Social Media Helped Me Survive COVID as a Professional Musician.
I’ve been playing music in one form or another since the fourth grade and I’ve been making a living in one way or another as a professional musician since the year after I graduated high school in 1988. Over the last 33 years, the ways that musicians have made a living have changed a massive amount just due to changes in technology and how culture has wrapped around that same technology. When the world imploded in 2020, I was in a decent position to ride it all out because of how I had integrated social media and other online tools into my work life over the last couple of decades.
First, a bit of history. When I first started “the life”, I had just graduated from a local 2-year college with a degree in Commercial Music Performance(that meant Jazz in the '80s). I had been lucky enough to already be teaching private guitar at a local music store for a couple of years at that point, so I already had my toe in the water. I also played gigs and occasionally drove as a delivery driver for a local radiator shop. Thankfully the delivery gig was short-term, but I had learned early on that multiple revenue streams were the key to survival. No one job in music would pay my bills by itself at this point, but I was young and I had nothing but time on my hands. One month the gigs might pay well and the teaching might slim and it might go the other direction the following month, but by not having all of my eggs in a single basket I was able to consistently make a living. Learning this particular lesson would serve me well in the years to come.
As time went on, I eventually met my wife and we started a family. As those life events unfolded I realized that gigs and teaching weren’t going to provide long-term financial security, so I decided to turn my love of teaching guitar into a business. Emulating the business model of the school where I had worked for so many years, my wife and I opened our own “brick and mortar” school in 2004. I have always been interested in using the online world to further my music career so when I realized that I could teach guitar online to the people that I was meeting in guitar forums and social media platforms such as MySpace and Facebook, I jumped on that concept just in time to ride it through the recession of 2007 and the subsequent rough retail climate that happened in its wake.
Being online meant that I had access to potential students (customers) worldwide and not just in the town that my physical location was. I was active in many of the popular online guitar forums, made YouTube lessons that I shared on each forum, and eventually started my own online guitar forum in 2008. The forum has endured to this day as a small but active community of folks who discuss hot wings and pop culture as much as they do music. They are very supportive of my various ventures and serve as something of a sounding/advisory board when I’m trying something new. Many of them have grown to be good friends over the years and even have meet-ups in various parts of the country to play music, drink beer and shop for guitars.
By nature, I’m not much of a people person. I have no problem getting on a stage in front of hundreds of strangers playing music, but I’m not so great at interpersonal communication with people I haven’t met or barely know. I’d be a disaster as a realtor or an outside salesman. For me personally, communicating online with the larger guitar community was much easier and it ended up being something that I became pretty good at.
Live video lessons eventually became possible with the advent of Skype, AIM, ooVoo, and a host of other platforms that have now largely surrendered to the monolith of Zoom. Over the years I was able to build a small but steady base of online students across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Being able to teach students anywhere in the world has had a stabilizing effect on my income but I had to participate in different online communities and generate a lot of content over a period of a few years before the ball really started rolling with the remote teaching.
In addition to teaching online and “in the real world” I would put out a self-published book or album every few years that would generate some income, but would essentially die on the vine because I did not have any kind of unified business plan for the “extra” work I was doing in addition to running the studio. I also did not have a “team” of people who could help me market or produce these products. More on this later.
The last few years that we owned the teaching studio became something of a drag. I barely saw my family since I was at the studio six days a week every night and Saturday mornings. I was constantly hustling and not being proactive with my online efforts. I quit doing video lessons and didn’t even have time to promote my last album properly. We finally put the store out of its(our) misery in 2016 and I went back to school to get a degree that would allow me to take better teaching jobs. Being online with lessons and still marginally active with some of the communities that I had a history with allowed me to still be able to work while I was also going to school full-time. I graduated in 2019 and started teaching at a local charter school that has a large arts conservatory and suddenly I had time to breathe and think about the future.
