Successful Musicians Podcast – Episode #35: Venture Virtuoso: Jon Cheney’s Business-Music Balancing Act

Successful Musicians Podcast Episode 35

Interviewee: Jon Cheney

Interviewer: Jason Tonioli

Hey, this is Jason Tonioli. I’m a piano player that grew up believing it wasn’t possible to earn a living and support a family with music. I’ve proven that idea was wrong and I’ve met hundreds of other people who have found success with their music. This podcast features stories of musicians who have found their own personal version of success and fulfillment in both music and life. This podcast is meant to inspire musicians and help them believe in their abilities and motivate them to share their talents with others. This is the Successful Musicians Podcast. 

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Jason: Welcome to the podcast today. My special guest is my friend, Jon Cheney, a fellow whitewater kayaker and piano player who has also had a business career that is not your normal path for a musician. Jon, I’m excited to have you here because you’ve been super successful in the tech and in the business world. With your companies, you’ve done some amazing recordings as well and are continuing to grow on that. Welcome to the show.

Jon: Thanks so much, Jason. Really excited to be here.

Jason: Jon, let’s dive in. I love your journey that you’ve had as a musician. Maybe start us back to when you were starting to play piano and you didn’t have that normal, or I guess what a lot of people would call a normal musician path to have a music career. Start us out I guess as a kid. When did you start playing piano and how did you get to where you are today?

Jon: Yeah. Thanks for the intro here. I started playing piano as most people do, just tinkering around on the piano at home. My parents, they really believed in the power of music in the home and just the power that could bring into a home, and the spirit it can bring into a home. I was born in Houston and when I was about two years old probably, my parents bought a piano, and this was before they had a bed frame. They just had the box springs and the mattress. It was a comfortable home, whatever. My dad had a good job. He was very successful, but it’s very early in his career and he bought this nice Yamaha G7 or something, that’s plenty good, just baby grand, but still sits in their home today, and I love playing it. It’s my home piano. I started playing when I was 3 or 4 years old, and then didn’t actually officially start taking piano lessons until I was about 7. I picked it up very quickly.

My teacher was pretty good, pretty standard going through the basics. One thing that she encouraged me to do a lot of, which I tended to really like was sight reading. She didn’t care about me mastering a song quite as much as… we did sometimes. We had those recital songs and I’d master those pieces, but she would just be like, “It’s good enough. Let’s go to the next one. Good enough.” Sometimes we would go to a lesson, we’d go to the next song in the book, and I would play it. She’d say, “You know what? I don’t think you need to practice that for a week. Could you practice it and get better at it? Yes, but let’s move to the next one.”, until I ran onto something that’s a little bit harder where she said, “Oh, you stumbled here, why don’t you practice on that and then we’ll come back?” And so I got really good at sight reading and that opened up lots of opportunities, obviously. I took lessons till I was about 12 years old. My dad got called away as a mission president for our church when I was 12 years old, down to Paraguay and so moved down there and from age 12 to 15, I had no piano teacher, no nothing but my piano teacher had given me a great foundation of this sight reading so I could just open up.

We brought tons of piano books and there was a music store down there where we could buy music. I really enjoyed playing movie music. That was something that I really loved. I’d buy everything that I could, and just play everything that I could. Then in middle school while I was down there in Paraguay, I got introduced to jazz and joined the jazz band. Jazz opened up a whole new level where all of a sudden it wasn’t about sight reading, it was about taking the music away and saying, “Hey, here’s a few letters and numbers. See if you can make something up that sounds good.” Then I had to learn a little bit more about theory and different chord progressions, and things like that. Obviously, I think that sight reading and being able to quickly do something and fill in the gaps as well as that jazz and improvisation background led me to being able to start composing at about age 15. As I came back, I would say even maybe 16, I got hooked up with Jon Schmidt’s cousin. He sat down with me for a total of three lessons. He went to my parents and said, “I don’t have anything else to teach him right now. He should just play.” I always knew that I was above average, and I could do stuff very easily on the piano. It was then that I started to really say, “Okay, maybe I can do a little bit more.” I started composing at about age 16 and here I am 20 years later and still doing it.

Jason: Still doing it for fun. Your college career in going to school, did you study music at all or you went into a whole other area?

Jon: When I went to BYU, my dad had done, as I mentioned, very well for himself in life. I said, “Hey, why not do the same thing?” He was an accountant by major, and then he was an MBA. He never actually did accounting in his career. But I said, “Hey, you know what? I’ll learn some good business skills. I’ll learn accounting and do an MBA.” I got into BYU, into accounting, first the first class, the pre-business, whatever, and was taught by a guy named Norm Nemrow, a really cool guy. He thoroughly and very quickly convinced me that I didn’t want to do accounting. Not by actually telling me that, but just sitting in his lectures, I’m like, “This is not for me.”

