The ten habits of unsuccessful musicians
I used to spend a lot of my working life in airports. There’s a set of books that seem to only exist in airports; punted at bored business travellers:
40 Million bored travellers believed that for £7.99 you could be let into secret about how to become the next Wolf of Wall Street which had thus far escaped them. The original analogue clickbait tapping into the same human traits that make guitarists covet their next overdrive pedal. Seven is a strange number, I’d like to think it was originally 10 but he missed a deadline cos he wasn’t effective enough.
I don’t consider myself to be highly effective or even a huge success, but I float about this interesting rung on the music industry ladder where I’m surrounded by people trying to make the jump from amateur to semi-pro, and eventually you start to recognise what works and what doesn’t.
I don’t have the testicular fortitude to tell people that if they only knew this one secret they could have the carrot that’s dangling in front of them. Instead after decades of watching people make the same mistakes, I bring you “Ten Habits of Unsuccessful Musicians”. Or to give it less offensive(and less catchy) title - Neil’s lifetime of study of the personality traits that choose to make music. None of these are based on one person or band. I’ve seen them all happen so many times that they are definitely “things”.
“Excuse me, but didn't we all get into this to avoid responsibility?”
Sadly not I’m afraid.
Overestimating short term, underestimating long term
In an ideal musical world we would all live in a hedonistic moment of nihilism and everything would be wonderful. Fuck the hangover. Optimism can pull you through. The reality and current climate is much different. It’s a competitive world out there and the chances are you’re going to need some planning to get anywhere.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. You plan to record your latest banger in January. Life gets in the way and January turns into March. The video isn’t ready till June, so you decide to self-record some throwaway tracks and call it an album and release it in July so that another year doesn’t pass you by before you get asked onto a celebrity reality show. In reality, you’ve turned your first single of the year into a half hearted autumn album.
Extrapolate this and you’ll discover why it’s so easy to find people in the music scene in their late thirties complaining that no one listens to decent music these days and that’s why they’ve never finished a song.
In short - don’t bite off more than you can chew. It’s not the easiest thing in the world, but try and make a plan to do things in a periodic and manageable manner. It’s not particularly rock and roll, but you can start here.
Fake it till you make it
I hear this adage all the time. It’s usually in response to someone making a spurious claim about their music career. It is in my experience completely untrue.
Between Donald Trump, Boris and people living life for their instagram persona, we now live in the world of fake news and lies. Don’t be taken in. Music career success is a marathon not a sprint. You might be able to win a few local races with a few lies, but the fakers pretty quickly get found out.
There are bands that I know who ten years ago were dressing up their CV’s and submitting requests for opportunities with ridiculously spurious claims. To this day, I just think of them as spam bands. These tactics work for some low level moments in the spotlight, but the people with actual power/interest in pushing you far enough to do anything meaningful are rarely fooled.
Particular favourites involve:
Claiming you sold out a big massive well known venue, when you played a support slot in a non-sold out date in the venue’s secondary room
Giving your friends and family free tickets to the local ‘Pay to play’ venue, and then claiming you sold it out. You’ve literally just paid one of the biggest capitalists in your local scene money to sell your friends and family over priced beer. It’s not taken you any further and it’s a terrible investment.
Claiming you were showcased at a festival when all you did was attend the festival. When you are picked for lucrative opportunities through your own hard work, this one really annoys you.
Claiming your project received arts funding, when you got a grant that everyone was eligible for - watch this one slide into the band CV’s post-pandemic
In all these cases, the bands and artists sank without trace.
It makes far more sense to be honest. You might be a wee bit embarrassed at your single’s write up in the local paper, but you should sing it’s praises and target getting into a national paper for the next single. Slow, constant, gradual improvement and momentum. This is a far more interesting to the people that matter than the possibility that you may have flooked a good opportunity early in your career.
A second cheek to the same bum in this is the retrospective dressing up of your musical history. This becomes a great observers sport as you get older. The next big thing local band will be down in London doing something super cool with BBC 6 Music or the like and the jealous bedroom musicians will look on and say “we all get our wee spot in the limelight. I remember when I did stuff like that”. This is presumably in reference to their headline spot at the local slug and lettuce that was later reviewed in the Auchtermuchty herald. Music’s just not as good these days :)
Feeling threatened by others
This one is a biggie. The amateur music industry is filled with musicians who want everyone to listen to them but they don’t want to listen to anyone else. They attend no local gigs, but expect their gigs to be packed out. Music can’t exist in a vacuum it needs a music economy and networking.
No one is going to attend your gigs if you haven’t networked and found your place in the local music economy. This would seem to be an incredibly obvious point, but despite this it continues to be a source of frustration for ‘bedroom’ musicians throughout the land who expect that someone is listening to their latest banger outside their bedroom window with the keys to the LA mansion in their hand.
Many take it one step further and feel incredibly threatened by anyone doing anything at all in their local music scene. The nature of social media is such that you tend to only see people’s successes and not their hard work. I’ve known hundreds of talented musicians who do nothing with their talent while lambasting anyone who does do anything.
“I’m better than that!!. How dare they write a song, find a band, rehearse with said band, play gigs, earn money, record the song and then release the song when it should be clear to anyone with two ears that I’m a better singer?? They just have to come to my local pub and hear me sing my Oasis covers!!”
These musicians don’t realise that the boring hard work is the talent. It’s incredibly hard to get all your ducks in a row and make music happen. Especially with feelings of self doubt and having to juggle real life, so anyone that does it should be congratulated. Way too many people who haven’t managed that journey or who have released one song and then lost interest when it didn’t result in instant fame are way too quick to feel threatened by others.
The ongoing quest of networking and getting yourself out there is a sport in itself. Seeing local bands - good or bad - should spur you on. Steal Borrow what they do well and add improvements on the things they do badly. If you are blown away by how good someone else is who is doing your job - ask to work with them.
“Hey. You fancy writing a song together some time?”
“I’ve this song that would work as a duet”
“Your band is fantastic. We’re putting on this gig and would love to have you play it”
What have you got to lose? Sadly the low hanging fruit is to poo poo and belittle what you can’t do yourself, while your debut single sits lonely on it’s 2008 shelf. The solution is network, network, network. Your(intended) job requires that you go to see some local bands and schmooze a little. It’s hardly a shift down the mines. Eventually you understand the structure of what’s available around you and you get to ride some coat tails to give you a bit more confidence to take your creativity further than your bedroom.
Taking this from a different perspective, I could have called this section - ‘compete against yourself, not others’
It’s very easy to take life lessons from mountain climbing and jogging. I love running. I’m terrible at it. The world record for 5km is 12 minutes and change(Joshua Cheptegei). I will never in any circumstances come close to this. I had to google it. It has no relevance to my life at all. What is relevant is how fast I can do 5km. I improve in small increments and the gamification of the process makes me feel good.
You should try and extend this mindset to your creativity. It doesn’t matter a jot what everyone else is doing. It matters what you are doing and that you feel good about it though personal improvement.
To extend the metaphor, I used to know a musician. He was better at running than me, so he would periodically join me on a run to make sure he was still faster than me. Once he’d made sure he was, he didn't need to run for a wee while. His creativity would follow the same trajectory. Dip the toe in to make sure he could still do it and then not bother for another 3 months. I shave 15 seconds off my 5km and it gives me a spring in my step. My mind is in a good place, I go and do some creative work - ad infinitum. Whether a friend or another musician is faster than me has as much relevance as Joshua Cheptegei’s 5km time.
The pandemic threw a curveball into this. With so few other distractions there was an 8 month period where I was running at least 10km every second day. While I didn’t manage a 5km in even twice the time that Joshua Cheptegei could, I got fitter and thinner. Coincidentally my creativity and work output soared. Who says drink and drugs are the route to music success :)
Said musician - however - his world collapsed. Not just me, but half the internet was now publishing run times on Facebook. Turns out people who hadn’t been running before were faster than him. Various conspiracy theories were posited. They were using different apps. They were doing their whole run down hill. They were cheating. Anything was possible other than the idea that amateur footballers half his age were better at running than him despite him doing it at least once every 3 months. He stopped bothering. Running and Music.
