Musician’s Notebook

It’s all well and good to have dreams for the future, and every band does–every band has a certain definition of what “making it” involves. But what they don’t know is how to get there. And while there’s a lot of learning required to find out how to get there in areas as diverse as marketing and public relations to management and organizational structures, there is a tool that anyone, or any group, can apply in practice.

Set targets for the near future - as in the next few weeks or months - and then work towards them.

Too many musicians look forward to ‘making it’ but don’t even know how to measure ‘making it’ - is getting a record deal (not for me, thanks), selling a few hundred copies of the band’s demo CD over the year at gigs,  or rocking out to a sold-out stadium?

If they don’t know what their desired end result is, there’s no way they can succeed on that level, whether the band objectively achieves success or not. The musicians in a band have to have a defined method of measuring that success.

So if this is pre-requisite for big-time success, what about small-time success? Worst still is the fact the bands who have no stated targets for the long-term never have a set of immediate targets!

When Midnight.Haulkerton first released the band’s name to the public in early 2007, a year and a half after they’d started writing music and planning for the future, we stated our immediate goal: have 1,000 song downloads within 6 months. We didn’t want a lot of attention yet, before we had recorded an album and readied our campaigns in full, so this seemed like an achievable goal without a hell of a lot of promotion involved.

But yesterday, only five months later, the download counter passed the 4,000 mark from the band’s main site without any real promotion whatsoever. Some of the band’s songs are hosted elsewhere, such as on the Sydney Morning Herald’s site, among others, and the combined count is expected to be double or triple that figure.

We weren’t consciously thinking about this figure most of the time, we just let it happen; but that target was in the back of our heads, churning away, as we worked to ready our various materials and campaigns. The strategy succeeded.