Transcription
Once you start getting $100,000 plus per show, you get the cars, you get the houses. You're touring all over the world, playing for huge audiences. You learn lessons that the rest of the industry isn't learning. There are patterns and methods that these artists are seeing that, just like a shark on Shark Tank, if they were to lose everything, by having this knowledge, they could quickly get back to making millions, touring all over the world, and get to the top all over again.
There are hidden secrets to being a multi-millionaire touring music artist that you only really discover once you get to the top of the mountain, and that's what I'm going to talk about today. These are lessons and insights I've learned from working alongside the world's top music artists, management companies, agents, and global brands. But these lessons are actually pretty surprising, and today I'm going to group them into my top 12.
Many of the artists I work with have not only cracked the code on how to be financially successful, how to be known and seen as an artist, but they've also learned how to feel joy, happiness, and fulfillment alongside the business part of their music and art. For me, I've spent the last 20 years of my life focused on three things: music, branding, and advertising. And I'm going to distill down my top 12 lessons that I've learned from the last 20 years that I spent in the music industry.
But before we get to it, let me quick give you the abridged version of who I am and this crazy life that I've lived in music, art, and branding, as it'll give context to why these are my top 12 and the things that I've been lucky enough to see and learn. So, I'm Chris Alba. When I was 17, I started collecting records while I was working at Blockbuster Video in my small town. Back then, I loved three things: music, movies, and art.
I moved from my small town to California in the early 2000s with stars in my eyes. And in college, I studied film, screenwriting, storytelling, and psychology. And at the back end of film school, after having built a pretty solid record collection, I saw this documentary called "Scratch," which was a doc about, uh, the culture of DJing and battle DJs, and that changed everything for me.
After seeing the doc, I immediately bought two Technic 1200s and a mixer and started DJing parties all over Orange County and LA. The local DJ thing popped for me pretty quick, and I was having a blast just performing and curating these events all over SoCal. And I had a friend of mine who started managing me, and we started throwing parties together.
Those parties started as small 50-person events where we were showcasing all the new music I was finding in the underground, and also, this is the blog era, so all the stuff that I was finding online on these blogs. And a lot of the sound we were doing was the precursor to what became EDM parties. We were doing, went from 50 people to 100 people to 200 people to 500 people to 1,000 people to 2,000 people and beyond.
We threw thousands of parties all over California. We ended up taking residency at the Avalon Theater in Hollywood and curated a weekly Friday night there called Control. That event ran for 10 years every Friday and had many of today's top dance music artists play their very first shows there. Zed, Porter Robinson, Dylan Francis, Skrillex, and many more got their start at that event. I think Skrillex even got signed to his now agent after the agent saw him perform at our event.
Because I was DJing alongside all these great artists at different events, we became friends, and many of them were kind enough to teach me the tricks and trades of modern dance music production. Skrillex was my first music mentor. He was my neighbor, he lived across the street from me. His manager knew my manager, and Skrillex became the first guy who taught me how to cook in the studio.
I spent the next decade releasing music on different cool indie dance labels like Diplo's Mad Decent records. I was doing bootleg remixes for the internet, and I also got to be known as like a go-to remixer for major labels like Interscope, Def Jam, and Capitol Records. I was lucky enough that I got to tour all over the world with some of dance music's biggest artists, and I got to see the world through music, and that completely changed me as a person and opened my eyes to so much of the world and humanity.
10 years ago, I started my creative agency, The Cult Creatives. We've done tens of millions of dollars in business and have worked with some of the largest music artists in the world, as well as global Fortune 500 companies. Cult's core competency is that we do creative direction and branding for music artists, as well as live visuals, staging concepts, music videos, and design.
So, I've had the lucky experience of being on all sides of music. I've been the superfan, the collector, the person who absolutely loves the music and the art. I've been the artist, I've been the DJ, I've been the producer, I've been the A&R person, I've been the concert promoter, I've been the talent buyer, I've been the creative director, the designer, the marketer, and the social media strategist. So, I've got to see so many different sides of this industry and getting to see it all working alongside the industry's top artists.
Life story over here. Here are my top 12 lessons that I've learned from 20 years in the music industry.
Number one: Make it for you first and keep it fresh. If you aren't excited, they aren't excited. Rick Rubin has a philosophy that as artists, we should put the audience last. You make it the best you can, but you're making it for yourself. Like if you were a clothing designer making yourself a jacket, you custom make something that would likely be one of your favorite things in your closet, and it would be one of your go-tos that you would consistently be grabbing for.
This was something I saw over and over in studio sessions I'd be in with dance music's top producers. They were aware that an audience was going to hear it, but that didn't inform any of the choices they made inside of the studio. They made it for them, and they were pleased if other people liked it, but that's not why they made it. They were craftspeople, and the craft is really what they loved.
And I've experienced many different kinds of artists through the years, but there's two types specifically that stick out to me. One type of artist is the system hacker. They would get a good sense of what the game was and where we were in the current moment, whether it was followers or streams, and they would try to hack the game. They would try to gain the system for positioning.