So to reiterate…. I run a 5km in 33 mins after being closer to 35 mins for 3 months and it spurs me on and puts my head in a good place. He knows as long as he is under 33 mins he doesn't need to bother. Once I was faster than him… he stopped bothering at all….
Worry about what’s in front of you, not whats behind you.
Believing your own Hype
This has happened to me more than once. Up and coming bands come to me and ask me what to put in the press blurb of their EPK(Electronic press kit). They see me as some sort of Gandalf figure who imparts sage wisdom. As this blog will attest, I’m fond of a waffle of bullshitty words, so I give the band a paragraph to describe their music in order that they don’t drown in the sea of other bands who sound the same as them. Roll forward a few months. I’m no longer seen as Gandalf, but more of a Samwise Gamgee figure and the band point out to me what the Glasgow Herald have written about them. It’s the press blurb I gave them.
While this may seem to be my pitch to be writing music reviews for the Glasgow Herald, it isn’t. It’s an example of how quickly bands and artists start to believe in their persona more than their personality, and it’s all too common. In this ephemeral social media driven world there’s this ongoing obsession with trying to elevate how you look like you’re doing versus how you are doing. The problem with music is that bands start to believe their own made up story.
It’s a tale as old as time - or at least as old as the music industry. If you surround yourself by sycophants who tell you that you’re amazing, then eventually you start to believe it to be true. The problem in the current environment is that when the Beatles were developing a big ego cos there was folk on national television saying they were good - they’d done enough legwork to get good. Now you’re maw’s hairdresser and her pal give you plaudits on social media and before long it’s become an echo chamber of people reiterating the myth that you are at the top of your game and should continue your champagne lifestyle on your lemonade wages. Add drugs to this equation and its a recipe for wasted talent.
“all the weekend rockstars are in the toilets practicing their lines”
The problem is that it completely stifles creativity. The local venues and music bars become a wash of burned out musicians who have seen more profile pics than guitar picks - their careers killed before they started by one early success that went to their head. They’ve long since abandoned their truth talking friends of old and are surrounded by a a revolving door of of new hangers on who are too young to know that the boasts of stardom and heady heights were never reached in the first place cos they fell out with the sound engineer during the recording of their second single.
Following the cool
The music industry is a strange beast. You fall in love with the medium, and then you don’t believe that anyone can have such a love for the same thing. You discover that other people love it, so you then constantly redefine your love to try and make it cooler and specialer than everyone else’s just in case anyone questions it.
Once you are actually making music you have to continue this subterfuge in case no one notices that your love for music and your musical skills aren’t unique, so you have to “follow the cool”. We all do it - we all loved Justin Bieber’s early stuff before he went too mainstream etc.
It becomes a problem when it turns into this endless spiral to try and escape the simplicity of what you do and make it look more complicated. Success and the mainstream is shunned. It’s the best excuse in the world for not doing anything and not succeeding in anything. Activity only happens on a rare occasion when your three favourite sources of what is cool agree on something. The problem is that eventually the next generation come along and all the “cool currency” you’ve built up becomes worthless.
Frankly life is too short. Enjoy things. Create. Tell people about it. Your own fear that it’s not going to stand up to the standards of your primary school friend who you’ve not seen or spoken to in 20 years is a pointless pursuit as you reach the end of you 30’s
Thankfully the internet’s “Access to everything” power means that it is easier to become unique. Go out and discover, interact with and enjoy things. If you are a metalhead go to the opera and discover you hate it. There are infinite possibilities for creativity and life is short.
Many people have found me uncool over the years. There’s a smugness that comes with watching them pull pints in their 30’s still waiting for their big break while becoming increasingly jaded.
