Music is powerful. The right music can make people feel emotion they didn’t even know they were capable of. It is a way of telling a story, expressing thoughts and feelings, making a standpoint, supporting a cause, and highlighting issues. It can be a way of healing, for both the people behind the sounds and their listeners. Producing music starts by simply enjoying your favorite bands and artists, to practicing an instrument and creating the sounds yourself, which is often through software. Music production is a creative hobby that allows you to express yourself, but it also has the potential to be transformed into a career, but how? This guide is here to help.
Set Realistic Goals
Having a clear aim is a huge motivating factor in any industry. If you know what you want to achieve and the level of success you want, you can make better informed choices to get yourself there. It is all well and good dreaming of getting up to the top alongside huge names like Kanye West, Diplo and Dr. Dre, but break this down into more manageable and attainable goals first. These could include finishing a specific number of beats each week, networking and creating new contacts within the industry and developing creative marketing campaigns or social media content each week. Successfully smashing through small goals leads to big dreams being made reality.
Create a Brand
Your brand will define your professional career. You want it to be you, but to be the music producer version of you; you don’t just have to use your name. In fact, you will definitely notice that most music producers do not use their actual names. They create catchy titles or unusual anagrams to be recognized within the industry; a great example is FKJ, which stands for Fresh Kiwi Juice. Creative, flavorful, and memorable. With your brand comes your entire presence, not just the artist. Rope in one of your graphic designer friends to create a personalized logo for your brand and use a consistent style of artwork for all your releases. Take time over creating you brand; while you can make changes and adjustments as you grow and develop, you want to be able to use this as your base for your entire career.
Find Your Sound
Branding gives you that signature look. When someone in the industry sees your logo or style of artwork, they are going to know who the producer is immediately. This is also what you want to achieve with your sound. While you need variation in your beats, you also want to be recognized by your sound. There is a fine line between being repetitive and having a signature sound, so be careful and have a play around. The more you produce, the clearer it will be what your niche sound is as it will be the style that you are drawn towards to the most. Most producers don’t go in search of their sound; it develops naturally over time.
Professional Equipment
You aren’t going to be able to produce slick and well-trimmed beats without quality equipment. When you are first starting out producing music and it is solely a hobby, you can get away with using cheap or second-hand equipment and not having all of it. Usually, you can make do with a few key bits and bobs and still create some decent sounds. But if you want to see your hobby explode with career opportunities, having high quality equipment is absolutely essential. Unfortunately, this can be fairly expensive if you want to buy everything yourself and create a home studio. Luckily, PIRATE have fully equipped recording studios in locations worldwide, including New York. If you are looking for a New York recording studio, look no further. Book your round the clock, self-service music studio that comes complete with free professional equipment; the perfect place for making music in New York if you are kickstarting your production career.
Market Effectively
You have a brand, you’ve found your sound, and you have somewhere professional to get creative and produce quality beats, but if no one knows about you, you are never going to be successful within the industry. Whether you decide to market yourself throughout your entire journey, before you have everything perfected, or you are waiting until the right moment to springboard yourself into the spotlight, you have got to use effective marketing techniques.
Social media is now your best friend. On top of getting a job in the music industry many companies like Apex Metal Signs are hiring music production people to work on their social media videos. There is so much marketing potential across all social media platforms for you to establish your online presence and get your brand into the public eye. Take a look at the social media accounts of some of the top names in music production and use this to develop an idea of how you want to promote and present yourself, then release it into the online world and maintain that presence.
People start producing through their love of music, the way it makes them feel and the creative expression it provides; it may take time and work but turning this passion into a career you love is definitely possible.
