You’re not short on effort. You’re short on a system.
Answer seventeen short questions, in about three minutes, and receive one free, honest read on where your music career currently stands.
Featured on Hypebot · MA Music Industry Studies, University of Liverpool · Registered UK Company · Meta Verified
You do everything. You write it. You record it. You release it. You post it. You book the gigs. Then, you chase the money and answer all the emails at midnight.
A day off? What’s that!? The schedule is absolutely relentless, and you accept it, because ‘this is what it’s going to take’.
Why? Because breaking through into the music industry takes longer than it ever has done before. Properly longer as well. Between 2015 and 2019, thirty debut albums by British acts made the year end Top 100, the biggest sellers of that year. In the five years after, only ten did. That’s two thirds fewer new names getting through. The climb to the top got a lot steeper while you had your head down doing the work.
Meanwhile the digital soup keeps on getting denser all around you. With 100,000+ new tracks arriving on streaming platforms every single day, nearly nine out of ten never reach a thousand plays in a year. So, when it feels like you’re shouting into an empty room, you’re definitely not imagining it.
Then there’s the part nobody warns you about. You now have to pay for the privilege of all this. The ads, the promo, the playlist pitch that quietly takes more than it ever gives you back.
Four pressures (I could name a lot more), are all pulling at you at once. And better music, on its own, is not going to sort out any of them. That’s the bit that stings, because in the music industry I was brought up in, if the music was good, then that was supposed to be enough.
The Five Pillars That Hold Each Other Up
CRAFT is how I break a career down when I advise an artist. There are five main parts to your music career.
Catalogue
Rights
Audience
Finance
Touring
Each part is reliant on the other, and all take time to build to a place of sustainability. Build a genuine Audience while your Rights remain uncollected, and you certainly grow a following, but you won’t see any of the money until it’s too late. Tour hard on shaky Finance decisions, and you will be Touring all year without really ever knowing which shows actually made a profit, or sometimes, who paid at all. If you let one of the parts slip, the other four will suffer, and it’s going to take you longer to get to where you want to be.
And let’s be honest, most artists pour everything into the parts they love the most, usually the Catalogue and the making of the music. Fair enough, as well; no one wants to be sat in the tour van working through spreadsheets, right? However, a career that only feeds the creative end will quietly rot at the business end, and you rarely notice until the money dries up, momentum stalls or something else equally dramatic happens.
So that’s your CRAFT™. Not more hustle, you’ve clearly got plenty of that. CRAFT™ is the way to see all five moving parts of the business at once and go after the weakest ones first, before it starts costing you on the others.
Where CRAFT™ came from
Who am I and why listen to me?
Make no mistake, I’ve had an unconventional route with academia and the music industry. I started in this business as a rave DJ and MC; I’d left school after my A Levels and then spent years in the scene before going back to full time studies at 24. I then had a long stretch in IT, working at Channel 4, Channel 5 and the BBC, watching one technology replace another through the digital revolution and then experiencing the whole business model quietly rewire itself underneath.
All the while, I was always involved in music, juggling life as a performer, producer, representing artists, musicians and bands at every level. Music pulled me back full time about twelve years ago, and I built IQ Artist Management as a solo operation.
I’ve learned that my unconventional mix matters, because I’ve seen this industry from angles most managers never witness. I’ve seen it from the bottom up, and the top down. From behind the decks and from inside the machines that broadcast it. And all the while from a desk where the contracts get signed, the audiences are built, and the royalties and the touring get decided.
I’ve studied all of this formally too. I have a BA in Music Business and Finance, First Class Honours, and an MA in Music Industry Studies at the University of Liverpool, awarded with a Distinction. What these qualifications taught me, more than anything, was how the music industry works and why it works the way it does.
CRAFT™ was developed and backed from these studies and also my experience of watching careers spring leaks in the same five places, over and over again, whatever the genre. Catalogue, Rights, Audience, Finance, Touring.
CRAFT™ is something I have developed based on well researched evidence to help you the next time you have a thought such as ‘what am I doing wrong’ or ‘I need a manager/agent’ or ‘I need to do what they are doing’.
You don’t and won’t make it in this industry on luck, and talent, no matter how good you are, will only carry you so far. You’ll make it by getting the business side in order, so you last long enough for the talent you have to pay off. That’s what CRAFT™ gives you: a clear read on which parts are letting you down, and the order to tackle them in.
I can’t make the graft disappear, but with CRAFT™, I can put you on the right track, which will give you the absolute best chance possible.
Answer 17 questions to see your own five scores across each pillar. You’ll have a clear idea of where you’re doing well and where you’re leaking time and money.
It takes about three minutes.