I actually transitioned to a music major at BYU and said, “Hey, this is cool.” I started going to different classes. I got through maybe four or five classes there and said, “You know what? I don’t really love the way that this is pushing me.” It was pushing me more towards piano performance. They had some composing and things like that, but it just wasn’t interesting to me. I didn’t like the ways that they were wanting me to play and do stuff. I was just like, “Okay, I’m going to do this on my own.” It was that one. I went on a mission and came back after that. I served in Taiwan and I came back, and I said, “Okay, what’s the fastest way for me to get out of college while still getting my degree?” That was Chinese because I could test out of a bunch and got a bunch of AP credits from high school. About two hard years of work and I was done with that.

I’ve always been an entrepreneur. I’ve always been from an early age, even when I was eight years old, selling door to door mistletoe that I would go and cut off the trees in Houston. I knew that I wanted to be able to have control over my income, control over how I could support my family. Music, to me, didn’t feel like… Number one, I had this experience, like I mentioned at BYU, that was… I didn’t like being told what to do, I guess, if that makes sense.

Jason: That makes total sense.

Jon: Then, I actually did some composing for some commercials and things like that. I still didn’t like being told what to do by those people because I’d write this beautiful thing and they’d be like, “I don’t like it. I’d like to, and it’s awesome.” Anyway, I quickly became a little disenamored with that side of it and at least for that moment, I think I’ve grown a lot since then and been more collaborative probably than I was.

I really realized that in order for me to be able to live the comfortable lifestyle that I had grown up with, it wasn’t going to be writing music for commercials and doing that music pathway and so I made a very conscious decision to say, okay, “I’m going to start businesses.” I’m a business guy, I’m an entrepreneur. I’m going to do that and I’m going to keep music just as a side thing. Throughout the years, I’ve published six or seven albums and I play and perform whenever I get a chance. I’ve had some times where I’m doing it more than others, but I always find myself sitting at the piano, whether it’s at my keyboard here next to my computer or at my grand piano or whatever. I’m just like, “Man, I really enjoy this. I wish I could do this more. I really enjoy composing.” That’s something that I think probably challenges my entrepreneur mind because an entrepreneur has to be able to do a lot of things at once to put all the pieces together. You know this, Jason.

Jason: Oh, yeah.

Jon: You are the same, right? You’ve got to be able to do the sales, the marketing, the product design, the customer feedback, send the contracts and collect the money, whatever. You have to do everything until it gets big enough to where you can hire other people to help. I think orchestration is fun because you get to create the melody and then all the counterpoint and all the different things, the bass, and then all the thrills that go along with a good, fun composition. I’ve enjoyed doing that a lot more lately. I really have a desire down the road to do a motion picture. I think that would be really fun.

Jason: Very cool. Where you’ve been in that business entrepreneur path for several years, probably almost 20 years now, you’re probably getting up there. As you look at other musicians, because I know you’ve got other friends that have been musicians and know a lot of people, what are some of the pitfalls you see that musicians typically have that if they’d had that business background that would have made their life a little easier and get their music out there?

Jon: I don’t know a lot of rich musicians. Obviously, there are some – Walk of the Public, Imagine Dragons. They’re making a lot of money. You’re a big rock band, pop band, K-pop band, whatever you are. Unless you hit it big, which is almost impossible to plan. It’s absolutely just like entrepreneurship. Those that hit it big, there’s a huge element of luck and you have to be prepared. You have to put in your time and all of that but ultimately, it’s really hard to make money. I know very good musicians at all levels, whether they’re just an individual performer, a composer, a songwriter, whatever it is, and they do fine. They make enough to make 80 grand a year, 60 grand a year, 100 grand a year, maybe even a little bit more than that. They can provide for their family but you’re never going to get ahead in life making 100 grand a year. If you want to go on nice vacations and have the freedom to buy the nicest instrument, I’m right now finishing a purchase of a 250-thousand-dollar piano and I’m very grateful for that. But it’s also 20 years of entrepreneurship, crazy blood, sweat and tears to be able to have the potential to even do that.

Musicians that are much better than me can look at that piano and say, “Hey, wow, I could do so much with that thing.” Yeah, I get it. I’ve been there for many years, but it takes something more than the music to be able to make the music possible. I think a lot of people, and I think the pathway that I got okay with was, “Hey, I’m going to make this a hobby, and I’m going to still do it a lot, and I’m going to try to put out an album every year or two.” Lately, I’ve been putting out Christmas stuff every Christmas and things like that and maybe accelerating a little bit on the composing front. But it took years of saying, “Hey, first, I’m going to just really set my family up well so that they’re comfortable and I can send my kids to gymnastics. My wife can buy a horse if she wants to and be able to.” A horse isn’t cheap, but the really expensive thing is paying for the barn and the feed and maintaining it and everything, boarding it or whatever it is you have to do.

13:05 Life is expensive. It doesn’t stop. It’s like the river. The river just keeps flowing and keeps flowing and doesn’t stop the next month. The next month’s mortgage,  rent, car payment, insurance payment or everything is always there, but I really believe that you can have a really good musical career on the side. You really can if that’s what you really want to focus on. Then at the right time, once you’ve got your million-dollar house paid off and you’ve got some savings and you’ve got whatever it is, now all of a sudden, your kids are a little bit older, you can say, “Hey, I’m going to devote more time to music.” I’ve also thought more from a spiritual perspective, but there’s going to be a lot of time for us to do the things that we want to do. I personally believe we’ll have the ability to do those things after this life. I’m not saying not to do it now, but don’t feel like you have to cram everything into now. I think that’s what I’m trying to say.

