Be advised: professional artists are business owners. This is a key message of our company, this blog, and everything that we seek to do through the educational side of our business. If you are an artist and you desire to or already do make a living from your art then you must recognize you are in business… you are a business owner.

I read dozens of new business books each year. Very few of them speak to the music business owner, yet most of the lessons of how to run a business apply directly to running a music business. You have fans (customers) who buy your products (music and merchandise) and in order to be successful you need to grow your fan (customer) base and keep your current base happy. True, this isn’t the sexy approach to the music business and it wasn’t the reason you got involved in being a musician. Yet it is possibly the most powerful lesson I could share with you.

This is why I am launching a new service called The Farm Team and will be open to only 20 bands/artists who do not currently have managers but are very serious about growing their business.

As many of you know I am a life/business coach – a service I provide for anyone even if they aren’t in the music business. The difference with The Farm Team is that I will be serving partly as a coach and partly as a mentor and the service is specifically for musicians. My interest is to help these 20 select artists grow their business to their definition of success through weekly one-on-one calls with me. If you feel that this would be appropriate for you or your band, you can read more about it and apply for the program here: http://thefarmteam.com

Regardless of whether you choose to apply for this group, I’d like to leave you with the simple message again. As soon as you choose to make a living performing your art, you have assumed the role of business owner. Embrace and appreciate this role – it will serve you well.

The Artist Farm and I have created a gift for our community – a pledge to eliminate litter at concerts.  You can read why you should sign this below, or you can go directly to the pledge here: www.cleanconcert.org

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I think we can all agree that the world would be a better place if we humans could be zero waste. No more trash, and everything used or decomposing in a healthy cycle the way all other animals do it.

The entire ecosystem of packaging, creation, use, disposal, recycling, and all that… it’s big- too big for most of us to comprehend. But there is something simple you can understand. You.

What can you do to affect any change here?

The answer starts with a simple task. When you purchase something, the cycle of disposal is yours with that ownership. In other words, if you consumed it, it is your responsibility to dispose of it properly. For bodily waste, we have toilets. For consumer waste, we have bins. Much like you wouldn’t put your bodily waste all over the ground, you shouldn’t put your trash their either.

Unfortunately, the current thinking goes that if you paid money for a ticket then someone else should clean up after you; that it is your right to litter. There is a better way!

If you want to change the world, you must first change yourself. You can start by not externalizing your responsibility. You can start by embracing sustainable values that apply everywhere (at home or camping in the woods) over situational values (that somehow it is ok to litter at concerts). You can start right now.

I have created a pledge to keep concert grounds clean, to take responsibility for your own trash, and therefore to contribute to a cleaner environment for all.

This Clean Concert Pledge is about more than littering. It is about:

• assuming your personal responsibility.
• recognizing that you are the door to change in the world.
• seeing your connection to all those around you.
• not having to worry about sitting on a paper plate covered in mustard… because grass is so much better.

I hope you’ll agree, that you see the wisdom in this, that you’ll sign the pledge here: www.cleanconcert.org, and spread the word.

Let’s keep changing the world one person at a time.

Great businesses tend to have great systems at work, many times as the foundation of the business.  Having a system as a foundation provides an economic engine and allows for more time to innovate on the higher levels of the business.  Of course, a system can always go through improvement and innovation in its own right.

In the music business we have been going through a significant shift.  One of the biggest changes is that the primary revenue stream for most artists is now the live show (touring).  For all of the income made in touring there isn’t a shared understanding of how to make a show great (from the business side).  Feeling the need to have a system that incorporated best marketing practices and a timeline for how to carry out these tasks, The Artist Farm created a tour marketing system.  The results (in current form) took several years of testing to hone.  I wrote a book on this system called “Squeezing The Show” which we are selling now on our publications page .  The cost is $87 which includes my 3 years of work at real management companies compiling this system and creating the spreadsheet and email templates included in the Tool Kit.  Though I’m not the best at selling things, I can assure you that you will make your $87 back within a couple of shows if you apply all of the techniques I teach.

This book is written for artists and managers but I think the following people will find it useful:

Anyone in the music business

• Managers (use it as a manual to train your new hires, learn some tricks yourself)
• Self-Managed artists (learn how to market your shows and get more people)
• Agents (use it for your self-managed artists, pick up some ideas of how managers work)
• Record Labels (doing 360 deals and want to know how to service touring?)

Anyone who has an event based business (the timeline tasklist idea is universal for event businesses)

• Photographer, Craft makers, Painters who participate in art shows
• Caterers
• Speakers/Lecturers

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