Competition in Music is Beyond Fierce… and Separating Yourself from the Pack Has Never Been Easier

Accurate thinking doesn’t dictate how most artists go about building their music career. Feelings do.

And this is a tough thing to accept because it’s human nature. It truly is the way most of us do things. We let emotion lead and justify it with logic later. It takes something to get away from that.

We see mass movement. People bum rushing platforms like Clubhouse, and TikTok, and Substack, and NFTs, and other opportunities they think they are the most likely to get the best organic reach or just the best income opportunity.

And I’m human just like you, so I’ve experimented heavily with and explored a variety of platforms myself, including Medium, NewsBreak, Steemit, Odysee, BitClout, and many, many others.

But someone else’s best opportunity isn’t necessarily yours. That’s accurate thinking.

In most cases, what some of these top performers had that you don’t have isn’t just a first mover’s advantage. We tend to think first mover’s advantage is all that counts, which is why we end up hitting more dead ends.

The top performers on these platforms might have skills, networks, or followings they’ve developed elsewhere well in advance of ever trying to build on a specific platform. And they were waiting in the wings for just such an opportunity.

To back this up, go and research some of the people you follow who you think are doing an awesome job. Did they rocket to the top just because, or did they have everything in place before they even got started? Were they intentional with every move?

There’s a reason I asked you to do some homework. Because accurate thinking is testing and tracking the results. Making decisions based on cold, hard facts. Being clear on what works and what doesn’t.

Last year, we published daily on Medium, and most of those posts went up on my blog as well. And I can tell you off the top of my head that we increased the traffic to my blog by exactly 70% after a full year of daily publishing (of course, there were some other interesting results). So, we know that blogging works, even if it’s not the top needle mover in our business. We have data backing this up.

Look closely, and I think you will be surprised to find that the artists you look up to have mathematical minds, or at the very least, they have someone helping them figure out what’s working.

On my podcast, Darryl Hurs of Indie Week shared that he used to manage bands and track things like the audience size at the start of the show, and audience size at the end of the show:

You might say spreadsheets are tedious, or nerdy, or boring, or whatever, but tracking does lead to accurate thinking. And accurate thinking is going to set you apart from the pack, because you’ll be focused on doing things that work rather than things you think you should be doing.

For a proven, step-by-step framework in cracking the code to independent music career success, and additional in-depth insights into making your passion sustainable and profitable, be sure to pick up my best-selling guide, The Music Entrepreneur Code.