The other type of artist was the one that I just mentioned, where they seem to be striving to create the best art that they could. It was about the craft for them. They weren't trying to gain the system. They were doing the hard, slow work of learning and getting better and being obsessed with their craft. And guess what? Spoiler alert: the second type of artist is always bigger and had more followers, sold more tickets, and had more devout fans.
And the second part of this is keeping it fresh. How many different styles of music has Diplo done over the years, and all feels like him in some way? I've seen a lot of artists that stumble onto a sound that people seem to love, but then they get stuck, and it's because they're letting the audience drive them in the studio, and they don't keep it fresh for themselves. So it goes stale for the audience because it's not fresh for them.
However, you can continually spice things up. Go back to the beginning, rechallenge yourself, travel, collaborate with new artists, go out and experience a scene, get out of the studio, push yourself out of your comfort zone. You'll feel the magic of creation and doing something new. The audience will feel this too.
Number two: Have a mission. The greats have a mission. They have something to prove to themselves. There's a big difference between someone who is doing something as a hobby and someone who's doing something with purpose and they have a mission. A hobby often finds its way to the bottom of the totem pole of life's priorities. A mission filled with real purpose always sits at the top of the totem pole.
There's a different kind of energy you feel around people who are on a mission. They move quicker through conversations and meetings. They're ultra committed, sometimes to a fault. I've seen artists with a 103-degree fever throwing up in a bucket on stage behind the DJ booth and then performing at a level where the audience has no idea that they're even sick.
A greater purpose gives you more drive. Every artist will have a different thing driving their commitment, but if yours isn't strong enough, you'll definitely want to spend some time finding this and being clear on it. The purpose fills these great artists up, and this is also a big part of where the joy, happiness, and fulfillment comes from. Being in alignment and living within your purpose, it feels good, and it continues to feel good.
Ever wonder how to truly cut through the noise and get your music to a broader audience? The Cult Creatives is a niche agency servicing the communities and brands surrounding the spaces of music and fashion. Our unique backgrounds of being highly involved with some of the largest music and fashion brands in the world gives us a unique perspective on how to connect creatives with their audiences. We offer a variety of services including creative direction, design, photography, videography, and strategy. Head to thecultcreatives.com to learn more. The Cult Creatives, not to be replicated, but if you try, we wouldn't blame you.
Number three: How many people can you bring to the party? How many people can you bring to the party? How many tickets can you sell? How many people buy your merch? How much merch do they buy? How many people are listening to and streaming your stuff? The answers to these questions define where you fall in the hierarchy of the music business, strictly the business side.
How long you've been doing this has nothing to do with the answers to these questions. How nice you are or how easy it is to work with you doesn't answer these questions. How hard you work doesn't answer these questions either. If someone is a headliner, it's because they move the most tickets and do the most business for the companies they're involved with, simple as that.
For the business side, it has little to do with the music, the art, the genre, or the personality of the artist. I've been in so many rooms where this is all the suits talk about: metrics, numbers, potential revenue. And this is 100% fair. This is what they should be talking about. This is their job to make the business money so that the business can grow and exist. Artists can be mad that this is all they care about, but this is what makes the business of music, buying, selling, trading the music, performances, and the things that surround the culture of the music. This is the music business.
If you want to elevate the status of your project, better slot times, more money, more streams, etc., use your creativity to sell more tickets and whatever the party is, get more people to the party.
Number four: Perform like you're already a headliner. When I was coming up, one of the best parties to go to here in LA was Steve Aoki's Deck Tuesdays. It was a small venue called C Space, and there were two rooms. One was a front room where DJs would perform, and then there was a back room that was more of an open space where they'd have bands and artists perform.
One Tuesday, myself and some friends were at the party. They announced in the front room that a new artist that had just gotten signed to Interscope was going to be performing in the back room. Not that many people made their way to the back room. I think it was kind of early in the night, and I think the DJ in the front room was killing it. But the artist came on stage, and she was performing to maybe 50 people or so. She had platinum blonde hair, big sunglasses, bangs, and a sequin outfit with matching top, bottom, and boots.
The way she started her performance was she was carried on stage by four shirtless buff dudes who stood by while she was performing. Her energy was crazy. She threw herself completely into the music. She was all over the small stage with her performance. And if I'm honest, although I was impressed by her energy, I wasn't that into it at the time because I was so in love with underground electro and the blog scene music that was happening. I didn't want it to get commercialized. Like, I was kind of protective of it. I wanted it in its pure form. And I remember whispering to a friend like, "This is like electro meets pop. I'm not into it."
But her performance was so good that I ended up asking one of the lead promoters who I was friends with later that night, who she was. And he responded, "Oh yeah, she's a new artist, but I think she goes by Lady Gaga." So you could tell just by the way she was performing, it was like she was performing at the Grammys, even though the audience was small, and I think there was a lot of other haters, kind of like me, in the audience. She gave it. And then I watched her career ascend, and I never forgot that lesson, even from the beginning: perform like you're headlining your biggest show.
And I also had this exact same experience with the electro house group DVBBS. We were buds with those guys from the early days, and we were the first people to book them in LA. One of the first shows we had them on at Avalon, they played the 3:00 AM slot time. We went late at Avalon, and unfortunately, on this particular night, the floor had cleared out pretty substantially by the time they went on. A 2,000-cap room only had a couple hundred people left.
