Do you ever find yourself paralyzed by fear, not quite sure how to move forward?  Do you ever find yourself getting stuck in negative thought patterns and negative thinking about your music career?  Does it sometimes feel like it’s simply too hard, too competitive and that you’ll probably never make it?  Do you sometimes think the idea of making music a career is just a silly pipe dream and that you were foolish to even consider trying to make a career out something as ridiculous as music?

Well, if you said yes to any of the above questions, this post is for you.  This post is going to address two issues, how to break out negativity and fear of failure and how to get to six figures annually licensing music.  I focus on music licensing, as you’re aware, so this post will focus specifically on music licensing, but the same principles really apply to any aspect of the music business. I’ve picked six figures just to give us something concrete and tangible to talk about.  The figure could be more or less, depending on your personal goals and needs.  Or, the goal could be something completely different and not related to a specific dollar amount.  Again, I just wanted a concrete target to shoot for, for the sake of this article.  Pick whatever goal or goals apply to your situation.

First, let’s start with the issue of fear and the stress that goes along with pursuing something like music. 

Let’s start with the obvious.  It takes money to live in modern society.  I’ve traveled extensively and in every single country and culture that I’ve been to, they all use money to exchange goods and services.  I’ve never visited a single place where it didn’t take money to get by.  Some places require less money, but unless you live in a forest or some remote village somewhere, you’ll need at least some money to survive.

Most fear and stress, when it comes to pursuing a music career, is a fear related to not being able to sustain yourself comfortably or easily through music.  It’s a rational fear. After all, we have a finite amount of time in life to pick a path, figure things out, move forward and hopefully build a comfortable, successful life.  None of us want to get stuck in a situation where we’re perpetually stressed about money and uncertain of our futures.  A few years of this is perhaps ok, and maybe even necessary, when we’re getting started and making our way.  But at some point, most us would like to reach a place in our lives where we’re actually realizing our goals and achieving the stability and rewards that come along with success.  We want to live our best lives, not lives filled with worry and stress.  That’s no fun, even if you have your passion for music guiding you.

 

Turn Fear Into Motivation

So, what do we do about this fear?  Well, if we can see the fear for what it is; a perfectly rational response to a real and valid concern, the next step is figuring out what to do about it.  Obviously, we don’t want to stay stuck in fear, because being fearful and stressed isn’t really an inspiring place to be in life.  We need to move past fear and into more positive and inspiring emotions.  We need to transform our fear into motivation and action.  When we’re motivated and inspired, we’re willing to work towards our goals and dreams.  When we’re in fear and stressed, it can be more challenging to get motivated and get moving.

Ok, Aaron.  Got it.  How de we move past fear?  Well, what works for me is being completely analytical and logical about what my goals actually are and how to achieve them. If you don’t really know what you want, you’re probably not going to know how to achieve your goals.  You have to first define your goals very clearly, in order to know how to attain then. Once you actually establish and define what it is you want to do with your music, both financially and the kind of impact you hope to make, you can come up with a game plan to get there. 

I recently listened to an interview with the Billionaire Ray Dolio, who outlined that there are essentially five steps on the path to success. These five steps fit perfectly into how I think about music licensing and how to come up with an actionable game plan.

The five steps to success, according to Billionaire Ray Dolio are:

1. Know your goals
2. On the way towards your goals, encounter your problems
3. Diagnose your problems at the root cause
4. Design a way to get around your problems
5. Execute the plan to get around your problems

So, like I said, the first step towards eliminating fear and getting motivated, is knowing what your goals actually are. Ray cites this as step number one and he’s a billionaire, so if you don’t listen to me, you should at least listen to him.

If you just have a vague sense that you’d like to “make it” in the music business, somehow, some day, but have no real sense of what that means, or worse, how to get there, you’re probably not going to have much success and you’ll likely stress yourself out and get stuck in fear and worry, if you don’t simply quit and go get a “real job” first.  I’m sure there are exceptions and we’ve all heard stories of people where success just fell in their laps, but for most of us it doesn’t work this way.  Figure out what your goals are, first and foremost.

Second, like Ray Dolio says in his five-step process, you’ll encounter problems on the way to success.  This is inevitable.  There will be challenges and “problems” and things that arise on your way to success.  In the context of licensing, this could be things like your production not being good enough, the songs themselves not being right for licensing, not having the necessary connections and relationships, and so on.  Your job is to figure out and isolate the things that are holding you back and then work to overcome those issues, systematically, one by one.

Once you figure out the things holding you back and the problems you need to overcome and you diagnose and design away to get around your problem, you’ll start moving forward.  As you move forward, the amount of work and the steps required to meet your specific goals will come into focus and become more and more clear.  So, for example, with our hypothetical goal of making six figures a year licensing music, you’ll start to get a sense of the types of songs you’ll need to write, how many of them you’ll need to write and so forth once you start having a little initial success that you can use as a reference point.

To use my own catalog as an example, I currently have a catalog of just 49 tracks that are being licensed.  My catalog is relatively small, as I tend to focus on actual fully produced pop/rocks songs, as opposed to cues or “stock music”.   My tracks, this year alone, have earned anywhere from $1.25 to $1,200 each, with the average being somewhere around two or three hundred dollars.  Of course, as the year continues, these numbers will likely go up as the tracks are used more and more.  The majority of these placements are for use in TV shows.

So, using the arbitrary goal of reaching six figures per year with my catalog as an example, this is how I think about it.  I simply look at things mathematically.  49 songs are enough songs to reach some statistical conclusions.  Like I said, the average earning per track, year to date, is somewhere around 200 dollars.  Assuming the same rate of return for the entire year, the average per track ROI will be around 400 dollars.  If these numbers hold, and all my tracks continue to be licensed at this rate, these tracks will collectively bring in somewhere around $19,600 for the year.  Again, this is assuming these tracks continue to get placed at the same rate throughout the year.  Things could go up or down, it’s obviously not an exact science, but the best way to predict future success is to look at past success.

So, to continue the example.  Let’s assume things unfold perfectly and that collectively these 49 tracks bring in $19,600 for the year.  For the sake of making the math easier, let’s say that it’s 50 tracks and that they bring in 20k per year.  Using these numbers as our example, and our goal of making 100k per year, the easiest path to get there from here, would be to simply grow my catalog to 250 tracks of the same quality.   Again, it’s not an exact science.  I could have one song that gets placed in a lucrative car commercial, for example, that brings in much more than our statistical average.  Or, for whatever reason these numbers could go down, due to changes in the marketplace. If the numbers change, I'll simply adjust my plan accordingly.

The formula and math above is the exact plan I’m executing to reach my own personal goal of making six figures from music licensing alone.  For the longest time, I didn’t really have a specific income target with the music I licensed.  To be honest, I’ve been pretty content to simply make a great part time income licensing my music, in addition to the other revenue streams I’ve created.  It wasn’t until I actually took a step back and started to look at things more analytically that I’ve been able to completely change my thinking about music licensing and how to generate a solid full-time income.   Now I simply have a plan that I’m executing.  There’s no fear or stress about how things are going to work out, because I have a crystal clear plan that I’m executing. 

I’ve often described music licensing as being like a 401k plan for musicians.  It’s something that if you invest in over time, will generate a nice passive revenue stream.  And it’s perfectly reasonable to approach music licensing this way. However, you don’t have to stop there.  There is a clear path towards making a full-time income from licensing as well, if that’s your goal.

Are you ready to start generating a full time income with your music?

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Happy Music Making!
Aaron Davison
htlympremium.com