I do a ton of things. I mentioned this even at our concert the other night. I’ve got several business ventures that are going on, and that’s crazy. I love playing the piano. I love whitewater kayaking. I love mountain biking. I actually live on a farm and it’s insanely busy. I’m just taking care of making sure everything stays alive and then killing the weeds that aren’t supposed to be alive and everything else. It’s just a massive amount of work. I could spend eight hours a day and not finish all week long and not finish everything I need to do on the farm and do that all summer long. I just have lots of competing priorities, and I want to have 70 hours a day. I’ve said that to my wife a hundred times. I wish I had 70 hours in a day so that I could get everything done I want to, but you really just have to say, “Hey, you know what? I’m going to try to have some balance here.” By the way, another thing that I didn’t mention that’s extremely important is I have four kids and a wife that want to see me and hang out with me.

There’s a time and a season for every purpose under heaven. I think you just have to find the balance that you’re okay with. Now, some people are going to be pulled to say, “Hey, you know what? I need to do music right now.” Oh, my gosh. I’m going to cheer you on and go do it. What you’re going to do is you’re going to say, “Hey, you know what? I’m going to do music full-time and I’m going to delay maybe the house or those vacations or some of the other things I’m talking about and you’re just going to really focus on that because that’s what makes you happy.” Ultimately, I think that’s your guide, right? What makes you go to bed and say, “I’m comfortable with my life. I’m happy.”

Jason: I know lots and lots of musicians as well, and oftentimes they go all in and they’re excited, but they spend a year or two years, or even five years and sometimes it doesn’t take off for them. I think the hard part is continuing to show back up, get up to the plate again, get up at bat and do another album. I think sometimes the experiences we gain in the business, you’ve done a whole bunch of entrepreneur stuff and done multimillion dollar companies. I’ve had that same path. I worked in banking and then I had a software company and consulting company. The things that I learned in running a business, actually, I know for a fact have made me much more successful in launching my albums. Even when I go into the studio, if I know I have this limited amount of time, it’s like, “Okay, I got two days to get into the studio.” Some artists will spend a full week knocking out a song, and they thrive on that creative process, and they’ll spend thousands of dollars doing that. Even when you or I, if we could pay thousands of dollars, and the problem is we don’t have the time, I can’t go spend two weeks straight, hardly ever in a studio to go be creative. As fun as that would be, it’s just not realistic.

Jon: Sorry, I was going to say every album I’ve ever recorded has been done in a four-hour session, the end.

Jason: That’s crazy.

Jon:  Sometimes it’s two hours if I just nail it. I’m pretty clean on the piano, I sit down, and I could just knock it out. I can’t even imagine spending two weeks. I think it’d be a blast to spend two weeks nailing it and then bringing in the other instruments. I’m going to be like, I got an idea, I’m going to throw it down and I’m going to publish it. I’m going to move on to the next thing and check that thing off my goal list that’s massive and ambitious. I’m going to get back to whatever emails I need to be sending off.

Jason: Just the same in business when you have all these things going, you have to prioritize those specific things. If it’s the song, I think as a musician, being able to recognize, “Okay, I got two hours or four hours or whatever it is, maybe you’re going to be able to do a four-hour album but think what would happen with the quality and you balance that quality versus a limited amount of time.” If you did spend, maybe you increase that eight hours, does your recording get that much better and does it pay off? Eventually, if you’re spending two weeks, it probably isn’t worth it.

The other thing I see musicians make mistakes on all the time is they have all these ideas, and it sounds great, but they can’t ship a product. Seth Godin, I don’t know if you follow him or not, but he talks about the importance of shipping a product. As an entrepreneur, you’ve got to be able to, “You’ve got this baby you’ve been working on for this business and there’s a product.”  If you can’t ever ship a product, no matter how cool your business is or how cool your song is, it’s not going to ever matter because you never get things done.

I know musicians, that creative mind oftentimes struggles with getting crap done and being able to say…

Jon: If you want to get it right, you have to get the vision and it’s got to come out exactly like that.

Jason: I think there’s a difference between get it right and get it perfect. With products, that journey is you’re figuring out what’s right at the time or perfect, and it’s never going to be perfect. The more you learn and the more your customers change and the more your listeners and fans change, it’s going to continue to evolve. Being okay with shipping that thing as it is now that you’ve put your energy in, and being able to recognize, “Yes, it’s time to ship this.”, it doesn’t matter. Yes, it could get better if I spent another 10 hours on it, sure. But is it worth the time?