I still retained something of an online footprint on most of the major social media platforms, but it would take some retooling and reimagining of what I was actually doing with that footprint before I could really get started trying to create content and eventually monetize that content in any meaningful way. The first step was reinventing the wheel and going through a fresh rebranding.
I have more than a decade of online content that I had produced on a budget or that was really out of date. My approach to teaching guitar has evolved quite a bit over time due to my re-education and the experiences of teaching the same material to middle and high school students in both a physical and later virtual classroom environment. I just wanted a fresh start, so I came up with a brand name for my new YouTube channel that was named after our much loved and missed dog (he was something of a social media star himself during his lifetime) and got the ball rolling.
My first year of content was really driven by my teaching needs. I wanted to produce a series of lessons that I could use with my private students as well as my classroom kids. I figured that I could make my own practice tracks for them to use and put them on YouTube as videos instead of sending them links to other channels. Lastly, I know that guitarists love toys so demonstrations of my gear rounded out the offerings. This was going to be my focus going into 2020.
L.O.L.
As we know, 2020 had its own ideas on how we were going to be spending our time. The last live show that I played was on March 13th. The festival I was supposed to play the next afternoon was canceled and then EVERYTHING was shut down. No gigs, no in-person teaching. I was fortunate that almost all of my local students had bought into the remote teaching thing and converted to online lessons. The school that I teach at went online almost immediately so I did not lose that income but now I was teaching for two…one of my coworkers could not handle the technology to teach online and I was given his classes in addition to my own for the rest of the spring.
What this meant for me in practical terms was that my time for content creation was gone for a few months, but at least I could pay the bills. Once the school year was over I was able to start playing catch-up with video lessons and even live streams, but it was slow going. Looking back, the actual value in the time spent over the summer and fall of 2020 was in the “doing of the work”. I was trying new things and seeing how different approaches worked. I loved doing live stream lessons but I didn’t have a big enough subscriber base on any of the platforms to make the time as profitable as I’d seen other YouTubers did with the online tipping and ad revenue.
The segment of my videos that were getting the most repeated viewing were the first two playlists full of 25 minute long videos that were literally a one-chord vamp to practice scales and improvisation over. The lessons would do well if I steered traffic to them with Facebook ads, but it is a fairly competitive segment on YouTube these days. Demo videos of guitar gear do alright, but that is also a glutted segment full of guys who are very good at what they do and are connected with many of the companies. At some point, I think that each of these segments will grow for me but they will take time and work.
What all of this means for me in the future…
I am discovering that all of these online ventures require diligence and patience similar to what I needed on the path to (somewhat) mastering my instrument. YouTube is flooded with videos of attractive young people who are making massive sums of money online. Most of them are doing that by making videos teaching people how they made massive sums of money online. Or commenting on cultural topics for other young people such as video games, pop culture, or lifestyle topics. None of this is relevant to me and what I have to offer, so I have to take a different perspective on what it is that I’m actually trying to achieve with my efforts. And to always remember that nothing good comes quickly. Anything sustainable will take constant effort over an extended period of time, so I need to be both patient and diligent.
Social media work is to support my real-life business.
I have to remind myself that my actual business is teaching people of all ages how to play guitar. That is my primary product, and how I pay the bills. Social media can help me market to a wider audience, sell digital versions of my product and produce some ad revenue. This summer I am going to try to streamline my time spent online to be more profitable but also to be less time-consuming. I need to spend more time actually enjoying life and being with my family. Working from home can turn into a twenty-hour-a-day grind if you don’t put the devices down.
One really important idea that I’ve learned from those “attractive young people making videos about how they made a lot of money online” is the idea that producing online content means that you can produce and stage your content so that it goes out to your public in a consistent manner regardless of when you have time to make that content. I’ve seen people take months at a time off to have children or start a new project and you would not know it from their social media channels. There is a grind to any career, but you can control the pace of your own grind if you can be organized enough to create content in batches that are scheduled for release weeks or even months in the future and not interrupt your earning potential.
