“If you want to grow and be successful with anything, whether it’s entrepreneurship, music, art, filmmaking, whatever, you’d be well suited to spend a lot of time thinking about how you can build your personal brand. You want your audience to fall in love with you, not necessarily your craft or the thing that you do. When you can build that, Taylor Swift did, and you can have an audience of raving fans that just love you. By the way, even if it’s not like the whole world knows about you, if you have a thousand people or 10,000 people who love you and also love your music, but they love you, and it doesn’t matter what you do, if you switch from country to pop music, that’s totally fine. Then to folk music, you do whatever you want, they’re going to follow you because they’re endeared to you as a brand, to you as a person. They have a relationship with you more so than your music, your craft, or the thing that you do.”

~Eric Thayne

“Just don’t be afraid in general. Whether it’s going to talk to someone. I’m sure you’ve met plenty of those guys that are like, yeah, I’m a songwriter, but I’ve never really put my music out. I’m like, what? Well, then you’re not a songwriter, dude. That’s the thing that drives me the most nuts, when people I’m like, oh, cool, where can I check out your stuff? They’re like, well, I haven’t done anything with it. I’m like, well, then we can all say we’re songwriters but you have to have a product that you can hand to me so I can check it out. That’s kind of a pre-req to say, you know what I mean? That’s just fear, because we can all afford a computer nowadays. We can all learn the basics of garage band or whatever it is that you use, Cubase or whatever. That’s just fear, man. I know that anything that I’ve made in my life, one thing I can say for sure, I’m 50 years old. Anything that I’ve done, I’ve gotten value out of it. I’ve thrown money at projects that ultimately didn’t work out the way I expected them to, but there was always value from that experience because what else are we doing? What are we doing on this earth? If we ain’t learning and kind of experiencing stuff? What’s the point of it, man?”

~Carlos Baker

“People are trying to put their music out in all these libraries. You go to a library, they have millions, millions of tracks in there. You’re essentially playing a lottery. If you think about it this way, a music supervisor goes to the library, it’s like a box store, and you’re like one can on one shelf in a department in a section somewhere. They’re going to walk all the way in there and make their way back and somehow find you, at least all the other cans that are beside you. It’s like playing the lottery. I realized that was not a way to get success. It was about going straight to the source. The very people who put music in the TV and film are the music supervisors. You get in with them and you get good relationships with them because they only have a limited number of go-to people. You become that go-to person. That’s how you get consistent sync placements and more lucrative ones is giving them what they want when they want it, and they trust you.”

~Chris SD

“The overall idea of the Mastermind group is that when you come together with multiple minds, with the shared purpose and open hearts and minds, you’re looking to support each other, then there’s something that emerges that you have these separate minds, but there’s like a new entity that emerges that you call the collective Mastermind. This Mastermind is really greater than the sum of its parts.”

~Michael Walker