Jon: It’s crazy. When I look at my top songs on Spotify, they’re the ones that I swear, almost all of them are the ones that I just winged in the studio. I did it one take, done. Then people were like, “Hey, can you get me the sheet music for this?” I’m like, “Yeah, I’ll have to figure it out, write it down.” It’s interesting how we spent a lot of time trying to really nail it down. Reality is most people can’t tell. Most people are just looking for some good music to go in the background. The other thing that’s crazy about Spotify, I saw this interesting stat the other day. Every single day, there are 60,000 new songs on Spotify. I don’t want to get off on this tangent too much, but 14% of those as of today are made by AI.

Jason: I heard it was 100,000 on something that I just read yesterday, actually. I don’t know which number is true, but I’m sure there’s some big crazy number that…

Jon: I read that 100,000 number and I was like, that seems high. Then I went and I looked it up and I found 60,000. So, it’s between 60 and 100, let’s say.

Jason: Way too many.

Jon: It’s crazy. Then you go and you spend two weeks or two hours in the studio, and you knock out 10 songs and you’re this tiny fraction of this massive release of just that day and you’re trying to get to stand out and so this is where business starts to come in handy. 21:30 You have to know how to stand out amongst billions of people and thousands of companies, hundreds of thousands of services out there trying to compete with you and so learning how to do ads and how to make sure you’re not losing money by spending too much on leads. Even if you do spend a lot of money on those leads in the beginning, and how to then leverage those over time and build lists. You’ve done a lot of this, of course, with your piano books, your music and career. That’s fantastic. I’ve done it more heavily at different times. That’s the easy part for me, I think, when I’m just like, “Hey, I need to push this, and I want to sell 100 piano books. Okay, I can do that. All I have to do is just go into business mode for a moment, sell the music and do that.”

A lot of people are great musicians, and they have no idea how to get it out there. Now there’s obviously TikTok and Snapchat and Instagram and different things like that these days that have a different style of getting music out there. I’ve never really done that in a big way. I have the channels and it’s terrible with really focusing on them because I just have so many competing things in my mind. Ultimately having that business to back up, if your music is good enough, then again, not perfect, but good enough, then if you employ the right marketing tactics, you can get it out there. You can get it out there from a lot of people.

Jason: Those tactics, I think, can be very overwhelming to somebody who’s not done much with that. I know for me, the CRM or customer relationship management, essentially, for those that aren’t familiar with that, it’s this software that will allow you to collect a name and an email. You think about when you call your phone company or your cable company, they’ve tracked how many times you’ve called in and interacted, and somebody’s put a note in there. Just the fact that as a musician, if you collect that name, having some notes about, “Okay, they bought this thing, or they had a question about this, or they interacted with me on Facebook Messenger.”, having a one stop shop is absolutely critical. It’s great that you build that list but then the next biggest mistake I see people make is, maybe they spent money on a software that can do some or most of that, and then they never get around to even messaging. They don’t send text, they don’t send a message out on Facebook, they don’t send an email out. As cool as it is to have a million views on a YouTube video or TikTok or whatever it is, there’s no money there. There’s a little bit, but it’s not sustainable.

Jon: It’s flushing the payment.

Jason: Yeah. Just like with any business, unless you can get somebody to come back and buy the thing again and again, or listen to your music again and again, there’s no business there unless you have continuity in that. I think that’s a mistake a lot of musicians make is they think, “Oh, I get up to 10,000 followers on Facebook.” What do you do? Well, Facebook’s going to charge you money even to reach 95% of those people. They will never see your post that you do, even if you’re paying for it sometimes.

Jon: There’s a musician that I want to share about because I think I wish I had done what he did, and I’m still young enough that I could probably still take advantage and do this a little bit. When he was young, he was a guy I’m not going to share his name with because I don’t have his permission to. He’s quite a private individual. He’s a Grammy winning musician out of Nashville, I’ll say that. Narrow it down quite a bit, right? Now, there’s a ton of people in Nashville, obviously, that have dedicated their lives to music, but he said, “You know what? I’m going to delay the gratification of buying the houses and buying the nice stuff. I was going to do music and I’m going to be really good at it.” He played piano and played some other things but then produced a lot, and he won his Grammy for production. Anyway, he took all of his money. He lived on the street if he had to. He just didn’t care. He just needed to lay down on a couch and eat some food the next day.

He took all of his money and he put it into real estate from late teens, early 20s until now he’s in his 60s. This guy is a multi-hundred millionaire at this point. Did he make his money in his music? He made some but out of his, let’s say he’s got $200 million. I don’t know the exact numbers, but let’s just say it is. I bet 1 to 2 million of that was his music over his career. Maybe a little more than that. Ultimately, just the style, what he did, and the industry he was in, everybody’s different. He just bought a house and then he bought a second one and then what he did is he built that passive income because one of the things that’s really difficult as a musician is to build passive income. You have to have at least enough.