Assuming the audience/money is going to find you
Of all the professional creatives I know - myself included, they didn't know where their eventual career would come from. It’s very difficult to plan for. For this reason it’s really important to put yourself out there. Once you’ve ticked off the “get a band together and do it long enough to get bored with it” stage there’s an infinite number of ways that your career can go and you have to let those paths find you through trial and error if you want to make a life/career/audience.
The bedroom stoner with the intimate knowledge of the works of Frank Zappa who has been working on his debut single for 15 years eventually becomes the 40 yr old with no life experience outside a series of dead end jobs. What’s more, eventually a younger less stoned person with better transferable skills will come along with a better knowledge of Frank Zappa and blow you out the water. He clearly doesn’t understand the true essence of Frank in the same way as you do, but surely if this was your unique selling point - the audience maybe don’t either.
Life is short. Get your current music out there, then wash rinse repeat. There’s such a cliche of the crabbit critical musician who thinks current music is shit and expects someone to come knocking their bedroom door. The truth is that the people that are putting music out are 100% more successful than then ones who aren’t putting music out.
It’s hard. It’s expensive. You put your soul on the line. The final product requires you to put a pin in something and call it done when you’re not completely happy, but no one is turning up to your local trying to scout bands for Sony.
The other side of the coin here is when musicians are working hard and getting themselves out here, but it’s entirely unsustainable. There’s this wonderful moment in David Brent: A life on the road where he says:
“If we’d sold out all these gigs I would only have lost £20,000”
I’ve seen this kind of accounting more times than I can count. By all means spend money on your country murder ballad doom metal cross over musical, but have a little bit of perspective and realise what it’s costing you. It’s fine and well driving the length of the country to play a gig to 8 people and not making enough to cover the petrol - but what if they ask you to come back?
Spin all the plates. Find what you enjoy. Find what makes the money. Balance the two.
Gear ACQUISITION Syndrome
I did a whole blog post on this alone. From this perspective it’s more about preventing musicians from progressing. As much as I would love every prospective musician in Scotland to splurge money on making content with me, I’m usually quite honest about people wasting money and time. I hear this type of maths from musicians all the time:
“I don’t want to record until I can afford a new guitar to make the songs sound good”
If the songs are good enough, you don’t need that new guitar. Almost everything that holds you back in terms of gear and tech can be begged, borrowed, stolen, or it didn’t matter in the first place. Don’t let it hold you back.
One of the best guitarists I have ever played with used to pick a neck and a body up from a bundle as he left the house. Bolt them together and string it in the car on the way to the gig and just make whatever he ended up with sing. I also know someone that marks a date in his diary to hoover his guitar cases. They are both excellent guitarists.
Necessity is the mother of invention. I watch videos of bands in the 60’s and I know that some of these cheap guitars must have been unplayable, but they made it work. You can too. The next time you postpone writing some lyrics until your new better pencil arrives. Don’t! Get the crayons out and scrawl it on a disused bit of wall behind some furniture.
The assumption that you are owed a living
You hear this adage on every Facebook group about musicians:
“try getting a plumber for those wages and then work out what you should be paying a musician”
Now the plumber might very well have grown up wanting to be a plumber, but the chances are they saw a job and they took it. The Job was there because there was a need for it. They need money, so they decided that plumbing was a reasonable bet for sustaining a career till retirement.
You don’t get to learn some chords on the guitar and think “I quite like this. Career! Now!”. Maybe the plumber likes playing guitar too.
A music career is a marathon not a sprint, and not an inalienable right. It’s a hobby that you have to craft into being a career, and you might be surprised how long that is the case for. If you are serious about it, you have to either “know your lane” and become the absolute best at something or multitask. In my experience being the best is incredibly hard. There will always be someone better than you, and in the western world you can easily be undercut by someone with lower living costs and less privilege in an increasingly shrinking world. Instead, my method is to multitask and offer prospective clients as much added benefit and extensible skills as possible. I often call it spinning plates.
