19: The goal of building a brand and cultivating an audience
What's the goal of building a brand or cultivating an online audience? Why do this in the first place?
Well, when you are among thousands of equally qualified players leaving conservatory - or college, not even just conservatory - every year, and you are trying to get a career, not just a job, right? Yeah, you can get a job., maybe, but those are becoming few and far between. But if you want to have a lasting career, you need to have people that want to listen to you. Right?
So if people don't even know you exist, how are they going to know to go to your concert or listen to you? And if you want people to come to your concert, they have to care about you. But then again, who cares, right? Like you play violin, or you play cello or you play clarinet, or you play trombone, who cares? So I played trombone in high school. That's what a lot of people think, right? And so you have to go deeper and that's what branding comes in. What do you believe? What are your convictions? And when you're young, you don't really have many because you don't know much about the world... or you do, and they're few and many of them are incomplete. And so living your life is part of the process as well. Growing, learning, maturing.
So all of these processes kind of work together in tandem to push yourself forward. And in building your brand, the reason why you want to build it is because at the end of the day, if you want to make a living doing art, your services have to be in demand. If you have no demand for your services, how are you ever going to engage in the market? It's basic supply and demand economics. So if you don't even get into the market, in the eyes of the consumer, how are they ever going to pay you?
Kellogg:
That was my very next question, which is, how do you turn a following into income or opportunities?
Forde:
I'm still learning that. You know what? It's-- Part of it is not caring so much about it and letting it happen naturally. And honestly, I am-- this is the most in-demand I've ever been in my entire life. And it's just, it just happened last year. I've been at this since 2013. So it took six, seven years to really get to a place where I could comfortably not reach out to people and just let work come to me. And I think it's going to take longer for a lot of people. So you shouldn't really even think about it in, in terms of like, "Ooo, next year I'm going to build a following, I'm going to get all the calls."
What's really important is understanding that in any group or any market, doesn't matter if you're in politics, doesn't matter if you're in electrical engineering, doesn't-- You have to start as an intern. And part of being an intern is playing for free, is playing for food, playing for exposure, at the beginning, like when you're in school and when you're right out of school because it's your job to prove that you can do the job and not only do the job well, but do it better than other people and/or doing it in a way that nobody else can do it.
And sometimes it comes down to very simple terms, right? Staying with it, like, not quitting, showing up, not just on time but early, being overly prepared, being a nice person. And then once you start getting more freelancing gigs, and calls, and things like that, remember that it's not safe for you to rely on other people to call you. You need to build your own platform. You need to build your own business.
And that's ultimately what brand building is for. It's not to get the calls, right? It's to make sure that you are too busy doing your own thing, to go do it for somebody else. And the only way that you were pulled away from whatever you're doing is if they will pay you money. Because what you build, the legacy that you build, is going to be way more important and substantial in your life than playing on somebody's album. That's all just decoration. But what about your album, right? What about your musical progress? What about the music that you, yourself, are creating? Because at the end of the day, if you aren't playing your own music, you are a cover artist, you're playing somebody else's intellectual property, and there is a ceiling to how much money you can make doing that.
Kellogg:
So a lot of what you're talking about is actually a creative career that is original music, original ideas, a very specific audience that only fits you as an artist. Is that- is that right?
Forde:
That's part of it. And, and that's safer because you only need a thousand of them. But if you're, if you're playing covers of Beethoven, you're competing with every person who plays covers of Beethoven, and not just the people alive doing it right now, but people who are dead and did it in the past, for centuries.
So like, that's cool, but you can't be p-- So here's the deal about intellectual property. If you're playing a Beethoven quartet, and if you bought a publishing-- that money while it's in public domain, if that, if-- Let's take a different example.
Let's say John Williams, right? You have to pay John Williams if you're playing his music, right? He doesn't have to show up. He gets paid, right?
Another example, if Taylor Swift comes out with a song and tens of thousands of people do covers of her music on YouTube, she gets paid off of their work, off of their expression of her music. She gets paid for that. That's powerful.
That's way more powerful because you have to realize that at the end of the day, you only have a limited amount of time. You don't know how much time you have on this planet. And you should not only be paid more for your efficiency than your time, but you also have to realize that you can make a residual income by owning the means of production, by producing your own music. And that is really, really, really powerful. It's not something we're taught in school, which is fine because we go to school to learn how to play our instrument. But once you learn how to play your instrument, you have bills to pay. So how are you going to pay those bills? And so it's important to think about these things moving forward.