We Asked Our Musician Community About Their Biggest Struggles

Thank you very much for clicking on the One More Time podcast. You've made an excellent choice. Building a comfortable career making music is insanely hard. But our singular function here at the podcast is to do whatever we can to help you guys achieve it. So we decided to straight up ask our Discord community what are some of the biggest struggles you're having? What are some of the barriers that you feel like are holding you back from a successful career? Which by the way, if you're not in the Discord, I'll put the link in the description. It's free and it's a great resource for musicians. And we talked about all of those struggles on the episode today, and we're hoping that this dialogue could be helpful for anyone just trying to make it in music. We feel you. It's hard. Let's get into it. So number one, finding good engineering. Yeah. You're an engineer, my friend. I am. What do you have to say about this struggle? First thing I would say is that for me personally, all of my clients I have found through word of mouth, which I and I think that's actually kind of common when it comes to engineering. So my best advice would be to ask everybody that you know who's your engineer, who do you use, you know, like maybe listen to some people's music.

And if you like how the mix sounds, maybe you know, ask for who their mixing engineer is, what they charge for rates. Um, and and go from there. Join communities. So, like, once again, shameless plug for our Discord, but there's also like so many communities out there of artists that are, you know, talking about these types of things and they're giving recommendations on like who it is that they work with. Yes. And it's really not that hard when you just put yourself out there and you kind of get out of your own little bubble. And I know it's easy to do. Sometimes creatives are like lone wolves, you know what I mean? They like to kind of do their own thing, be in their own little circles, and they like to kind of keep their circle tight a lot of times, which like I can respect that in some ways, but it doesn't help you find new team members, right? To collaborate with, both on like the creative side and the business side. So I think that if you can find yourself uh, you know, kind of engaging in these communities online and in real life, then you're gonna really have a a better shot at like finding quality, you know, creatives to work with on the engineering and the production side, and even featured artists and writers, et cetera. And then on the business side, like if you're looking for a manager or an AR or you know, graphic designers or you know, project managers or digital marketing people, whoever, like all the all the different pieces to the puzzle, it's a lot easier when you're like part of other musician communities because that's where you can get like quality recs.

Of course, you can like look people up on you know, Fiverr, you can look people up on Google, you can look people up wherever the fuck, but you're not gonna get this like word of mouth, bro. Get out there, you can put yourselves out there, absolutely. And then also another note I wanted to say on that one. I think they mentioned that the engineering thing was holding them back from dropping music as well. Oh, it does. It says, which makes me lose enthusiasm to drop music. Fuck that. Like, I'm an engineer. You don't need a great mix to drop music, at least to start. You know, maybe you don't want to upload to Spotify, Apple Music immediately. You can post something on YouTube, you can post something on SoundCloud, Audio Mac, you know, just get ideas out there. You want people to get accustomed to the fact that you are someone that releases music. If it's a good idea, it's a good idea, and like a muddy vocal isn't gonna completely ruin the song. Could it have been a little better? Yes, you know, is an engineer gonna put that icing on your cake? Yes, but you have a cake, you know what I mean? Like, share your cake with the world, you know what I mean?

For sure. If if engineering is actually your biggest struggle, hopefully this kind of debunkes. This is great. Yeah, you're doing great. Yeah, hopefully this debunks that myth and you start realizing there's actual struggles happening because engineering shouldn't be kind of like the biggest thing that y'all are dealing with. So speaking of yeah, real struggles, yeah, number two. Exactly. Number two. What? Which one were you thinking? I was thinking it was time management. It is time management. I didn't know the order. I I guess it is an order, but good memory. But yeah, time management. Specifically, this uh, you know, member of our community was talking about like, you know, supporting uh his family, right? And so obviously being like a present family member while still putting in the work to try and further his music career, uh, it's tough. I'ma just say it. It's not easy. We don't have like a yeah, you know, quick quick fix for this one. None of these answers or none of these ideas are gonna necessarily be like wave your magic wand type shit. But we could talk about how we, you know, no, for sure. As someone like me who's I'm a father of two, right?

And so I can relate to this wholeheartedly. Um, and and it's really tough. I think that unlike people who maybe don't have um family responsibilities, right? Uh they probably have other struggles, but they don't have like the the kind of weight of a of a family, right? Um, I would say that you every second, every minute, every day is just so precious and like you have to be as productive as possible. It's kind of a mindset shift. Yeah, there's no wasted time allowed, right? Like it's just it's not, it's not, it's not gonna, it's not gonna happen. Like you just can't do certain things, like right. Like I you have to sacrifice doing other things to make time for both your family life and in this case, trying to like further your music career. Yeah, if you have a family, you have to make time for them. If you have a job, you have to work your job. It's not going anywhere. So the only solution is to just figure out how to maximize that. And we do lots of things like we have a calendar. Calendar. We live and die by our calendar, you know. You know, sometimes you'll see a lot of entries on on that calendar.

If it ain't on the calendar, it doesn't exist. It's not real. And and and we've even become accustomed to like putting personal things on the calendar because we do think it's important for you guys to set aside time for yourselves, whether that's spending time with family, whether that's spending time with yourself and playing video games. Exactly. Whatever it is you like to do. Block it off. Block it off. If you need to even just block off time to make music, block off time to come up with content to market your music, come up with, or you know, block off time to do all the administrative shit, like uploading to your distributor, you know, fucking registering your songs with your PRO, um, all the like kind of more tactical admin type shit that we all don't like to do, but you gotta set aside time to do it. Um so I would say calendar number one. There's something about it being on the calendar too. It's like, oh shit, I can't, I can't, I gotta do it. Can't say on the calendar. Can't say no to the calendar. Calendar's gonna beat my ass if I don't do what it says. Calendar don't fucking play. Yeah. Um I hope you guys are enjoying the conversation. I want to take a quick moment to tell you about our pals at DistroKid. You can't get your music onto streaming platforms without a distributor, and DistroKid is an excellent choice to handle that for you.

For the ridiculously low price of $23, you can upload unlimited music for an entire year that is less than $2 a month. I tripped on $2 walking down the street earlier. They have countless features to help you out on your musical journey. One of my favorites is splits. Instead of my collaborators hitting me up all the time saying, Where's my fucking money? I can input everyone's percentage when I upload the music, and DistroKid will handle it. I've personally used DistroKid for many years and can genuinely recommend them as a great tool to get your music out into the world. And if you sign up at omtdistro.com, you'll get 30% off an already insanely low price. This is absolute peanuts for unlimited uploads yearly. We wish you the best with your creating. Let's get back to it. Number two, I would just say research some time management methods, right? And I know that's kind of like passing the buck, being like, go do some homework, but there's a lot of them out there. Pomodoro. Yeah, yeah. The one that Henry put me on when we first actually started working together was this method called the Pomodoro method. You know, it put me on was Adam Ivy. Okay, shout out to Adam Ivy

past uh podcast guest. Um, the the Pomodoro method, in essence, is basically you kind of do like sprints, right? Where you're really working hard on a task, distraction-free, right? Like you turn your phone on silent, you only do that thing. I don't care if an email pops up, I don't care if honestly, if you know something's happening outside, you want to go check on it. Like, don't do it. Don't do it. But it is, but sprint is right because they're short bursts. You do, you know, 20, 30 minutes of a task, very focused, and then five-minute break. Exactly. 10 minute break. Yep. And then you kind of recalibrate, reset, take a breath, get some water, take a piss, take a dump, whatever you gotta do. Exactly. And then you get back into it. And you get back into it. And the way that they kind of approach, like, all right, what tasks should I accomplish first? The one that bugs you the fucking most. The one that you wake up like, I gotta do that today. I really don't want to do that first. Yes. And you know who actually put me onto that is another thing.

Uh my dad put me onto a book that's very good called Eat That Frog. Oh. Have you heard of Eat That Frog? I don't like frogs. No one does. I wouldn't want to eat one. No one does. That's the point. You have to do it first, though. You have everyone has to eat the frog. It's like, you don't want to eat the frog, but this just that one daunting task that you know you have to do. It's gonna be the hardest thing. People love to do like the easy task, like, well, uh, before I do that mix, you know, maybe I'll just start my dishes and start my laundry or I'll do some other little things to feel productive. No. Eat the frog. Do the one thing that is the most daunting. First, you will just feel better for your entire day. How good does it feel when you eat the frog? After the frog is eaten. Once you swallow, it feels great. Eating the frog is a little anxiety pops in. Exactly. But no, I meant like y'all will be shocked. Yes. As to just like a weight is lifted off your fucking shoulders. Clarity. Exactly. Because it's that one thing.

I mean, for a lot of y'all, I'm sure it's about coming up with content ideas. Yep. It's, you know, doing the admin shit I mentioned as far as like registering your songs with PROs. You'd think like getting paid would be something y'all would be, you know, into. Jumping at the bit to do. Doesn't happen a lot. It doesn't happen, right? Um, so yeah, I definitely think, you know, number one calendar. Number two, just you know, researching kind of time management methods. Um, and then yeah, just like not letting yourself get sucked into those distractions, man. Um, it's really easy for us to start scrolling mindlessly, um, to you know, just kind of be a little lazy. Uh, but if you really want this shit, you're gonna you're gonna figure out a way to do it. One thing that works for me too, also, just as a side note, is that a lot of people like I like to think about other people that are doing it, and like whenever I like get distracted or I'm doing something, I'm I'm thinking like there's someone else who's busting their ass right now. There's someone else who's out here getting it right now, and I'm fucking off for nothing. Yeah, that's motivates me in a way.

