CONSISTENCY

Just like most other jobs and careers, making a living from writing songs and being a professional in music industry requires a huge amount of sacrifices and more importantly it requires consistency. If you're anything like me, and the rest of 99.9% percent of other musicians, you'd fail for at least a couple of years! But the key here is not to give up. Not to be stubborn, taking no as an answer is okay here but don't "go home"!

It's a very normal thing in music industry that if you're an artist, you'd release songs and albums, and nobody will notice no matter how much you promote it. If you're a songwriter, you might keep writing and get rejected over and over again. Now you have 2 options. Easy one is to give up and get another job (or most probably you already have another job and just to keep it) and in best case scenario you still keep writing and creating music but keep it as a hobby or you can go for the better option which is to be consistent! Don't give up. Keep writing, when you get rejected, ask for the reason. Work on it and pitch again. Don't get yourself stuck in the cage of "I'm not good enough". Always remember Prince wasn't born as the great Prince we know. Freddy Mercury wasn't born as the legend we know. The difference between those guys and the failed musicians we all know is the they kept up working on their craft to make it better and better while the failed ones just accepted failure and have up!

Just a simple personal example. Few years ago, I was living in Malaysia holding a student visa. My Visa was finishing, and I was thinking instead of going back home I wanted to move to Singapore. I got a tourist visa for coming to Singapore and arranged with a couple of producers here to have an interview, hoping to be hired in their studio as a sound engineer while back home I was already an established producer myself. But I'm talking about coming to a new country with a totally different music scene. So, I had to start from scratch. So, I went for the interviews and got rejected. Both of the producers said my work is not up to standard for working in their studio. But I knew my abilities! So, I came up with the idea to start my own label. I used to run a couple of very successful hip-hop labels back in Iran and I already knew how to manage a record label. That's how we started Flipside.
And guess what! In a year time after I started in Singapore, both those producers started calling me and asking me to help them in their mixing! The same guys who rejected me became my clients! Now after four years, instead of working for them, I'm just charging them for mixing their songs. While I had the option of going back home and God knows what would happen!! Not giving up worked for me here!

Author

Hangi Tavakoli is our in-house established and professional music producer with more than 14 years of experience in music production, mix and mastering, recording engineering, live sound designing/engineering, lyrics writing and music arrangement. He has produced more than 800 and written more than 2000 published songs to-date, including some major hits in international scale.Write something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview.