Do you fancy your chances as a professional musician? Then you need to know what it takes to make music on a full time basis. No longer is it just a passion project or a hobby. Now it’s a career you need to put your heart and soul into, and that’s not easy!
So let’s take the idea of making music full time and think about how viable it truly is. Here are the things to think over before you pick up your musical talent and rely it on for income.
Do You Have a Signature Sound?
You won’t necessarily need one; when big name producer Clive Davis discovered and signed Whitney Houston, he helped her develop her sound from that point onwards. And every artist that’s ever been has experimented with their sound here and there!
But it’s better to have a style you know fits you, and lets you express yourself through your music in the most natural way.
Plus, when you already have a signature sound, you’re going to have a much bigger bank of tracks to show off when you meet producers, directors, and other musicians.
Simply put, you’ll feel more confident in your musical abilities, and that’s another thing to think about when you want to go full time!
How Much Time Do You Have?
If you’re going to be making music full time, then you need to have plenty of time to actually make it!
Music isn’t the kind of thing to rush. You need to put time into building your track, layering in vocals, and making sure you get the final result that sounds like the dream in the back of your head.
How will you need to change your schedule to fit in these kinds of working hours? You could need more than 40 spare per week, and that’s quite a difficult chunk of time to come up with!
How Confident Do You Feel in Your Music?
We touched on confidence in our first point, and it’s worth reiterating here. Because even if you have the time and the passion for being a career musician, there’s one more question to contemplate:
Are you ready to start putting music out there?
It’s not easy to share art like this with the world. Sometimes the songs you make were originally intended to be for your ears only. But now you’re opening up and letting potentially hundreds of thousands of people share the sound you’ve put together.
If that sounds pretty intimidating to you right now, you wouldn’t be the first person to feel like it!
And many people put off sharing their music because they have no confidence in it. But the only way to truly build that confidence is to put it out anyway.
So, could you start making music full time? If you’ve got the time, the patience, the sound, and the confidence, you could be well on your way to a music career in the near future.