Yeah, I mean, shit, maybe even just following some like motivational, inspirational people like a Gary Vee or someone. Yeah, someone's gonna be able to like beat the like productivity into you. You know what I mean? Um, all right. Uh the next one consistently putting out content. We have a very great resource for you for this one. You have no excuses because it is a free resource that we put together. It is called 100 viral content ideas for musicians. Where is it? Where can they get it? They can get it at 100 viral contentideas.com. That's right. We'll put the link right here. You have no excuses. Take one of these, just flip up, you know, just you can like scroll through it, land on an idea, replicate it, make it your own, tweak it so it makes sense for you, and just put out content. You know, it is hard. And Ben loves to batch as well. That's another kind of note I would like to make. Yeah. Batch isn't for everyone, though. It's not for everyone. We talked to Larry O recently who doesn't batch. Yeah, but I did see some other uh shit pop on my feed that was talking about batching as well. Cause it was just like that daily struggle, man.

Cause think about it. If you gotta literally wake up in the morning, you gotta shoot something, you gotta edit it, and you gotta post it all in one day to keep up with maybe like a daily posting schedule. You're fucked. Well, you're literally fucked, dude. Larry O's not fucked. I'm just saying, like for someone who's struggling with time management, like Yeah, I I think it's I think self-awareness plays a big part. For for sure. But it but if but if it is something that you struggle with, um I think that yeah, to Henry's point, you know, batch, I would say batching everything, right? Like batching the ideation process, like coming up with the ideas. I think some like a lot of famous YouTubers say that before you even start a YouTube channel, you should come up with a hundred uh YouTube video ideas. So I want to kind of translate that to musicians. I would say anytime that you're coming up with like a marketing plan for a song or or a project, I would say come up with a hundred content ideas to market that song or market that project. Because then you're not gonna necessarily use all a hundred, just like these YouTubers don't necessarily do all those hundred ideas, but at least it's like a starting point so that you can kind of pick and choose from them when you then go to the actual like shooting process, right?

Like the actual creation process, right? So it just gets your juices flowing too. You know what I mean? It just gets your gears turning on like the idea. Because, because, like, the anxiety of just starting paralyzes people Sometimes literally just the act of like once it's so funny, man, because I'm the exact same way. I'm speaking to myself right now. The thought of starting something like that is so much worse than like when you once you're actually doing it. Once you're doing it, you're like, oh, this is great. Yeah. You know. There is something so overwhelming. Cause I I will say this, this is where also just like finding people to kind of like collaborate and bring and and you know, brainstorm with. We have a content ideas uh channel in the Discord. Once again, this is not meant to be a fucking like ad for Discord, but like join the fucking Discord. Join the Discord. Not there, But like I'm just thinking of like things that we're doing. Um it's a lot easier to come up with ideas and to like not feel as like intimidated or like scared or whatever, you know, kind of like not have it be as daunting if you're doing it with other people. Yeah.

You know what I mean? It makes it a lot more fun. You can bounce shit off of each other. And like, you know, just as this is why I think you and I work well together too, is that like you'll say something that then sparks an idea in my mind, and then that'll further you'll even like further like take it to the next level and shit, and then it's like, oh bam, we got this really good idea, versus if it would have just been you at the very beginning or me at the very beginning. It wouldn't have been the same. It wouldn't have been the same, and we probably would have been like done after one. Yeah. So um, so I would say that just goes back to like, man, community. And like that's what we're really trying to build ourselves because we're a brand just like you guys are a brand. So us building a community is just as important as like you guys building a community. So that's why I think like it's so much easier to do. Like, ask your fucking fans too. Like we That's the basis of this entire episode. Literally, we crowdsourced ideas from you all on kind of like what to talk about in the thing that we do. And so you guys could do the same thing with your audience as far as like you know what kind of content to post. You know what I mean?

Like ideas uh on you know what things you should create. So I think I think that's a good one for sure. All right, let's see. I like this one. I don't know how much like it's kind of just a bar, no motivation to do everything by myself, and no money to pay anyone to do it for me. And someone else said something about making money, so I feel like we can kind of maybe parlay those two together. I mean, we did we did make a video about like eight unique ways to fund your music career, and I think we kind of touched on like the scary subject of money and how to fund this expensive thing that is doing music, yeah, right. Um, so yeah, I mean, what are your thoughts, man? It's it's tough, man. Um, when you're early on, like there's all the money, all the money in music is at the top, you know what I mean? Like, there are what I will say is though, the amount of ways to monetize a music career is as big as ever. So everyone obviously wants a platinum record, a Grammy, you know, be famous, cool, like, yeah, you can do that.

