Wrong assumptions I made in my music career
2 min readJan 29, 2023
- I don’t need lots of money to be happy. I only need my music.
- It is difficult to be happy when you’re spending the majority of your time working odd jobs (including teaching) just to pay bills. - I will be able to make a reasonable living with music if I practice 8 hours every day and sacrifice everything else to become the top 5%.
- As it became easier for anyone to make music in their bedroom and release it, the value of music itself became lower and lower. In the meantime, the amount of time and effort you have to put into making youtube videos and increasing your followers/subscribers has become the most important factor in making living with music. - I will get a high degree (eg. Masters and above) to get a stable teaching job at University/College level and will keep creating the music I like as I have seen from my teachers at school.
- Wrong. I have taught at the most prestigious/competitive music schools across the country and even become a “cooperative” professor at one of them. Most of the music schools are on the way to reducing their full-time faculty, not hiring another one. They hire two contract professors when one of the tenured professors retires. You are a part-time instructor forever regardless of how better you are musically (which is hard to prove in the first place) than other full-time faculty who are getting compensated 5 times better than you are unless you are a close relative of someone “higher up”. - I will also put in the time to learn the music business if that is what it takes to survive.
- Not when you are spending 50% of your time working to pay bills and 35% making youtube videos and posting on Instagram. If you’re only spending 10% of your time on actually doing things you set out to do (making music), you have to re-examine your path.
