5 Ways to Avoid Feeling Stuck In Your Music Career

In the hustle and bustle, it's easy to feel discouraged or unsatisfied with your current career progression. This is especially so with something as personal as music. It's not uncommon to pour all of your heart and soul into what you do, only to feel like you're not yielding the results you desired. The longer you've been in the industry, the more likely you are to encounter a creative rut. The everyday work routine becomes mundane, and you start feeling down and doubtful about your career.

While there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution to combat this, here are a few ideas to try and reignite the passion you once had. Take a look at these five possibilities and see which of them makes the most sense for where you're at now. Remember, this too shall pass. It always does.

Assess what you really want

Without a clear direction of what we want to achieve, we may lose a sense of accomplishment and feel dispirited at work. Another common rationale is our goals are shifting, but we've yet to recognize that or make further steps to attain our goals.

Take a moment to think about what it is that you really want out of your career, and don't be afraid to be specific and dream big. Instead of saying, "I want to make music full time", think about what that really means for you and be sure of it. Next, take a few steps back, and think of a few small goals that are achievable within the coming months. By realigning yourself to your goals, you'll be able to see better progress in your profession.

Map out what you need to get there

While envisioning your career's future, it's easy to list 'full-time music' as your ultimate goal and call it a day. That's a great goal, but it's going to take some time (and the fulfillment of many smaller tasks) to get there; this is where your one, three, and six-month goals come in. They all help you identify and build towards a larger purpose. Here's an example below:

For a start, you might make your one-month objective to connect with five bands in your area. Next, to build off that, you would make your three-month goal to book a local show with a relatively well-known band in your town. This starts to get you traction and in front of more fans while giving you more live show experience.

Your six-month goal might be to book a weekend or week-long tour in your region. At this point, you've built up a bit of a local fanbase, garnered some live show experience, or booked a small tour that goes within a few hours of your local city. All of this gets you closer to your ultimate goal of making music full-time by building your connections and fanbase. Plus, it's tangible. You can see the results and the progress, and celebrate them.

Change up your routine

Oftentimes we get so set in our routine that it's not only a little boring, but it's a total creativity and motivation killer. Ever wonder why you have the best ideas in the shower, right before bed, or on vacation? It's because you're relaxed and not cluttered by a to-do list, so your brain is free to find new inspiration and ideas.

Do something as simple as working from a coffee shop instead of your home, modifying your desk space, or doing something totally different on the weekend that you wouldn't normally do (music related or not) can be enough to start to get you out of a funk and reinvigorate that creativity.

It might be challenging at first, but try changing up your routine every now and then. We adapt so quickly to new environments and situations that it can require constant effort, but that's the fun of it. It keeps you creative.

something new with your music

Just as doing something for the first time in your life helps you stay active and motivated, so does attempting new things in your music. This could mean actually changing up your music if you're bored of it or feel like it just isn't resonating, but it could also be changing up what surrounds it. Think of your music career as a sandbox. You don't have to keep building the same thing over and over — it's perfectly fine to play and have fun with it. Don't be afraid to experiment.

Stay open to change

Change is the only constant in the music industry and our lives, so adaptability is key. The ability to pivot and identify when something isn't working is key.

Your goals may have changed over the last few years, and that's normal. Sometimes, when our personal goals in life change, our goals for our music must evolve too. Say, you wanted to tour full-time ten years ago but now have a family you don't want to leave. You have to adjust your goals for your music career as well. It doesn't mean you can't do it full-time, you just have to adapt and work around your new schedule.

5 Ways To Fail In Music

Because success means something different to each one of us as songwriters, we should also take time to think about what failure looks like to us. You might feel like you've failed in some way if the single you just released isn't getting any attention or your band just split up, but there are almost always broader things going on behind the scenes that cause problems in music. Here are five common ways that failure happens in music:

Letting differences get in the way of collaborative relationships

It takes most bands years to develop their sound enough to create music that connects with audiences. Maybe it's strange to say, but the secret formula to the success of many bands is that they found ways not to break up. The relationships in bands are completely unique and surprisingly complex. When arguments about money or petty differences begin to drown out everything else, bands are at risk of forgetting why they're together and giving up. But we should also remember that not every breakup in music is a failure. Sometimes relationships run their course and need to end. However, when a talented band with lots of promise acrimoniously parts ways, it's a sad situation that probably could've been prevented.

Criticizing your work so much that you can't finish songs

Objectivity is essential for having an idea of what you create is good or not. But there comes a point when too much criticism can be paralyzing in music. If you love creating music but can't manage to finish your songs, this could be the reason why. The "it's never good enough" approach is a weird and somewhat self-indulgent way to fail when you stop and think about it. It allows the songwriter to protect themselves by believing what they want to about their work by never finishing and sharing it with people. This keeps them in a state of perpetual arrested development. It takes courage to finish songs and share them. This means that if you're serious enough about music to do this, then you're succeeding in at least one way.

Focusing on conventional success more than creative fulfillment

If you want streams, views, money, and critical acclaim more than the creative fulfillment of making music, then your priorities are backwards. There's nothing wrong with wanting to earn money and affirmation from your music––music costs money to create, after all. But if conventional success drives you more than anything else, you're going to have a tough time connecting to audiences in a human and lasting way. By loving music creation and being able to throw yourself into it again and again, you'll be able to create music over the long term no matter how conventionally successful you are.

Letting negativity shape your work

Negativity can be a massive obstacle for developing artists to overcome in music. Your music might be amazing and perfectly promoted, but that doesn't mean things are going to turn out like you hope they will. Since this is a pursuit when you can do everything right and still never find success, it's common for musicians to get jaded and let negativity shape their music. The more jaded we become, the easier it is to lose focus on the joy of creating music. This is a complex issue to talk about because so many reading this have sacrificed so much for their careers. But by creating in a sustainable way, we'll be able to keep rewarding music creation and performance at the forefront of our musical pursuits, which leads me to one of the most damaging ways to fail in music.

Burning out by creating in an unsustainable way

Burnout is not only one of the biggest reasons great musicians give up, but why so many musicians don't continue making music in their 30's, 40's, and beyond. Creating sustainably means making music in a way that doesn't strain relationships, put you into debt, or keep you from being a healthy and fulfilled person. Music is brutally hard to pursue seriously, and we often think we're just one sacrifice away from landing that record deal or creating the perfect album. The all-or-nothing success stories we hear about in music are incredibly rare and often dramatized for branding purposes. For most of us to find our audiences, we need to diligently work for years and years. By creating sustainably, you'll be able to make music for as long as you want to and not just one season of your life.