Most people, if they want to live a pretty comfortable life, need $20,000 to $30,000 a month of income. That’s a $240,000 to a $360,000 salary or annual income. That’s comfortable. You’re making enough to be able to do what you want and provide the opportunities of your kids. Now, you could still be much more successful than that, but I think most people would be happy with that, but how many song-plays a month do you need to get $20,000 to $30,000 a month in your bank account? It’s a lot. Even if you’re selling piano books and things like that, if it’s not completely digital and completely automated, then it’s still not passive income. It’s income, it’s great. It’s hard to get to a point as a musician where you’re like, I’m going to stop doing effort on the music and it’s going to support me for the rest of my life and so I think that finding something, whether it’s real estate or some other home based business or go work some job and make in sales or in whatever you want to do and live below your income level and then invested in those long term things so that eventually you get to the point where by the time you’re 35, 40, 45 years old, you don’t have to work anymore unless you want to, but you can. I’m someone who I want to work with. I enjoy it. I think it’s fun.

Ultimately, it’s not that hard to get up to $20,000 to $30,000 a month in passive income in real estate if you focus on it from a young age. You buy your first house, you live in it for a year, you buy your next house, you have that one as a rental income property and you just move your way up year over year. That’s a lot of work. You got to move. You have to spend time probably in your free time, fixing up the house and getting it ready and trying to improve it so that you can turn it into rental income, whether that’s an Airbnb or long-term rentals or whatever you want to do. Again, that’s one guy’s way that he did it with real estate. 

He did commercial real estate, he did residential, he did it all. Understanding how the business world works, how to make money, how to quickly put together a company, how to quickly put together an ad campaign, how to be able to do graphic design and video editing and all those little things that you don’t have to be an expert at it, especially with all the tools today. They do a lot of the work for you. You just have to know how to put the right pieces in place. You can quickly whip out in 10 seconds or 10 minutes, we’ll say, to be realistic, of an album cover or just an iTunes and Apple Music, Spotify image that’s going to show up on your album or your single or whatever it is. You just have to figure out how to do it quickly so that you can diversify your time and be efficient. That’s what I found. I really hate inefficiency because I don’t have time to be inefficient. At the same time, I don’t have time to do everything that I want and then I find myself watching six episodes of The Office at night before I go to bed and saying, “I don’t have time.” Man, that’s really a little bit.

Jason: The numbers you’re throwing out there, I think for a lot of people, those are huge numbers. I think as I’ve been around a lot of business owners and successful people, there’s something that’s different with their mindset than in the numbers that they think they even realize they can do. For a lot of people, making $1,000 with their music would be life changing and the whole idea of like, “Oh, my gosh, I could get to 10 or 20 or 30,000 a month.” There are ways to do that, but I think you’re spot on with, don’t necessarily just put all your eggs in the music basket. Yes, you can make money in there, but if you really want to grow that passive income, you’re going to need to figure out how to do some other things and be okay with that and invest sometimes as much energy, if not more, into some of those other things so that it’ll open up the ability for you to really spend time on your music later. That’s my story for sure. I spent nearly 20 years in the banking and then the marketing, software development side, and then got to this point, I was like, “Oh my gosh, now what am I going to do with myself?” I sold my company. It’s a weird place to be. I’m in the same boat as you are. I have fun working and helping others and serving. It’s different when you get to choose what you want to do for sure and can then spend as much or as little time as you want on that music.

Jon: Well, and it’s nice also to have the budget. Music stuff is expensive. I got these monitors you can see right here. They’re Neumans, I think. Each of these monitors is like 800, 900 bucks. That’s not a crazy amount of money, but I got one behind the video here. Then I’ve got a $6,000 or $7,000 computer. Another one sitting right over there. I’ve got a keyboard here and I’ve got another keyboard here and all the nice inputs and mixing boards and the real instruments that I’ve got. I’ve got five or six string instruments and I played sax. Actually, in a jazz band back in the day, I’ve got a few woodwinds and bought a nice piano but all that adds up very fast. And then I don’t know how much money I spent, but I’ve spent a huge amount of money on samples. I’m always like, buy the biggest package and now I’ve got 64,000 instruments that I’ll never use, but I got them on all my recording programs. I found that I’m like, “Man, I really want that really nice sound board that’s 3,600 bucks and you just got.” It doesn’t come out of nowhere.

I found that by first focusing on business, and it wasn’t because I wanted all this fancy stuff, that’s not why I did it. I actually did it because I wanted to be able to provide amazing experiences for my family, which I know you care about too, Jason, with the things that you’re up to. I really wanted my family to just be secure and be like, “Hey, we can take care of ourselves.”, and then occasionally I’ll say, “Hey, I’ve got enough money that I think I can spend a few thousand bucks or two thousand bucks on some new headphones.” That gets me really high quality so that when I do get to focus on one of my passions which is music, it’s a really fun experience and I have the right equipment and I’m not like, “Man, I wish I had this thing.” I’m like, “No, I’ve got it. I’ve got what I need.” Do I know how to use it all really well? No, I’m still learning, but I’ve got it. At least I have the opportunity to learn it.

Jason: Well, I think the beauty of the way the music business is going now is a lot of… Yes, you can spend thousands of dollars, but it’s a pretty low ticket. It’s not super expensive to get in and have a good quality that if you had them side by side and you knew how to use the basic stuff, you can compete with the guy that has the $100,000 worth of stuff in his.

Jon: I agree but they’re fun. The gadgets are just fun.

