Cameron and I started MusicianWages.com almost 3 years ago now. Over the years we've worked to make the site grow—adding a forum, curating guest posts, building the jobs board, making friends and writing our own articles.
It's been really gratifying to see our audience grow, especially in the past year. Last month we broke our traffic records again with an incredible 60,000+ visitors to the site. For a niche blog like ours, that focuses on a very unique part of the arts economy, I have to admit that feels like a lot of support. We're really grateful to everyone that has helped us and humbled by the responsibility we've been given by our community of readers.
There's a lot of content on the site now, many useful tools, and a huge list of important readers and contributors. I just wanted to take a minute and highlight some of my favorite things about MusicianWages.com and how being a part of this community can help your career.
Shout out to my peeps in the forum!
It takes awhile to get a forum going on a new website, and it was no different for us. Our forum might still be a little sleepy compared to the forum giants like All About Jazz or Harmony Central, but we have really good group of people that make up our little community.
Big props to Andree-Ann, Brian, and Joe Stone, who have been hanging out and helping people in the forums since the beginning.
Check out the help Andree-Ann gave a fellow Canadian last week when he asked for info about coming to the states. And see the help that Brian and Andree-Ann gave each other when they both moved to LA around the same time. That's some career-changing stuff right there.
And a big thank you to James Higgins, Nick Rosaci and Wedding-Pianist, who have been contributing a ton of great info in the past few months.
Great Articles
We've never been the kind of blog that posts 6 days a week. Our posts are usually of article length, and they try to shine a light on a topic or technique that would be important to our readers. How-to guides, career advice, economic/political discussions—that kind of thing. We've always called them “articles" instead of “posts" and if we can get one article out a week—that's a good week. It takes time to write a good article.
And there are some great articles on this site—nearly 400 now, which is a big number for us. Here are some of my favorites articles on the site:
Registering Copyright for Musicians
Like everything that Cameron Mizell writes, this is a well researched, comprehensive guide to the topic. Written specifically for working & recording musicians, this article is a must read.
The Musician's Guide To the Self-Released Album
One of the cornerstones of the site is Cameron's articles about recording, releasing and selling your own music.This series is a good representation of all the articles here on MusicianWages.com—in that Cam never gives any techniques that he didn't, himself, use. We made a rule early on in building MW that we would only give advice on things that had personally worked for our own careers—and we hold our guest bloggers to the same standard.
Start Your Teaching Business in 30 Days
I'll never get over the time Greg Arney, a guy we'd never heard of, sent us this article out of the blue.What a generous gift of knowledge he presented us with. If you have any interest in starting a studio, read his article. I've read entire books with less information than you'll find in these mere 2,200 words.
Group Blogs
We haven't done one of these in awhile, but group blogging events are some of the things I like to do most.We've had two—the first about the file-sharing dilemma called To a Mother Concerned about File Sharing and another wrapping up the last decade called Dear 1999. The group blogs altogether brought 55 musician bloggers together to discuss the topics—the responses represent a fascinating view into the thoughts of our community.
The Life of an Army Musician
Staff Sargeant Joshua DiStefano, an Army keyboardist stationed in Belgium with the NATO band, has been writing for MusicianWages.com since 2010. We were in negotiations with the U.S. Army for several months before Josh joined us. We were clear with the Army that we wouldn't print any military marketing or press-release-like fluff. We wanted a real, working military musician who would tell us what it was really like to have an Army gig.Josh writes every month and his posts give a unique insite into a gig that, to many of us, has always been very mysterious. He sends his posts directly to us, without any oversight or editing from the Army, and he tells it how it is. A military gig isn't for everyone, of course, but if someone is curious about the life—MusicianWages.com is the place to send them.
How I Became a Broadway Musician
My friend Mikey was on tour with a Broadway show recently, and he heard some of the band members talking about a series of articles by some dude named “Dave Hahn" about how to get a gig on Broadway. I like that story. (Hi guys.)Broadway is a tough gig to get, and how to get the gig has always seemed to me like some kind of closely held secret. But that is old-school thinking. We're all stronger if we keep together, and there's no reason to keep secrets like that in a community. So if you want to know how I got my gig—read this series.
Community Building
I'll be honest with you—when we started MusicianWages.com we wanted to make some money off of it. And we do make a little—you can see the ads on the site. But surely anyone reading this who has tried to include advertising on their music-themed website knows that those things don't bring in much bread.
Soon after we started, though, it became clear that the community of readers and contributors we were building was much more valuable. The ability to attract and bring together like-minded professionals, discuss common challenges and help each other out was the most valuable thing about MW.
For me, the best example of this has been the music director community. It started with a few articles about music directing techniques, grew to a Facebook and Yahoo group.
