How To Balance Teaching Music With Building A Music Career (Or Touring)
A reader asked me about what it takes to balance teaching music with building a music career and becoming successful as a professional musician:
“How do you do things like touring etc when you are teaching music offline and happen to be 3000 miles or whatever away from your business?”
Great question.
And the answer is: It’s really quite easy.
Here are 6 simple ways to do it off the top of my head:
- Teach guitar in groups (not only will this help you make way more money in far fewer hours, but it also saves you the headache of teaching 50-70 one-on-one makeup lessons every week while on tour... or while working on other aspects of your career in the music business).
- When you tour, teach your local, offline students via Zoom. - (This makes it way easier to have ALL your students in one time zone (vs. having them scattered all around the world). You simply pick ONE time for a makeup class that fits most of your students (and you) and you’re good to go.) Then, when you are back home from the tour (working on other parts of your career in the music business), continue to teach your students in person.
- Schedule your time off from your business during the time you go on tour. That is one of (many) perks of being a business owner (vs. working for someone else).
- Hire another teacher to teach for you. - To be clear: do NOT hire anyone until you have way more students than you can handle on your own (or until you make enough money from your career in the music business that you can easily afford it). But that ‘is’ something you ‘can’ eventually do to give yourself more time.
- Create pre-recorded lessons during your tour and then send them to your students back home. (There is a lot of downtime on tour when you can easily do this.)
- Do some hybrid of ideas 2-5. (Only idea #1 is non-negotiable.)
And beyond it simply being ‘possible’ to balance building a music career with teaching music...
Teaching music makes it far easier to do things most musicians struggle with as they attempt to become professional musicians, such as:
- getting endorsements
- getting gigs
- getting into a band you want to join
- get on a tour
- get a record deal
And on and on.
When you have access to dozens of musician buyers (who know, like, trust and spend money with you)...
... you become compelling as heck to just about everyone in the music business, who start to see you as a real professional musician.
Plus: if your business is doing well...
You’ll be able to negotiate better terms on every contract and record deal, simply because you’re not strapped financially.
So, compared to working just about any day job...
Teaching music wins hands down when it comes to helping you with building a music career.
And if you want to know what else to do besides teaching to become a professional musician, check out this article about becoming successful in the music industry.
Build a highly successful music career by working together with a music career success mentor.