Jason: It is fun. Absolutely.

Jon: I agree. East West is 30 bucks a month or whatever, and you’ve got everything you need, at least from a sample perspective. You need a keyboard, and you need some DA and you are off for the races. You’re right, that’s a couple of hundred bucks all in and you’re going.

Jason: Well, I think as I look back on my path, some of the times when I feel like I’ve grown the most as a musician was when I was spending a lot of money in the studio to have the coaching, mentoring, the producing. Those experiences when you can have them will sometimes fast track you much more than if you were at home just trying to figure it all out yourself and spending 10 or 20 years learning. You might be able to skip those 19 years and learn enough in that one year by working with some great people so that now it’s a game changer for your next year. I think the cool thing is there’s a path for everybody. I’m curious, the podcast is called the Successful Musicians Podcast. When you hear the word successful musician, what does that mean to you?

Jon:  It’s a great question. I’ve been thinking about this actively for the last few days as I read the stats about Spotify. How do you really stand out? When it comes down to it, 35:00 I really have found more joy lately in my life and knowing that I helped The One. That’s why I write music. I write music to bring peace and joy to other people’s life and for some reason, for the last few years, the time when I’ve had the most opportunity, the place I’ve had the most opportunity to play music is in Church. I’m asked way more than I should be to play. Every two months, I’m up on stage, and sometimes more than that. I’m playing this Sunday. I hate coming back to old stuff so I’m always writing new things every single time I do that. I always go into those opportunities, whether it’s at church or even not at church. I always say a little prayer before I play and I just say, “Hey, help me to touch somebody.” There’s just one person that just brings them some hope or makes them a little happier or brings a tear to their eye because they felt something that made them a little happier or helped relieve something. That’s what I want.

Every single time, 100% of the times that I have gotten up in front of people and played, I’ve had people come up to me and say, “Hey, that really helped me. Thank you for sharing that.” I hear just little things like that. Those are the moments that make me feel like I’m successful. Honestly, I have enough money that I don’t need to make money with my music. It doesn’t mean I don’t mind making money with my music, and I’m excited when my Spotify check is a little bigger that month or my app music, my streaming things. I’m like, “Oh, hey, a lot of people listen to my music but it’s not the few hundred dollars or a thousand dollars, maybe sometimes $47 that comes in and you’re like, “Hey, cool.” There’s a little bit more money in my checking account. I actually don’t care. I actually immediately translate that dollar into how many people. Instantly, that’s what I care about is how many people enjoyed my music in their home. I came out with a really cool little EP for Christmas a couple of years ago, and I worked really hard on just these four songs, and I put them out. They got onto one of those playlists that everybody listens to. It got played like three or 400,000 times. I don’t remember the exact number, but during the Christmas season, that was a lot. For me, I was just like, “Man, that is awesome.” Hundreds of thousands of homes felt the Christmas spirit a little bit more because of the work that I did. For me, that’s the successful musician. It’s being able to play and compose and create in a way that makes someone else’s life better. If that’s accomplished, then I’m happy.

Jason: I love that. As I look back on all of them, the millions and millions of song plays or 100 million, whatever it is, I think if you ask me when it meant the most, there’s probably that dozen or so emails. I’ve been really fortunate to get lots of emails or messages, and I love every single one of them but there’s some that hit you hard. When you have somebody, for example, that they were contemplating suicide, and they’ll reach out months later and say, “Hey, your music helped me with that.” You and I both have this relaxing piano vibe going on, but I can’t tell you how many people I’ve had tell that, “Hey, my mom or my dad was listening, had your CD playing.” I had one that said, “That CD finished, it was my last breath, and that was the end.” They just said it was so calming and it made such a difference. Those types of things whether you believe in a higher power or not, I got to think that most people believe that there’s some spiritual side, however you understand that to be with music and how that interacts. It’s definitely cool when you can connect at that level and help that even just one person. That’s all that it needed to be. Who cares about any of the dollar signs, right?

Jon: Yeah, the dollar signs really fade away. They really fade away fast, especially if you’ve taken a route like your meat where we focused on business first and then music. We get to do what we want, and we don’t have to have somebody telling us what to do. In fact, I was saying in the beginning, we got to really focus on that. I think the best compliment that I’ve gotten many times, I’ve probably gotten it 10 times, but to have the same comment 10 times means there’s probably a pattern there and it’s that my music is really good at reducing road rage. I just turn it on and there’s calm and peaceful driving down the road. Again, I don’t think I’ve ever had anybody, “Say, hey, your music saved me from or saved my life in that way.”, not that directly but I’ve had people reach out and say, “Hey, me and my daughter love listening to this, and she plays your music and I love it, too. It just bonds us. Thank you for sharing.” Those little things make a difference. That’s the reason. If I can write a ton more music and just get a few messages like that every year, I’ll keep writing.

Jason: I think every time I do a song, there’s something that you just feel a little bit of fulfillment and knowing that there’s actually something that may carry on longer than our short time here while we’re here. You never know when it’s going to end.