By spinning plates I’m able to survive losing clients and revenue streams - which is dead handy because in this world you don’t get severance pay or contracts. Sometimes I’m a victim of my own success. I love to work with up and coming artists and often we make some content together that contributes to them moving from up and coming to established. At this point management and labels have different ideas about who to use for the roles I perform. You would think this would be annoying, but it’s great watching bands and artists grow and succeed. There’s also a new up and coming band around the corner. As a result there’s a kind of undulating list of different things I do which I’ve constantly pushed up the hill at different rates and for about 10 years.
So you’re not owed a living. You have to carve one out and constantly balance doing things you enjoy with things that pay. Some of my most lucrative jobs are ones I don’t shout about and some of my coolest gigs have cost me quite a bit of money. Sometimes that requires adult decisions. Sometimes you get them wrong. The absolute no no is to do something you aren’t enjoying for unsustainable wages. It is entirely pointless. You’d be as well working in a call centre 9-5 and being creative for free.
Lastly. you don’t know where your career is going to come from. You might think you are going to be the next Angie Mallstone* but the world has other ideas and it turns out you’re really good at writing music for computer games. Turns out you enjoy it too!
Open more doors than you close.
*That was Yngie Malmsteen before autocorrect took hold and I’m just leaving it in. I met Yngie at a music thing once. The big hair and silk shirts open to the waist don’t work as well in your 50’s with a receding hairline and a beer belly, but he is nonetheless a very fast twiddler if that’s what you need.
9. Creating a comfort zone for your creativity.
I see this quite a lot. It’s another natural human trait. If everyone loves it when you sing Beatles covers at the open mic in your local slug and lettuce, why would you play anywhere else?
A lot of musicians I know can’t make it because they refuse to be somewhere that isn’t a guaranteed win. While AC/DC are doing very well using the ‘wash, rinse, repeat’ method, it doesn’t work for many. The fragility of the creative mind is such that it can require quite a strong mental constitution to take risks and make leaps and put yourself out there. The trick is to try and own your mistakes and just shrug and think - ‘Well. You miss 100% of the chances you don’t take’. You can also take a leaf out of Bowie’s book and constantly reinvent and change. Does the world really need your 20th album of self recorded R.E.M. “inspired” bangers?
The problem with the creative mind is that it prefers to write a more pleasing narrative and it never astounds me how much they are able trick themselves into believing it; Venues are shunned for having no atmosphere(at your gig where you sold no tickets); Towns are shunned for having the wrong kind of audiences. We return to the retrospective dressing up of musical history, so it makes more sense to stick to your local and tell people about the time you played at a festival that also had famous bands playing at it.
Unfortunately deep down you know the truth, and you have to be selective about who you work with and play with. This creates even bigger gulfs between you and an actual career. Having elevated your own talent way beyond it’s means you don’t ever want to get found out, so it’s other creatives that are at fault. Pretending that you are such a connoisseur of various professions you don’t understand you have to apportion blame elsewhere. This results in some wonderful actual quotes:
“I hate the way he records - all the microphones have cables coming out of them and they get everywhere”
“The way the guitars are mixed has made my vocals sound out of tune”
“We recorded 15 songs in 6 hours and I felt he was using us”
Eventually this gives way to the “we’ll just do it on our own”. Now while I’m a great advocate of a band recording an album and then spending their budget on the mixing and mastering, it shouldn’t be done in order to hide from scrutiny, reality and creative critcism. The same thing goes for the boast of “self-managed”. It can be all fine and well being a self starter with initiative, but eventually that means that no one wants to work with you and you can’t get anyone interested.
This section reminded me of a time when I was covering a multivenue festival. A great local band with a legendary live act were first on in one of the bigger venues later in the day. There’s had been a mix up with the security passes(they were expecting one colour and the large queue of people outside all had another colour). The photography passes weren't affected. I walked into the empty venue with the band just coming on the stage. There was a bit of a gulp as they saw the empty floor - a band’s draw never quite being a sure thing in a multi-venue festival; but like a comic book hero facing off the end boss, they cracked their knuckles and launched full pelt at the opponent anyway. The opponent being an empty floor, three photographers and sound engineer. They gave it as much welly as they would have if there had been a crowd, so when the crowd finally ran in, the smiles on the band got dialled up to 11 and so did the performance. The key is that they were willing to put themselves out there and play to an empty room when many wouldn’t and that’s why they achieved what they did.
