“Just because something maybe doesn’t fit in the moment in time or maybe it just seems like it’s a newer thing for the community that you’re in doesn’t mean it’s not going to work. It just means sometimes that you have to be the one to try. You don’t necessarily need a bigger company or a bigger entity to represent you. It’s just all it matters is you just find some people that this is going to work for, and you help them. If they change, then you’re doing something good. It doesn’t need to be more complicated, but you don’t know that until you try it.”

~Michael Averill

“I think the thing I would most want to convey is everything is learnable for you and the specifics for me at the time in music would have been around ear training and playing by ear and improvising, but really like you alluded to earlier. So much of what we do in music is transferable to everything in life.”

~Christopher Sutton

“Press release is not your entire PR strategy. So I just want to make that super clear so there’s no confusion. It is a tool that can absolutely be really helpful but it is not your campaign. When you are writing a press release, you want to think of it as an announcement so it has to be something really newsworthy that someone besides your mom and your grandma would be interested in. ”

~Kaytee Long Becker

“If you want to have success in music, it’s really about promotion. It’s like this should be the main job, not the production or at least find a good balance between these two. Most musicians just neglect promotion or think it’s just about posting a couple of times and all that stuff, but that’s just not true. It’s a lot of work and your promotion should be the main focus besides production.”

~Tobias Rauscher

“What does Cheryl want most? Anyone will tell you, oh, Grammy. Like my clarity is so clear that other people know how to show up for me. I think that that’s a big miss for a lot of musicians, like if you want to tour and to do Spotify and to do licensing and to do this amazing yes, I am a big fan of doing all the things, but what’s the most important thing right now? What is the thing that’s going to give you the biggest step up to help all the other things that you want to do? If you can give yourself the gift of focusing on that one thing and the clarity of like, this is what I’m going after right now, then other people are going to know how to step up. If you don’t know what you want, people are not going to know how to show up and help you.”

~Cheryl B. Engelhardt

“Figure out who you are, figure out what your voice is, carry yourself the way you’re meant to carry yourself through life because that whole thing that they talk about when you’re a kid, like everyone’s special and everyone has their own thing, sometimes I thought that’s just to appease the people who are not going to be successful. Maybe I won’t be successful and they’re just trying to make me feel good. What I was thinking is not true. What they’re saying is very true, is that we’re each a fingerprint, we each have our own thing and that one thing is the thing that’s going to be interesting to everybody.”

~Chris SD

“I just stood there shocked and said, “It’s a piano.” I later learned that my dad felt impressed that it was really important that I have that piano at that time of my life. My parents used a part of a small inheritance my mom received to purchase it.” ~Jason Tonioli

“Your value is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them. No matter what we’re doing, whether it’s music, whether it’s a barista at a coffee shop or whatever, we’re serving others. Even on the music side, if we’re serving composers, we can think our direct contact would be a supervisor or a music library. But the reality is that we’re ultimately serving the directors and the producers and the production companies. We’re helping them tell their story through music.”

~Michael Elsner

“Your attitude is what will get you hired again.

I strongly believe in that. I’ve hired musicians that are as strong as others, but they have a better attitude when they’re coming to work. And I was like, I wish I had this one person because they’re better, but I don’t want to deal with all this drama and stress and negativity. So, I rather have this guy that is one, much less. But it’s like a beautiful, great attitude. Everybody’s happy to be with him.”

~Ion Zanca

“So, there is this mindset journey that musicians have to go on which starts with all of this undoing and unknowing and un-programming that has to happen from all these years of feeling like this is the only way, like this is just how it is for musicians, we all struggle to then having an expectation that I can thrive. That’s why I call it a journey, because the undoing has to happen first and then it’s like really, this ownership of, oh my God, I’m not just a musician, I’m a business owner that is a musician. That energy completely changes everything. And then the energy of “I can be prosperous with my music passion”. I can do it full time; I can be way more successful than I ever imagined, and I can do it on my own. I don’t have to wait to be discovered. Which to me is a very reactionary, passive experience where you’re just hoping that you’re the one in 50 million artists that gets discovered and then gets signed, whatever that means anymore. And finally, I could just sail away and it’s like, wait a second. Instead of waiting, passively waiting for someone to come find you, what if you just found yourself and created this yourself that you can do right now instead of waiting? So that to me is like really the big mindset piece around it.”

~Tiamo de Vettori