MUSICAL MATH: The Formula

Let’s put singing, songwriting and musicianship on the shelf for just a few minutes. Here’s the bottom line: The value of an artist is measured by the public demand for his or her music, performance and or appearance. Artists often forget that though many of us are musical perfectionists, music in America is a business before it is an art. Any business trying to sell a product with low to no demand (in any industry) will never even make it out of the creative womb and into the economy.

Now that music product is worth an estimated 50% less than it once was in dollars and cents, the consumer has turned up the heat on artists without realizing it. Artists must now do what labels have done for decades – sell a person. No – not just sell records (the truth is that people really don’t care very much anymore), but brand and sell themselves. The relevant questions become: How many people can an artist get to buy into his or her personality, look, angle, sound, style and creativity? How many people can an artist get to pay attention to them? Are people invested enough to spend their time and money to see, hear or experience the artist? Here is a formula that eventually becomes “success” when it occurs in a winning sequence. The first step in the process is called, “visibility.”

Most artists get stuck between visibility and fame. The difference between the two is that visibility creates possibility, while fame presents real opportunities – the kind that artists can only dream about, eventually earning the artist a major following. For a select few lucky folks, visibility and fame come at the same time. For everyone else, the distance between visibility and fame is almost as far as the distance between dreams and success. For most, a lifetime of hard work layered with every kind of challenge, obstacle, demand, distraction and deterrent imaginable lie between them and their dreams.

Visibility is the most difficult stage of the formula for success to acquire. No matter how talented an artist is, he or she isn’t worth a single dollar if they never take the steps to acquire visibility. Visibility can eventually snowball into fame, fame will most likely create demand and demand will always create dollars. Any person who makes it to the “demand” level of their career faces a new challenge – reinvention. Reinvention is necessary to maintain demand which is fueled by relevancy. At this point, there is a completely different equation for survival of the consistently successful artist.