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Jon: I was sitting in a concert with Alan Menkin down at Two Acon in St. George a couple of years ago, maybe. One of the best concerts I’ve ever been to. It was just him at a piano with no agenda, really. He’s just going to talk and share stories and play a couple of things here and there to just illustrate something. He wasn’t even really performing. He was just like, oh, here was an idea, and he’d show it, and then he’d just talk about it, whatever. Then he’d play some of those things, and there’d be a movie or thing that would go on. I’d look around the room, two of us, not huge, I don’t know how many people fit in there, 3,000, 2,000. I’m not sure how many people fit in that venue, but 100% of everybody in that room on that venue knew every word to every one of his songs. I was thinking while I was doing that, bringing tears to my eyes thinking about this guy, and I know he had lots of people help him, but let’s just tell him for this argument’s sake, he could go into almost any room in the world and have the same result.

There’s probably over a billion people that know all of his music, or at least some of his music. One of his songs, Beauty and the Beast, Part of Your World, whatever it is. Some of these songs that the world has grown up on and made animated movies and different things what they are today but man, you’re mentioning, could we just write a song that carries on? Kurt Bester, his best song is not Prayer of the Children. He’s got lots of really cool stuff but somehow that one just went out there and everybody, every choir in the world knows it. He always talks about how that’s his jewel. That’s the one he really cares about because so many people know it. It touched so many hearts, but he wrote it in the afternoon. It was just one of those things that just happened. He was playing around with one of his cool new gadgets. Talked to him about it a few years ago, and it just popped out. It’s interesting. 42:58 Music is powerful. It can make such a massive impact with such a small thing. Anyway, I was impressed. Jealousy is the wrong word, but that’s what I aspire towards is with my music. I can write something that gets out there and brings feelings, usually for most people, I would imagine, of happiness when they hear a song like that.

Music brings back memories, I think. I think that’s why it’s so powerful. You hear a song, and I can hear some yellow card song, or back when I was in high school or something, and boom, I’m instantly back in the car going to school with my friends and I just remember all those things like I’m right there. I think music can bring back those tender, sweet memories. Yeah, that’s what motivates me is to just bring those moments of peace and joy to people that listen.

Jason: Last question for you. You’ve probably had lots of advice and mentors over the years. If you can think back to one, is there any one specific moment or one piece of advice somebody maybe gave you along the way that you feel like has helped you with your music and I guess just life in general?

Jon: Yeah. The person that’s coming to mind, and I don’t know if this is what you’re looking for here, but his name is Dave Fulmer, and he was the jazz band teacher at Tempeh High School for years. His jazz program was one of the best in the state for many years while he was doing that actively. He’s now down at Snow College.

I just remember him expecting more from me. He’s like, “Jon, I know you can play, but you’re missing some of these things here and if you just spent a little bit of time focusing on these things, you’d fill in and you’d…” This is when I’m 16 years old, right? It’s right before I started composing actually, so it might have been him that really pushed me out of my cocoon to say. There were a lot of technical things because I had only had a teacher for a few years, right? Then I got to be really good without a lot of structure, just my own thing. Then I was the second pianist. The first one was a senior and I was a freshman at that. No, I was a sophomore at the time at Tempeh High School.

I knew I was better than the first chair of pianists. I could play the piano better. I could play harder things, cooler things, whatever but she was technically more proficient. He wanted me to fill in those gaps. He wanted me to fill in and be like, “Hey, there’s things that she can do better than you that are going to be useful and if you understood them and then applied them to what you’re doing, you’re going to be just incredible.” When I buckled down and for two months, I just practiced like crazy. Every technical thing I could get my hands on that would improve the things we were talking about. It was just a bunch of dexterity with scales and really knowing how to do the scales in different chord progressions that were really tough mind brain exercises for me at the time. Then they just became second nature. I could still do them today. I tell you I could walk you through them right now.

I think Dave Fulmer expects a lot more from me saying, “Hey, I know you’re not living up to your full potential.” That’s always been a problem for me. I’ve always found things to be easy for me. When I was in elementary school, middle school, high school, I could put my bare minimum effort in and get A’s. I was just like, Yeah, here it is. I catch things quickly and that’s a curse. It was a curse for me. My son has this thing, he’s brilliant. He just doesn’t try very hard and that’s a bad habit to get into because when you get it easily, then you don’t get that joy of really trying hard and then when you do work hard, you get this extra awesome result.

I think that was a turning point for me where I started pushing a little harder, especially in piano, to say, hey, maybe I am good. I think part of it, too, is having people in your life to cheer you on. Your cheerleaders are important. They’re critical. He was a teacher and critical but also, he saw something in me. He’s like, hey, you gotta go hard. And so, he pushed on me, pushed on me, pushed on me and by the time I was done with him, we had a great relationship and I ended up being in first chair eventually, which was great.

Dave was the guy. Push hard or be. Don’t settle for… Just because you’re good at it without trying. Push yourself. Everybody’s limit is different. If you push yourself to the limit, you’re going to find really cool stuff.

