A New Study Identifies The Top 6 Mistakes Musicians Make Trying To Get Into The Music Industry

April 26, 2010 - PRLog -- A study performed by a music career mentor and touring guitarist Tom Hess, uncovers several common mistakes made by musicians who are trying to build a music career.  

Hess says, "In addition to mentoring musicians from all over the world on how to build a successful career in the music business, I have several free music career assessments on my website where I ask musicians specific questions to test their effectiveness in building a music career.  From my experience of mentoring hundreds of musicians and after analyzing the responses of thousands of people to my music career surveys, I found that musicians tend to make the same kinds of mistakes over and over again in their pursuit to become professional musicians."  

Among the music career mistakes uncovered by Hess, the following made the top of the list:

- Trying to 'get one's name out there'.  The main goal of most new bands and musicians is to get their music heard by as many people as possible.  "Although this may seem logical, it is the wrong approach to take", says Hess.  "Before trying to be seen and heard by a lot of people, it is often more important to focus on 'converting' the people who hear and see you into becoming actual fans. This 'conversion' is the first key to your promotional success", he adds.

- Believing that social media websites are the keys to music promotion on the internet.  Music industry companies are far more impressed by the popularity of a band's personal website, than in how many friends a band has at MySpace or any other website that is controlled by someone other than the band. Building traffic to a personal website is more difficult to do but will do much more for helping one's music career grow.

- Not having great live performance skills. Many musicians, who are not yet in a good band, put off developing their live performing and stage presence skills. This is a big reason why talented musicians don't get into really good bands that they audition for.  "If people only wanted to hear the music, they would listen to you at home. Both fans and record labels want (and expect) to see a REAL show. Neglecting this area results in talented musicians and bands becoming quickly forgotten," states Hess.

- Focusing too much on acquiring more new fans, rather than making the existing fans more loyal.  This is particularly true in the beginning of a band's music career. "The number of fans a band has is only of secondary importance compared to the number of intensely loyal and fanatical followers.  Increasing the number of people in the second group will increase the number of your overall fans through powerful word of mouth", says Hess.

- Not being able to finance your music career growth.  Building a music career requires significant investments of money and time, and most musicians are financially unprepared to grow their career to the point where record companies become interested to invest additional money and resources to fund their career further.   Hess says, "Most musicians and bands miss opportunities because they can't afford to take advantage of them, or because they don't have the freedom of time to invest into their career.  One of the easiest ways for a musician to achieve such freedom is by teaching their instrument.  Teaching music, when done effectively, makes it very easy to earn a lot of money even while working part time."

- Not having a clear idea of what record companies look for and expect from new bands. Hess says, "In a nutshell, it's very useful to think of record companies like banks that lend money to people or small businesses. Record companies make most of their decisions about whom they will work with and what the terms will be in much the same way that a bank will determine who they will loan money to and what the terms of the loan will be.  In other words, both banks and record companies are primarily concerned with how much value and risk you present to them before they decide to invest their resources to work with you."

Although becoming a professional musician cannot be achieved with a simple formula, avoiding the commonly made music career mistakes will help to increase one's odds of success.

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Tom Hess is a highly successful guitar teacher, professional touring guitarist and recording artist. He mentors musicians online to develop their own professional music careers. Visit http://tomhess.net and read music career articles and get free music career resources on this page: http://www.tomhess.net/MusicCareerResources.aspx.