To start making music, it is enough to have an instrument in your hands, motivation in your head, and love for creativity in your heart. However, finding fans and becoming a famous musician is much more difficult. Due to the huge competition, only a few achieve recognition. How to go through a thorny path from a novice performer to a great star in the music industry?
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How to start making music and become a musician
Music lessons should begin with the choice of genre and musical instrument. The guitar, bass guitar, block flute are perfect for rock performance. Pop lovers can practice on the piano, synthesizer, melody. And bowed string instruments (violin, cello, viola) will allow you to perform classical music.
Attention! A novice musician will be able to quickly master the guitar, harmonica and recorder.
Should an aspiring performer receive a musical education?
To become a musician, it is not necessary to study at a music school from an early age. If you study the biographies of great and simply famous musicians, you can find many examples of self-taught. So, guitarists Jimi Hendrix, Slash, Eric Coepton, Yngwie Malmsteen came to world success. They learned music by trial and error.
However, with a good teacher, becoming a musician is much easier. The mentor will teach musical notation, as well as the basics of playing the chosen instrument: the correct placement of hands, the simplest chords and rhythms. In addition, regular classes will not let the motivation fade away.
If you want to become a musician quickly, you can try one of the following learning formats.
Do not forget about self-education. Books, articles and Youtube channels will help you become a musician. For example, a guitarist will benefit from Aturn3d and Chris Zoupa, while piano players will benefit from Piano Tutorial Easy.
- Music school for adults. Depending on the chosen profile, training in it lasts from 6 months to 1.5–2 years. Many schools allow you to attend the first lesson for free.
- Private teacher. Service announcements are posted on tutoring websites such as repetitor.ru, repetitors.info, and boards like Avito. And you can start doing it even with a modest budget. One lesson with a private teacher costs from 300-400 rubles.
How often do you have music lessons?
Most of the great musicians once combined their favorite work with work for hire. A beginner will most likely have to go the same way. In order not to lose motivation, you need to practice music at least 1-2 hours a day. The more you practice, the better your technique will become.Attention! In order not to face emotional burnout, it is better to take a break from music 1 day a week.
How to Become a Great Musician or Create a Famous Band
Suppose you have already learned how to compose music and play your favorite instrument with confidence. It remains to become famous. However, to achieve this goal, you will have to try hard.
Popular platforms to start a music career
Today, an aspiring musician can become famous if he promotes his work on the Internet. The following platforms will help you reach listeners.
- Popular social networks : Vkontakte, Facebook, Instagram, Odnoklassniki, Youtube. Based on them, you can create a group (channel, blog), where you will upload the best tracks, photos and videos of live performances, news about upcoming events. The main disadvantage of social networks is limited monetization opportunities.
- Music social networks : SoundCloud, Bandsintown, Music Mama, Bandcamp. They were created specifically so that a novice musician could upload their work for free, create albums, and users could listen to music and share it with friends. The disadvantages of the above social networks include restrictions on the format of audio files and strict moderation.
- Digital storefronts : Google Play, iTunes, Guvera, Yandex.Music. They have a huge audience of listeners, so they allow the musician to quickly become famous. However, to add music to such platforms, you need to contact the distribution company and pay a commission.
Tracks can also be posted for free on blogging platforms, in particular, Mecenate . It has a friendly interface and good opportunities for monetization. Artificial intelligence analyzes the downloaded content and finds listeners who are most likely to be interested in the musician's work. On our platform, you can collect donations from fans, sell licenses to commercially use your music, and earn money in other ways.
Attention! On these platforms, not only musicians, but also other creative personalities can post their creations. About where it is most profitable to publish paintings for beginners and advanced artists.
How to create a group
Making music in a team is more interesting and easier in terms of promotion. Group members inspire each other to creativity and competently distribute responsibilities among themselves.
An aspiring musician can find colleagues in the following ways:
- among friends and acquaintances who are fond of music;
- in social networks and forums;
- place ads on Avito and other online boards.
It is not necessary to rent expensive premises for joint rehearsals. At first, a garage or a private apartment with good sound insulation will suffice.
Attention! If you are going to get into electronic music, you can interact with the band members remotely via instant messengers. And upload audio files and lyrics to Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage.
Does a musician need a big studio, producer and label
If you want to record a band's performance with vocals and several instruments, then you can't do without a professional studio. In large cities, her services cost from 1000 rubles per hour. In other cases, you can assemble or purchase a ready-made home recording studio.
The minimum set includes the following equipment:
- a computer;
- digital audio workstation with audio interface;
- USB microphone;
- headphones;
- 2 studio monitors (speakers).
Today, you don't have to work with a producer or a big label to be great. However, working with professionals speeds up the promotion process. They define the genre of the musician and its presentation in general, promote it on social networks and TikTok, achieve placement of music on platforms with a high entry threshold, sponsor album recordings.
Attention! Even a novice musician can find a producer on social networks or on a forum. And labels, as a rule, are engaged in cooperation with more experienced and well-known performers.
How famous and ordinary musicians make a living
Great musicians earn several thousand dollars as fees for participating in concerts, festivals, and tours. In addition, they receive passive income from the sale of CDs and licenses to use their music for commercial purposes.
Attention! Independent organization of a concert requires a lot of expenses: for renting a venue, installing lighting equipment, travel and hotel accommodation, and advertising. Therefore, such activities often turn out to be unprofitable even for great and famous musicians.
And what should a musician who has not yet become great start doing? Fortunately, there are at least 10 ways to monetize your creativity.
- Participate in large commercial projects. Sometimes well-known collectives (groups, orchestras) temporarily hire assistants. There is always a high demand for drummers, jazz performers, backing vocalists.
- Become a street musician . And as an alternative - to engage in performances in trains. If you know how to “ignite” the hearts of listeners, then you can earn several tens of dollars a day.
- Play at corporate parties, weddings and anniversaries . Here, first of all, the performing skills of musicians are in demand, and not originality. To make a living this way, you have to be willing to play covers of popular songs.
- Perform at festivals and other public events . To get into the entertainment program, you need to send an application with audio recordings to the organizer and win the tender.
- Conduct live broadcasts of speeches - streams . For this, the Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki, Youtube, Twich platforms are suitable. Streamers earn money by collecting donations, paid subscriptions and showing ads.
- Become a freelancer . A musician can, at the request of a client, come up with lyrics or music, for example, for use in advertising. Freelance exchanges and creative platforms will help you find such a job: Creative Downloads, Instagram, Patron.
- Sell audio . Or rather, non-exclusive licenses for their commercial use. To do this, you need to upload audio files to stocks: Audiojungle, Istockphoto, Pond5. For each download you will be paid about 2-10$.
- Get paid for listening to music by premium subscribers . This opportunity is provided by digital storefronts: Apple Music, Google Play Music, Spotify, Bandcamp and others.
- Become a resident in a restaurant, bar or club . There musicians are paid for live performances. As a rule, you have to perform covers of popular songs. The salary is small, but the work is stable.
- Sell merch . The method consists in the sale of goods with the symbols of a musician or group: T-shirts, souvenirs, vinyl records. You can sell merch on social networks, intermediary stores, on the Patron platform or on your own website.
Freelancing, selling works on stocks, streams are also relevant for representatives of other creative professions. By the way, if you know how to paint or create designs, our article "How to make money as an artist" will be useful to you .
Thus, music provides a huge scope for the creative self-expression of a person, new acquaintances and earnings. However, to become famous and even more so great, one talent is not enough. You need to have inexhaustible diligence, perseverance, an entrepreneurial streak and a reserve of patience for many years.
