many people argue that a music career is not secure, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Which do you think is more likely, that a company lays off an employee in the blink of an eye (cutting off his one and only source of income), or that a music teacher with 40 students (who essentially has at least 40 “diversified” income streams) will suddenly lose all of his clients overnight?
By making your Plan B options diversified, you also build your own financial security, without depending on anyone else.
I don’t know about you, but I feel much safer knowing that I am in control of my own future, rather than putting my faith into someone else’s idea of security.
Music Career Backup Plan Characteristic #4. Congruency and Relevance
This means that Plan B needs to make your primary goal (music career) MORE likely to occur!
This also means (ideally), that the time you invest into developing skills and experience in Plan B can be easily used to enhance Plan A.
For example, if you are known as an excellent guitar teacher, you can easily integrate teaching clinics and workshops with performances of your music, selling your future music CDs, other merchandise etc...
I hope that you can see now how this strategy is different (and superior) to the conventional wisdom of getting a day job, and then doing your best on evenings and weekends to launch a music career from scratch.
As you design your own successful music career backup plan, compare the steps you are taking against the criteria above and modify your strategy if necessary.
This will help save you from the frustration felt by most of the ‘wannabe’ musicians, who realize (much too late) that their strategy leaves them no way to manifest their music career dreams.
If you have missed the survey mentioned at the beginning of this article, check it out here.
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