Soon we started meet-ups in NYC. Then Geraldine Boyer-Cussac, who already wrote her own outstanding career blog, took over the community building. She started a Twitter presence, began interviewing successful music directors and curating a new section of our jobs board just for music director jobs.
This is no small change for the music director community. The music director career has traditionally been a very independent, closed, isolated kind of job—especially outside of big cities. Music directors rarely work together, rarely meet each other and have rarely been able to share gigs and other information amongst each other.
Having the ability to now network with each other, learn from each other and trade work is a big change in the way the music director industry works.
Economic Development
What I'm talking about here is the economic development of a section in the North American arts industry. Creating a central gathering point for freelance professionals to collaborate on the collective advancement of their careers. That is a big deal!
The musician industry is (still) in a major transition right now—transitioning from the recording-based industry of the 20th century to a more complex live + recorded + service-based industry of the 21st century. We all need to re-tool our skills to cope with the rapid changes that technology and culture have thrown our way in the last 15 years. The collective discussion that happens on MusicianWages.com articles, comments and forums is the kind of brainstorming that will help us all emerge from this transitional time as successful innovators.
Our readers, our contributors, our forum members, the jobs we list on the jobs board—we are building what economists call a cluster—that is, a concentration of interconnected businesses in a particular field that help each other increase productivity and compete in their industry. This is the kind of business development that the musician industry needs, and I know that the more involved our community becomes the better off everyone will be.
The Future
In the past few months we've started to organize more meet-ups with different groups of the MW community. We organized a drummer meet-up this past weekend. We had an uptown Manhattan meet-up in April. We're discussing a composer/orchestrator/copyist meet-up later in the summer. We're trying to encourage our LA and Nashville-based readership to organize meet-ups of their own.
Our jobs board, launched several months ago, has begun to slowly attract more employers and job seekers. We have the two largest cruise ship agencies in North America using the jobs board, as well as several music education organizations—and, of course, Geraldine's music director listings.
Just last week Worklight Production posted a listing seeking musicians for next year's national tour of In the Heights. That tour is a major, legit gig, and it's an honor to host it on our jobs board—it shows a lot of trust in our community.
We've found a good direction for MusicianWages.com—community building and career development—and we're going to keep moving in that direction. It's important to us that our readers stay with us—what would a community be without people? So I hope that you'll follow us in any of the dozens of ways that you can follow us—our , email list, Twitter handle, Facebook page—whatever works best for you. Please tell your friends!
It's been really gratifying to see our audience grow, especially in the past year. Last month we broke our traffic records again with an incredible 60,000+ visitors to the site. For a niche blog like ours, that focuses on a very unique part of the arts economy, I have to admit that feels like a lot of support. We're really grateful to everyone that has helped us and humbled by the responsibility we've been given by our community of readers.
There's a lot of content on the site now, many useful tools, and a huge list of important readers and contributors. I just wanted to take a minute and highlight some of my favorite things about MusicianWages.com and how being a part of this community can help your career.
Shout out to my peeps in the forum!
It takes awhile to get a forum going on a new website, and it was no different for us. Our forum might still be a little sleepy compared to the forum giants like All About Jazz or Harmony Central, but we have really good group of people that make up our little community.
Big props to Andree-Ann, Brian, and Joe Stone, who have been hanging out and helping people in the forums since the beginning.
Check out the help Andree-Ann gave a fellow Canadian last week when he asked for info about coming to the states. And see the help that Brian and Andree-Ann gave each other when they both moved to LA around the same time. That's some career-changing stuff right there.
And a big thank you to James Higgins, Nick Rosaci and Wedding-Pianist, who have been contributing a ton of great info in the past few months.
Great Articles
We've never been the kind of blog that posts 6 days a week. Our posts are usually of article length, and they try to shine a light on a topic or technique that would be important to our readers. How-to guides, career advice, economic/political discussions—that kind of thing. We've always called them “articles" instead of “posts" and if we can get one article out a week—that's a good week. It takes time to write a good article.
And there are some great articles on this site—nearly 400 now, which is a big number for us. Here are some of my favorites articles on the site:
Registering Copyright for Musicians
Like everything that Cameron Mizell writes, this is a well researched, comprehensive guide to the topic. Written specifically for working & recording musicians, this article is a must read.
The Musician's Guide To the Self-Released Album
One of the cornerstones of the site is Cameron's articles about recording, releasing and selling your own music.This series is a good representation of all the articles here on MusicianWages.com—in that Cam never gives any techniques that he didn't, himself, use. We made a rule early on in building MW that we would only give advice on things that had personally worked for our own careers—and we hold our guest bloggers to the same standard.
