Other than being a busy voice coach teaching artists out to get more fans, I’m also someone who regularly gets called to do various types of gigs on various instruments, being good to excellent at a wide variety of different styles of music has been of huge importance to getting call-backs.
However, a learning experience over the last few years has grown out of a developing dissatisfaction in playing for other people. As I developed my own purely technical skills as a player, I was able to apply myself to diverse and difficult genres, but then also found myself coming up various musical ideas of my own. Sadly, whilst I had all these ideas that I had great desire to use, there was no home for it in the music I was making for others. “How to get more fans” was not a question I was asking myself, because I wasn’t out to get any for myself.
What made this situation worse was that I lacked a focal point onto which to focus my efforts so as to harness those ideas as something more than just ideas in themselves. I was stuck in a rut of merely being a good musician.
Eventually I got tired of this and started the process of writing more seriously for myself, and in the process started to gain a deeper understanding of the difference between an artist and a musician, and how that relates to the question of “how to get more fans”. Here’s what I’ve found.
The key to being a successful musician is generalisation
As a musician, if you want to get to play as many different gigs as possible and play with as many people as possible, it is important to practice constantly to develop the ability to fit into a variety of different styles and do whatever is asked of you is critical, but it’s this generalisation that makes you a better musician.
In contrast…
The key to being a successful artist is specialisation.
Here is something to try. Every day, play/sing through the same song at least once. Literally, do it everyday. Play through it as if it is a performance to an imaginary audience. Aim to get it as good as it can be on that day. As you play through that song every day, within a few days you will find that your performance of the song will be better, and things within the song will have changed. Even if you’re not intentionally practicing the piece, you will have automatically increased the dynamic range of the song, added inflections, and unconsciously amplified idiosyncrasies in your own musical style simply because of unconscious musical preferences. You are automatically ingraining what makes you YOU, which starts to make you a distinct personality… and listeners love distinctive personalities – this is a simple way to turn your music slowly but surely into something that solves the issue of “how to get more fans”. The best artists in the world go over and over and over the same thing so many times that it becomes effortless to perform their songs, and the song becomes theirs – they own the song. Time spent doing this over and over is the only way to develop your own artistry and style, to bring out what is truly ‘you’.
This is what it takes to be an artist…
… to be so good at one particular thing, that people choose to listen to you because you sound like no-one else and they like it. It’s not because of how fast you can play, or how high you can sing, or how many chords you use, nor the opposite of those things.
Ask yourself “are you listenable?”, and you will find the answer to “how to get more fans”.
Oh and to finish off… A great clinic by John Mayer sums this up simply by asking:
Are you listenable?
When the goal is not to add more notes to your range, or play faster than anyone else, when the goal is to be listenable, suddenly it’s no longer a competition. When you realise there is no ‘prize’ or qualification of being ‘best’, when you realise that there is no such classification in music as an art form, what is the goal? To be listenable.
So, are you listenable?