Checkpoint 🛑 Music Creator Roadmap Part 6

Welcome to part 6 of the Music Creator Roadmap breakdown. If you have not read parts 1-5 be sure to check them out here.

Here’s the flow chart again for your reference:

Now that you have chosen your best path, and you understand the function of each industry role, it is important to stop for a:

🛑 MINDSET CHECK 🛑

Wait, why? What does this have to do with the music industry?

Mastering your mindset will make you more successful in all areas of your life, regardless of what industry you are in or what specific goals you choose to pursue.

A simple way to begin understanding the idea of mindset is that your mindset can be determined by the ‘stories you are telling yourself’. These stories are also known as your ‘limiting beliefs’.

We all have limiting beliefs, but most of them are not true. Most of them come from your societal conditioning, childhood trauma, and life experiences. You have created your identity based on your subconscious beliefs about yourself.

The easiest way to analyze your mindset is to look at the stories that are going on in your head and figure out if they are empowering or disempowering.

ALWAYS shift your mindset toward your own empowerment. You are only as powerful as you believe yourself to be.

What do I mean by powerful?

I mean that you have the ability to make things happen.

Do you have a negative association with the word power?

If so, then it will be difficult for you to harness your mindset. Nothing makes you more powerful than your mindset. Power is a good thing when good people have it, and a bad thing when bad people have it. Our world needs more good people who are powerful, so be one of those people!

The limiting belief that most artists have is that someone else holds the key to their success… that they can’t be successful without a manager or agent or label. That is a powerless mindset.

It might be true that getting a key person on your team can drastically improve your chances of success in a specific area. But over the long term, your success is really a function of your ability to set long term strategic goals and pivot along the way as I covered extensively in my post ‘The Number One Reason Most Artists Fail’.

Someone might come along who can help you grow your business, but at the end of the day, it is still your business. And it will only grow and thrive to the level that you are able and willing to make it thrive.

In other words, you are the leader of your life whether you like it or not. Here’s a great quote to drive the point home:

If you are hoping that a management company, label or publisher is going to build your dreams for you, then you are in for a rude awakening. You will be working to help them build their dreams, their companies, their profits.

And as soon as you are no longer profitable, you will be let go.

This is why I always stress the importance for creators to embrace the entrepreneurial mindset. With the right mindset, you can work with other team members as a business partnership where both sides are growing their own businesses while simultaneously helping each other’s businesses grow.

In this business partnership scenario, if it doesn’t work out for some reason (and most business partnerships don’t), the businesses part ways and they are still fully functional on their own.

You MUST develop the mindset of the entrepreneur looking for viable long-term business partnerships (powerful), NOT the artist hoping for a gatekeeper to make them famous or ‘put them on’ (powerless).

So, at this point, you have identified the right path and corresponding business model on the roadmap, you are working to become world-class with the required skills, and you are accumulating the resources you need to succeed.

Even more importantly, you have the right mindset to succeed long term. 

We went through this mindset exercise to make sure that you are thinking about it the industry roles in the right way. 

They are NOT gatekeepers, they are potential business partners.

You must learn to identify win-win opportunities, and always have the mindset that you are helping them win in some way. That’s how successful partnerships work. If you want to build your team, figure out who you can help win, and get used to pitching yourself and the value you are bringing to the table for them.

Get comfortable with having uncomfortable conversations because effective teams are built on trust and communication. You will need to communicate a lot to work well with your team.

Here are five more mindsets and practical tips to help you embrace your role as an entrepreneur, business partner, and team leader:

1. Remember what Andy Warhol said “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” Look for ways that you can flex your creative and artistic muscles when working on your business. It is a creative act.

2. Remind yourself that it is not about you. It is about being of service to the world. As a professional artist, you must believe that your art is truly valuable to the world around you. Once you have reached that level, it is your duty to make sure that your music finds the audience it was meant for. Be of service.

3. When you are starting a business, you must wear a lot of hats. Build a routine that doesn't let you get away with skipping the most important things. If you need a review on the most important gears in your business, read my post ‘Scaling Your Music Money Machine’.

4. It really all comes down to priorities. As you get better at the entrepreneur game, it boils down to prioritizing where your biggest impact lies. You'll have more and more incoming opportunities, ideas, responsibilities, etc… but you don't get any more hours in the day. Always look for the 80/20 rule - the 20% of behaviors that are driving 80% of the results in your life. Make yourself prioritize those things.

5. Focus on becoming a great leader. You don’t need to know how to do everything, but you need to know enough to get clear on what needs to be done. Once you are clear on what needs to be done, start to envision who you would need on your team to help with the things that you are not uniquely qualified to do.

If you are looking for more practical tips for building your team, be sure to read my post ‘From DIY to Dream Team’.

Now that you are going into it with the right mindset, my next post will focus on strategic ways for you to get started building the right team for the path you have chosen.

Keep crushing it Homies!