10.Punctuality and life skills
Okay, so I said there wasn’t “this one trick” but this is the closest that comes to it.
It’s really rare that I see someone that just can’t do the job they are doing. By the time there’s even just a bit of money involved, the drummers can drum and the guitarists can guitar. The quality of your playing isn’t always the factor that gets you hired or fired.
The number one reason that the best instrumentalists I know aren’t professional is this - They can’t turn up on time. I wish I could let them know how much work they lost out on. Opportunities whistling past their ears as their names come up in discussion and people say:
“yeah. He’s always in time but rarely on time. He. He. He.”
I think back in the day when there was only a handful of competent musicians in your town, you could probably get away with it, but your time in the ‘Young, Cool and enthusiastic’ seat is amazingly short-lived and what you are ultimately trying to do is combine your talent with being in the right place at the right time in the hope that someone pulls you up the ladder a bit. If that someone’s first impression of you is that you turned up late and didn’t think it was an issue, trust me…. they don’t think
“Oh. My. God!! Did you hear how fast that guitarist twiddled, when he was tuning up while we all waited for him??”
What you are doing is screaming:
“I think I’m more important than everyone and more important than this”.
These life skills extend to delivering things on time. The lack of life skills in your stereotypical musician are such that much of my paid work could be better performed by someone else if the client is willing for the deadline to have an error margin of about 6 months and for the files to go missing three times during the project.
I used to shrug it off as a personality trait. You can’t take the rough without the smooth. When the right opportunity is there, I’m sure they’ll pull their socks up. They don’t. First time on a national radio interview - 2 hours late. First main stage spot at festival - didn't bother with the soundcheck.
This one is pretty easy for me to poke fun at. I’m the exact opposite personality. I’ve turned up to numerous gigs that are genuinely below most with a tool kit and spare bass strings in case the bass player didn’t bring any. Constant imposter syndrome because I know that I’m not as good as the unemployed musicians blaming their lateness on the lack of taxis.
This section could also include - not taking drink or drugs suitable for the situation and not taking responsibility for having working equipment. In short as much as I adore Keith Moon and the like, no one is thinking - If only our drummer was more problematic.
As Keith Richard’s says:
“Rock and roll is 10% playing guitar and 90% sitting around waiting”
So you’d better get used to entertaining yourself during the 90%. On the other hand Oscar Wilde says:
“punctuality is the thief of time”
So who knows…..
I’ll finish with one small caveat - a tale of arriving early.
I was recording demos with a young singer songwriter who didn’t need to look far to seek his troubles. He was plagued with mental health issues which had given way to drug issues. He’d messaged me about recording and we made an appointment at my home studio for noon. There was lots of follow-up to tell me how much he was looking forward to it and how much he appreciated the opportunity - to pay me for work presumably. Now as a workaholic with imposter syndrome, I’m no stranger to sitting behind a computer at 7am with a hot coffee planning out my day. I do however quite like to do this for a few hours in my South Park pyjamas before (relative) strangers enter my domain. That’s why I say Noon. It lets me get other work out the way. It ensures that I don’t need to worry about whether I have a late night the night before and it doesn’t impose an early start on any musicians that don’t have great punctuality. So at 9:30, this kid sends me a message to let me know he’s outside. I hurriedly throw on some clothes glad that I’m not a fashion icon and bring him in.
“I thought we said 12?”
“yeah - did the clocks not go back or something. I make it 12”
So it turns out you can present a sense of self importance by arriving early :)
Conclusion
Remember this is just one person’s opinion, if you like turning up late every week to lord over the slug and lettuce open mic with a £3k acoustic guitar while bitching about how uncool the other open mic across the road is then I’m sorry for pissing on your chips.
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