Jason: It’s amazing. As you’re explaining that as I look at myself, has somebody probably pushed me? I’m not sure. I think different people respond differently to pushing back. I think there’s sometimes a maturity level that we may or may not have until we get older in life where you realize, “Oh, my gosh, that person was actually trying to help me.” I’ve been around other people, and sometimes they take the feedback or the criticism as a negative, and they’re like, “Oh, I think I’m terrible, or I can’t do this.” I think the limiting beliefs and that mindset that you have and trying to grow when somebody gives you that feedback and learning from it is a skill that I think every musician ought to have. I think it applies to the business side. A lot of times people say, “Oh, I can’t do the business side. I just play the instrument.” It’s probably a perfect example of, “Okay, wait a minute. If you step back and look at the big picture, if you want to be more successful with your music, maybe you need to branch out and learn some of the business side so you can be more successful with the music.”

Jon: Great advice. I’ll say one other thing that this isn’t something that I heard, or maybe I did somewhere, but as far as I know, it just came out of my brain. This applies more to the business side, but certainly applies to music and everything as well.

I have a lot of people, I’ve raised capital from a lot of people, and that’s a scary thing to do because now you’re playing with other people’s money and at least some people just lose it and whatever. Maybe they don’t feel bad, maybe they feel bad. Personally, as a sense of honor and duty, I’m not going to lose those people’s money. I listen to them but raising capital from over 50 different individuals and groups, all of them have different opinions. They all think it should be done one way and one person says this and “Hey, if you do this, I’ll invest more money.” I think something that really matters for music, for business, for whatever is really just… You can take that input from whoever, whether you respect the input or not, and then you decide what to do with it. You have to decide what you believe and go and do that thing.

I had people… It’s just like with anything in life. You get online and you say, “Is bread good for you?” You’ll find 50% of people saying it’s good for you and 50% saying stay away from Gluten, whatever. We could go on that with caffeine or with wine. I’m just talking about food related things. You can find answers all over the place. It’s no different in business or even in music or in how you should do it. There are all these ideas, and everybody thinks they’re right. Maybe in the right context, they’re all right. With all of that, with that complexity and so many voices out there, you really have to sit down and say, “What do I believe? Why am I running this business? What is the core problem that I’m trying to tackle here? How do I want to run this business? How do I want to treat the people that work with me? Do I want to squeeze every ounce of value out of this person and pay them as little as possible? Or do I want to pay them enough money so that they don’t have to worry about money, and they don’t have to go get a side hustle and they can focus completely on what I’m doing.?”

I can find people who tell you both of those things are the right way to do it. Ultimately, you take all this stuff that Jason and I have been saying for the last hour or longer here and then make your own choice. You’re the best equipped to make that decision. Take all the input and ideas you can get. If you feel something, if you feel like you should do something, or if you feel like, “Man, this song is just awesome and I love it the way it is and I need to get it out there.”, then don’t do that. That’s a double negative. Don’t stop. Don’t let anything get in your way. Things will get in your way. Especially if, as Jason was talking about earlier, I do believe that there is a higher power and I believe that when we find something really good and we want to share it with the world, that there are also forces and powers that don’t want you to share that with the world. If you push past those doubts, you’re walking. When you’re out there publishing and starting businesses and creating, when you’re creating, that is the road less traveled, and it’s lonely and it’s difficult and it’s not well lit, sunny and nice.

The road, well-traveled, it’s paved and nice and there’s tons of people there. It’s crowded but you’re safe. When you venture off that path and you say, I’m going to go create something big, whether that’s a symphony or a re-minute song, and it’s your first song that you’re putting up on Spotify or you’re going to start a business or whatever it is you’re doing. Focus on here. Really pay attention to what you think. Use the inputs. Don’t ignore other people. They might be smart. They might be idiots, but you have to decipher that. You have to decipher all that information and say, “Hey, what is best for me? I found that that’s helped me get where I am today.” It’s just knowing what I believe very firmly and then respectfully listening to all opinions. I love listening to other people’s opinions. I love looking for blind spots. Then I let it all calculate and then I’ve got a better plan to go ahead. I’m smarter because I’ve thought about it, and I’ve given time to let it just ruminate in my head and do its stuff. 

Jason: Awesome. Well, Jon, if people want to be able to decrease their road rage and listen to some of your music, where should they go?

Jon: Yeah, good question. My music, I update my site on average, probably once a year. I should do more than that. I’ve got some stuff coming up. I’ll be updating in there. I just threw out a couple of new songs but yeah, JonCheney.Com, it’s J O N Cheney, C H E N EY. com. Then if you want to connect with me for business purposes or for advice or you just want to see what I post, I post every day on LinkedIn. That’s my main platform – LinkedIn. Feel free to follow me there. Connect with me there. I’m happy to chat. 

Jason: Awesome. Well, Jon thanks so much for your time. We’re going to put all those links in the show notes as well so if you’re coming back to them, you can click and find those real ones easily. I appreciate you sharing those words of wisdom. I think a lot of people are going to benefit from what you shared today.

Jon: Thanks, Jason.

Finding success and fulfillment in the music industry is possible. Looking forward to seeing you in our next episode.