2. If You Don’t “Get” Technology, Don’t Worry – Your iPhone May Be All You Need To Get Started
Having live videos of your performing can be incredibly valuable for your music career.
In order to create a compelling video of you performing, you have to play well, with passion, and with multiple camera angles.
What’s more interesting, a single camera shoot or a multi-camera shoot?
Right, the multi-camera shoot, because when you are able to shoot different views of your performing, you provide visual depth to accompany the emotional gravitas of your music making.
Unfortunately, the multi-camera approach can cost over $2,000 if you choose to buy multiple premium cameras for your shoot, like four GoPro cameras.
Luckily, according to Michael Reed, Eastman faculty member who teaches musicians how to integrate technology into their careers, you don’t need more than your iPhone and your friends’ iPhones.
All you need to do is purchase the RecoLive multi-camera recording app, get a couple iPhones together, and make for yourself an incredible multi-camera shoot for a price that is infinitely cheaper than using four “GoPro” cameras or a professional video recording studio.
1. Music Is a Social Art
At an event like Chamber Music America, one thing is clear – the most social musicians leave with the most connections, business cards, music & money making opportunities, and more.
In performance and in our general musical lives, collaborating with other people is essential to our success. Music is always a social art. Even if you are a solo electronic musician who literally does not work with any other musicians, there is a social element to sharing your music with the world.
Enter successful jazz artist Darrell Grant, Portland State University professor who knows how important collaboration is to the career of a musician.
According to Grant, when you collaborate in music, you can leverage other people’s abilities and statuses to augment your own. Collaboration can also help us find ground that wasn’t before tread.
A prime example of new ground tread in classical music thanks to collaboration and social media was the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, a phenomenal event that brought together dozens of high-level musicians from around the globe to perform classical music broadcast on the world’s most popular video streaming website.
Barriers of entry in collaboration do exist, as Grant points. These include money, not knowing who to ask, and having too much pride to ask for “help.”
At the end of the day, it is a silly thought from a business perspective to think that collaboration is merely asking for “help” – it is an opportunity that you can leverage to augment your own music career while helping others enhance theirs.
Final Thoughts
The answer to having a great music career couldn’t be laid out any more clearly than at Eastman’s pre-conference presentation at Chamber Music America.
When you combine collaboration with cemented core branding, DIY multi-camera smart phone technology, social media audience building and engagement, and associating your music with greater economic and/or social causes and values, you have, without any shadow of a doubt, the blueprint behind success for a musician in 2015.
Notice how different this value-giving, community-engaging, customizable, revenue-oriented, and modern, 21st-century method is much different than many traditional music school values for creating a great career have been, such as those values that advocate winning lots of competitions or putting all of your time into attaining the coveted audition into one of two dozen professional orchestras in America that can provide a substantial living.
Times are changing very rapidly, and as musicians, we must adapt or our potential careers could perish. It is truly inspiring to see schools that do have such strong ties to tradition, like the Eastman School of Music, allocate energy to building strong resources for modern, career-first musicians.
The next morning at Chamber Music America, when the main festivities began, keynote speaker Jane Chu, Chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts, stated to the conference attendees that $700 billion dollars of the national GDP came from the arts.
So how are you going to tap into this nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollar market?
Well, I know how you can, and Eastman does too.
When our collective musical vocabulary becomes large enough to not only understand the principles behind harmony, counterpoint, analysis, and so on, but also branding, marketing, and bringing our product to a market in order to generate money in our music careers, our educations as professional, career-obtaining musicians can only then be considered complete.