But if you, you know, if you're realistic with yourself and you'd be happy making, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, like with a core group of fans and touring, like medium venues, or just like there's just so many, we've seen so many ways that you can be successful. I think opening up your mind to other monetization methods outside of the normal traditional ones is where I would start, at least. Yeah, I I think, spoiler alert, number one on the eight unique ways to uh you know fund your music career was get a job. Yeah, was get a job. And that's not no shame, It's not meant to discourage. I've seen a lot of people like Kato on the track, uh, who we had on the podcast, you know, in the in the past, like he talked about this. I've seen a bunch of people actually posting about this, how we should maybe more normalize, like getting a nine to five or getting some sort of side job to fund your music career. The reason why I think it's important, like fuck all the other reasons, but this is like really, really important for me, is that it takes the stress away from the like funding your music career, right? Because if if you're in a place of like survival and desperation, you start to make decisions with your art that detrimental, yeah, are sacrificing what you would actually want to be doing.

Yeah, right. So I think that's the most important part is that like fuck everything else, you know, ego, et cetera. But it's like, look, if if I can now be very true to my art and be like the the artist that I really, really want to be because I'm not scraping for every fucking dollar and I'm not having to like beg my fans to stream because I need their pennies on the stream, you know what I mean? Like I'm not begging them to buy a ticket. I can like really organically like just you know create a community, even if it takes a little bit longer, brick by brick. Because the longer moves are the more successful ones, you know. Like, could you make a hundred dollars right now if you really tried? Yeah. But if you want to make a thousand dollars later, it takes these, it takes that comfort, you know. You do need like a safety net to some degree. So yeah, don't be afraid to get a job, sell drugs, do something. Don't know. Oh, god. I don't stand with Henry on that one. Um, but yeah, and then and then the motivation to do everything yourself. The DIYers, man, you guys, I respect the hell out of you.

I do, because I know that it's coming from a place typically of requirement, of need, of budget, right? Like you can't afford to pay other people, like like this comment says. And everything is very learnable. Everything is easier to do. Like you can watch some videos on you know, mixing, and you can get a decent sounding mix, you know, pretty quickly. But there's a there's a point, right? Where you're just kind of overloading. It just goes back to still the community, man. Like, I'm telling you, there's other people out there who you have something to offer them just as much as they have something to offer you. I'm a hundred percent telling you that is true. I know it to be true because I've seen it time and time again, where an artist finds an engineer who's also a producer, the producer wants to make songs with this artist, the producer records them for free from an engineering perspective, and then they split the fucking revenues on the song, even though in a in a typical world, the producer should only be getting whatever percentage of a song, right? So get creative with how you're structuring your business.

We've talked about this so many times, but I don't think that still enough of y'all are like putting this into practice. So I'd really like urge you to try and find those people. It's not gonna be easy. Like you're not gonna find this person tomorrow who's like an engineer that you like and they're gonna record you now for free because you have something to bring them. Like it's not gonna happen overnight. But the more you're putting yourself out there, the more people you're meeting, the more people that you're like you're genuinely interested in helping them succeed, right? I'm telling you that shit's gonna come back around. We've had it time and time again where people that like we added value to have then done things for us that they should be getting paid for 100%. But because we were able to like barter services, it's like I'm telling you, it works. So it is funny how like some of the most creative people just aren't creative with business. You'd think that there would be this overlap, like I have to pay my engineer this an hour. I looked up the industry standard, and this is what it said. you can do whatever the fuck you want. It's business. Like make it work for everyone.

Get creative. Literally, fucking LaRussell. He's the greatest. The king of this, bro. Yes. This is why he's so successful, and he's built a business around his art. Yes. And he's done it the way that he wants to do it. Is because he's not too egotistical to think that he commands, you know. Shit, he probably could have charged us to come on the podcast, did he? I probably would have paid him. I yeah. Don't tell him that. We've been somehow we've never paid a guest till. Yeah. Exactly. So I mean, once again, you know, he didn't charge us to come on the podcast, but he understood that there was a barter of services, right? He was coming on to give game to y'all and to give game to our community, but he was getting content out of it. He's already posting it. He's posting a lot of clips. So he understood that that was kind of the value exchange, right? So once again, we're not this huge, you know, he's done the breakfast club, guys. Yeah, he didn't have to come out one more time. He literally went from the Breakfast Club to one more time podcast. But he understands everyone has something to offer, right? Um, so that's where I would just say, like, get creative with the business, bro.

Yeah, for sure. Anything else that we that we saw in here? I think consistency, that that kind of went back to it, but let's see. Oh. There was one more 40's engineer. Read it, read it. Getting to collab with the Obi-Wan Kenobi of his generation's engineers, OVO 40. Okay, my best advice give up on that dream. Kill it. It's you're not it's dead. 40, you know, 40, 40. But what about manifestation, Henry? Manifest something else. No, fuck that. You're working with 40, baby. Let's go. You got this. Let's go. Oh man. Appreciate you guys for tuning in. Love y'all. See you next time. Peace.