Start Your Teaching Business in 30 Days
I'll never get over the time Greg Arney, a guy we'd never heard of, sent us this article out of the blue.What a generous gift of knowledge he presented us with. If you have any interest in starting a studio, read his article. I've read entire books with less information than you'll find in these mere 2,200 words.
Group Blogs
We haven't done one of these in awhile, but group blogging events are some of the things I like to do most.We've had two—the first about the file-sharing dilemma called To a Mother Concerned about File Sharing and another wrapping up the last decade called Dear 1999. The group blogs altogether brought 55 musician bloggers together to discuss the topics—the responses represent a fascinating view into the thoughts of our community.
The Life of an Army Musician
Staff Sargeant Joshua DiStefano, an Army keyboardist stationed in Belgium with the NATO band, has been writing for MusicianWages.com since 2010. We were in negotiations with the U.S. Army for several months before Josh joined us. We were clear with the Army that we wouldn't print any military marketing or press-release-like fluff. We wanted a real, working military musician who would tell us what it was really like to have an Army gig.Josh writes every month and his posts give a unique insite into a gig that, to many of us, has always been very mysterious. He sends his posts directly to us, without any oversight or editing from the Army, and he tells it how it is. A military gig isn't for everyone, of course, but if someone is curious about the life—MusicianWages.com is the place to send them.
How I Became a Broadway Musician
My friend Mikey was on tour with a Broadway show recently, and he heard some of the band members talking about a series of articles by some dude named “Dave Hahn" about how to get a gig on Broadway. I like that story. (Hi guys.)Broadway is a tough gig to get, and how to get the gig has always seemed to me like some kind of closely held secret. But that is old-school thinking. We're all stronger if we keep together, and there's no reason to keep secrets like that in a community. So if you want to know how I got my gig—read this series.
Community Building
I'll be honest with you—when we started MusicianWages.com we wanted to make some money off of it. And we do make a little—you can see the ads on the site. But surely anyone reading this who has tried to include advertising on their music-themed website knows that those things don't bring in much bread.
Soon after we started, though, it became clear that the community of readers and contributors we were building was much more valuable. The ability to attract and bring together like-minded professionals, discuss common challenges and help each other out was the most valuable thing about MW.
For me, the best example of this has been the music director community. It started with a few articles about music directing techniques, grew to a Facebook and Yahoo group.
Soon we started meet-ups in NYC. Then Geraldine Boyer-Cussac, who already wrote her own outstanding career blog, took over the community building. She started a Twitter presence, began interviewing successful music directors and curating a new section of our jobs board just for music director jobs.
This is no small change for the music director community. The music director career has traditionally been a very independent, closed, isolated kind of job—especially outside of big cities. Music directors rarely work together, rarely meet each other and have rarely been able to share gigs and other information amongst each other.
Having the ability to now network with each other, learn from each other and trade work is a big change in the way the music director industry works.
Economic Development
What I'm talking about here is the economic development of a section in the North American arts industry. Creating a central gathering point for freelance professionals to collaborate on the collective advancement of their careers. That is a big deal!
The musician industry is (still) in a major transition right now—transitioning from the recording-based industry of the 20th century to a more complex live + recorded + service-based industry of the 21st century. We all need to re-tool our skills to cope with the rapid changes that technology and culture have thrown our way in the last 15 years. The collective discussion that happens on MusicianWages.com articles, comments and forums is the kind of brainstorming that will help us all emerge from this transitional time as successful innovators.
Our readers, our contributors, our forum members, the jobs we list on the jobs board—we are building what economists call a cluster—that is, a concentration of interconnected businesses in a particular field that help each other increase productivity and compete in their industry. This is the kind of business development that the musician industry needs, and I know that the more involved our community becomes the better off everyone will be.
The Future
In the past few months we've started to organize more meet-ups with different groups of the MW community. We organized a drummer meet-up this past weekend. We had an uptown Manhattan meet-up in April. We're discussing a composer/orchestrator/copyist meet-up later in the summer. We're trying to encourage our LA and Nashville-based readership to organize meet-ups of their own.
Our jobs board, launched several months ago, has begun to slowly attract more employers and job seekers. We have the two largest cruise ship agencies in North America using the jobs board, as well as several music education organizations—and, of course, Geraldine's music director listings.
Just last week Worklight Production posted a listing seeking musicians for next year's national tour of In the Heights. That tour is a major, legit gig, and it's an honor to host it on our jobs board—it shows a lot of trust in our community.
We've found a good direction for MusicianWages.com—community building and career development—and we're going to keep moving in that direction. It's important to us that our readers stay with us—what would a community be without people? So I hope that you'll follow us in any of the dozens of ways that you can follow us—our , email list, Twitter handle, Facebook page—whatever works best for you. Please tell your friends!
