Monetizing Your Art! How To Live Life As A Freelance Musician!

Episode 6   Lets start the conversation on what its like to monetize your art form. Lets start the conversation of if college is the right choice for you or if you don’t need it for the career you want to pursue. These can be difficult conversations to have if you fear starting your career in an art or you already went or are at college when you shouldn’t be but we need to get after the ways we succeed in the industries we care about.   Today we talk to CJ Poole freelance musician, manager of Capital City Jazz Orchestra, and owner of C.P. Music Contacting. CJ and I met at my sales job when I was working with his business. He hired me on to do some live recording and sound for his ensembles and we have stayed connected since!   I wanted to talk to CJ to get a taste of freelance lifestyle as opposed to some of the businesses we have talked to in order to get another side of doing what you want to do to bring in an income. Living freelance, DIY, or running a business holds many similar traits of how life works but every background has its own way of getting things done and doing what your passionate about to make an income.   In This Episode You’ll Discover

• You need to wear multiple hats to make it work

• What doe full time musicians do and how do they keep it structured?

• Should you go to College?

• Monetizing your art form

• Entertainer VS. educated

• Real life, business, and rules you don’t learn till you learn

• Whats the real world? How do you change the way you communicate with it?

• You don’t need to do what the book said

• Professionals: The difference between what you’ve been taught and what you can do

• Being an entertainer vs your own taste: How do we balance it?

• Perceived value of your art

• Levels of your industry and the consumers pricing expectations

• Do we factor in the time it takes to perfect our art into pricing and expectations?

• Hobby vs. Business: Where are you at?

• Take the risks that other people are unwilling to do

• Dave’s first batch of craft beer was well received: CJ’s pitch for it is FOR REAL

Quotes:

“ Here’s the deal, as far as college goes; I went to college for music performance, long story short I didn’t finish” CJ Poole   “The thing about music business is its 90% business and 10% music” CJ Poole   “Do you know how hard it is to monetize your creativity? Do you know how hard it is to make a living off of creative stuff that doesn’t have a hard value to it, you need to create a value to it” Co-host Ryan Carrigan   “College is reading the book, post-college is writing the book” Co-host Ryan Carrigan “In this line of business the most important thing you need to be able to wake up in the morning and say to yourself is: Is there anything else that I would rather be doing than this?” CJ Poole   “If a lawyer studies law for 8 years to become the best lawyer then why wouldn’t the 8 years you spend to be a professional musician why wouldn’t that value be brought into the picture comparatively?” Host Dave Swillum   Links:   CJ Poole Contact Info Email: [email protected]   Waking Up From Work Podcast Links    Website  www.wakingupfromwork.com    Instagram @davewakeup @ryancarrigan4   Facebook www.facebook.com/wakingupfromwork   Dave’s audio business www.crawlspaceaudio.com