Your Marketing Mindset and Hustle

Being a good jazz musician is not enough. Your thousands of hours put into developing your craft, honing a unique musical voice, and discovering how to make meaningful music over keys and chords are now table stakes. Growing your audience and income requires more.

The infrastructure you once relied on for career success is disappearing. Taking its place is a world demanding communication skills, technical prowess, and self-promotion chops for which you neither expected nor prepared. I hear, "My phone used to ring a lot." "I was busy making music." "Royalty checks came regularly in my mailbox." "Things were taken care of for me." Those days are over for many, maybe for you. Life now requires a change in mindset—one that asks, "What can I do differently that will attract gigs, teaching opportunities, and fans buying stuff that is authentic for me? Coming up with something you can enjoy doing that will satisfy your income needs and self-esteem requires new thinking.

The Marketing Mindset

You worked hard to master your instrument and build your music career, much harder than the average non-musician could ever fathom. You now need to channel that discipline into a marketing mindset. This mindset empowers you to use rather than fight against new technologies by placing the control of opportunities in your hands instead of depending upon others to hand them to you.

Today we are all publishers. It's now dead simple to communicate through text, audio, and video. Your potential worldwide audience wants to hear from you through social posts, emails, texts, podcasts, streams, and website content. You just have to pick your medium(s) and figure out what you'll provide your audience. For those jazz musicians skilled and fortunate enough to have once heard the phone frequently ring with gigs, opportunities may not be so rich anymore. You may be asking yourself, "What can I do to make up for that?" My suggestion is to embrace the marketing mindset.

Here are a few ideas:

• Pick up the phone and call someone. Think of a friend who you have not worked with in a while. The focus of your call is not to ask for a gig, but rather to genuinely check in with them and see how they are doing and what they are up to. Eventually, your conversation will naturally make its way to talking about gigs and perhaps about future opportunities. Do this with enough old friends and colleagues and you might surprise yourself at the opportunities that pop up.
• Post a short video about a favorite jazz skill or topic. Not a polished or expertly edited extravaganza, just a short video demonstrating one thing from your unique point of view that people care about. I'll bet you could come up with 10 good topics in two minutes. What is your best single piece of advice for jazz players? Start there. Think about ways to play or to look at music or your instrument. Resist overthinking or convincing yourself you can't do it. Record and post one, and then do another and another. Make it a habit.
• Send an email to some people you know. Send them something they might be interested in like a video mentioned above that they could enjoy or share with their students. "I saw this and thought of you." Whatever you do, be authentic and come bearing gifts (value). Send these emails one at a time or subscribe to a service that lets you send many at a time like MailChimp or Constant Contact. There are dozens of these services that are free to begin with a small list. And your way around the platform can be easily learned by someone as smart as you!

I can hear you thinking, "I am not comfortable doing any of this." or "I am too old to start doing these things."

BS! I recently built a website for a 90-year-old client who is now blogging and selling his book directly from his site. Another client in his 70s is using AI to scrape the web for mentions of his recent album that he posts on his site. A chamber orchestra client recorded a video consisting of one single lesson each of them learned recording their latest album. We used the finished combined video as one of several bonuses to increase online sales of their album.

You can learn to do this no matter your age or current tech skills.

The Marketing Hustle

But you've got to work at it. The marketing hustle is about the elbow grease to do this stuff. 400 years ago Isaac Newton told the world that a body at rest will remain at rest unless an outside force acts on it. Translation: nothing's gonna happen until you do something. Newton also discovered that something in motion tends to build momentum. It takes effort and a change in thinking to do good marketing for gigs rather than waiting for the phone to ring.

For some, it feels demeaning to hunt. After all, don't they know who I am? Maybe they do, but there's so much competition now from brilliant players willing to work for less, and don't even get me started on the sampling and synth robots coming for your gigs! But besides that, people just need to know you are around and that there might be something cool you could do together. What I'm suggesting may require some 'retooling' and new ways of thinking from you. But what else are you going to do about evaporating royalties and the fraction of pennies now doled out by the streaming services? What is your alternative in this brave new world of millions of online musicians self-releasing soundtracks and albums, selling high-quality samples, and building engaging social channels of musical instruction?

I'd love to give you my two cents on possible things you can do to elevate your jazz career. Leave a comment. I just might have a crazy idea that could help you.

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