The original lesson that I had learned about multiple revenue streams when I was just starting out is even more important in the current day and age when you can do just about anything from home. You can produce merchandise to sell to your customers through print-on-demand sites such as Lulu.com, Printify, and CDbaby. Selling something like T-Shirts no longer means paying someone to make a design, putting out the money for manufacturing the shirts, and then being able to ship them to customers before you see any income. Now, you upload a design to a website and they do all of the rest for you. Unlike the twenty-year-old me having multiple jobs where I had to work each hour to get paid, I can spend an hour or two designing a product or making a video and let it go out into the world and collect money for me. Over time, this turns into a decent bit of cash flow even if no one product goes “viral’.
It does not matter that other people make videos on these same topics.
I have my own point of view and perspective on the subject matter and bring my own value to the work. I used to be upset when I would make a video and then see other people copy the video or I would shy away from topics that I have been covered by a number of other channels but the reality is that I usually have my own take on these topics and if they watch my videos they will get a unique viewpoint or approach to the material that I feel strongly enough to discuss. If I don’t feel that way about something, I just won’t spend the time and effort making the video.
I can’t wait to be able to contract out some of the work.
I am jealous of the folks who can afford a video editor or graphic designer. I am fortunate that I am able to do most of the technical and design work myself but it takes valuable time from my day, it is tedious and I’m JUST barely capable enough to do it on my own. A pro would do nicer work faster. I suppose that is a long-term goal for me, but I can’t wait to get there.
Which online platforms should I focus on?
Picking appropriate social media platforms to focus on happens to be another piece of the puzzle that I’ve had to figure out. YouTube was a no-brainer considering my experience in teaching both online and off. Instagram is supposed to be important, but I find it difficult to monetize it in any meaningful way in my current business model. I’ve been on Facebook forever so I have a decent-sized audience there but I have that divided into my personal account, a Facebook group that I had started, and a couple of different pages for different parts of my business life. Snapchat, TikTok, and the other platforms just did not make any sense for what I’m trying to do at the moment so I’ve not spent much time on them. I also have a very underdeveloped Patreon that needs attention and as you can see, I am also dabbling in writing on Medium.
What the previous word-salad paragraph really tells us is that I need to streamline and focus on just a few things. In my own personal work-life I am planning on taking a week or two once the school year ends and taking a frank look at what is working for me and what is not. Over the many years that I have been self-employed, these breaks for self-assessment and the inevitable realignment of my priorities and projects have become a necessary device for me. I am usually able to fine-tune or change the direction of my projects based on what I see when I take a step back and honestly evaluate how things are actually going. If I don’t take this step, I stagnate and stop moving forward financially as well as artistically.
At this moment in time, this is what my evaluation is telling me:
- I have several projects that have been on hold for such a long time that I need to decide whether or not to start them or forget about them altogether. Or maybe I could just lay out a production schedule and eventually get through all of the good stuff over time.
- I need to pare down my social media presence and focus on fewer platforms with greater efficiency.
- I’m not at a point where I can outsource or hire someone to edit or do some of the other “creator” chores so that needs to be factored into the new plan.
- I should try a few non-musical “print-on-demand” products like t-shirts or mugs and see if I can expand my earning outside of my normal revenue pool.
I have always looked at social media as a way of marketing my teaching but I feel that this is now the time to develop and launch products that can be bought not only by my students but guitarists anywhere. As I mentioned above, I have decades of lessons that can be turned into print and video products. My Patreon should be active and engaging for paying members. I might even start writing and recording music for my first new album since 2014’s Black Market Hearts. I’ll eventually return to performing live but I get the feeling that it is not going to be very rewarding financially for quite a while. It’ll be fun, though.
The main lesson that I have learned from 2020 is that I need to get a little more organized and create a work structure that will allow me to do everything that I need to do without driving myself crazy. There is a lot of earning potential residing in the things that I do, but I need to explore how to better exploit that potential using the online tools and products that are out there and not try to invent a new wheel much less reinvent the old one.