But when they went on, they went full level DVBBS energy. They were spraying champagne, they were throwing around bananas, they were bobbing up and down in choreography. And I remember thinking, that moment, from the things I had previously seen, I thought to myself, "These guys are going to be huge." They believed in themselves. They manifested their destiny. That belief is infectious. How can the audience believe if you don't believe?
So, I want to add, uh, an addendum or a PSA to this lesson. This doesn't mean that if you're opening, you should be playing headlining level music and pumping it as hard as you can out of the gate. Being a good opener or support act is kind of a lost art. Setting the tone of the party is such an important component to making a memorable night for someone. Be aware of where you are and be the best in that space. If you've chosen to say yes to an opening gig, don't blow it out early. Don't do it.
Number five: The greats are equally as good at advertising and branding as they are creating their music and art. I've done a couple of videos that touch on this. You can check those out on the Neighborhood Art Supply channel, but the net of those videos is the point that advertising can be just as creative as making art, and more artists should embrace advertising and bringing awareness to their art. It only helps their endeavors of bringing more people into their work.
I've worked with management teams of some of the largest artists in the world, and something I've noticed about their strategy versus say, a mid-tier act or a come-up act, is that they plan their advertising and marketing efforts way in advance. The really big artists generally have a 24-month strategy plan that lays out big tentpole moments where the artists will engage their audience with story and bring awareness to whatever it is they want the audience to know about at that current moment.
The mid-tier artist teams will usually do this too, but instead of being 24 months, I notice that it's usually four to six months of planning, and they're hitting a few major moments for the artists. But these teams are often more focused on music release schedule than they are around branding and storytelling with the audience. They use the music releases and the content around the releases to be the strategy, which isn't a terrible strategy, but it'll definitely keep you in the middle.
And then newer artists often don't have a marketing calendar at all, and they find themselves in scenarios where they've maybe forgotten to post, they need to make something quick, and then they'll often create stuff that is lackluster and it doesn't really move the audience. The big artists, they never get caught in this scenario. They know who they are, they know what the current story is, they know their themes, and they know what they're posting way in advance. It doesn't mean that if they have something significant happen that is of the moment, that they don't post about it. They find a way to work it into the calendar, but for the most part, they have it all mapped out.
Also, the more savvy artists are often hiring people like me to come in and help them refine their stories and branding and help them come up with the ideas for these big tentpole moments so that they have a solid plan. Everything they do is done with intention, and everything they do has some form of plan and organization around what they're trying to accomplish.
And lastly, on this point, advertising methods change. When we started the event at the Avalon, the main way that we were promoting that event was through newspaper ads. Yes, this used to happen. And we also had a street team. The street team would go all over LA handing people our flyers and putting them on people's cars. Sorry to the people whose cars were covered in our flyers, to bring awareness to the event. Then that changed to being email blasts and text messages, and also with a little bit of street team. But then there came a time where everything we were doing was just digital, and it was digital ad buys, and we no longer utilized the street team. How people were getting their information on what shows were happening in LA changed, and we changed with it.
The same concept can be applied to your artist project. Keep up with the times. Try not to be a snob around how the next generation discovers. Be an early adopter. Don't get left behind.
Number six: Your point of view and taste is everything. Think of your favorite artist. Don't you feel like you can easily point out the things that they seem to like? You can guess what their taste is. This is because in their art and music, they've been clear with their point of view. This doesn't mean that they make the same song over and over, or that they only live inside a singular genre. All the greats don't do this. They often make all kinds of genres and jump all over the tempo spectrum. That's because they have a point of view. They have a way they cook, a similar perspective to their creative process, and similar filters for defining when something is done and ready to be shared. And the things that they share feel like it's absolutely them.
Something I see a lot with the mid-tier acts is they look to other artists in the dance music space to inspire them on where they should go with their music and art. And while this can actually be a great way to get to the middle, it's absolutely the wrong method to get to the top. The artists at the top that I work with do not look at other artists for inspiration on what they should do or where they should go. If anything, they may look around, and when they see a bunch of people doing the same thing, that tells them where not to go.
The greats look within. They look at their own story, their past, their experiences, their travels to inspire where they should go next. Mid-tier artists are often great mimics, and they get caught chasing the dragon, jumping from one popular genre to the next, trying to stay on trend. Top artists don't do this. They bring you into their taste and their universe and give you a piece of themselves. Your taste and your unique life experiences are your superpowers. Never forget that.
The more you don't think about other things and how people see you, the more you find out who you are, and you can, you can, uh, train your soul and your mind to be yourself as you're creating and not try to think of anything else. That's the best. I mean, success is something you attract, not something you catch. So you have to work on really being the most to yourself. You have to connect with your music and be attracted to it. Like, that's that's everything. It's nothing to do with trying to catch people's attention.
Number seven: Save your money, or invest in real estate, or both. I can tell you one thing for certain: no matter how high you climb, no matter how much success you have, it will not last forever. Every artist has dips in their career. How you manage those dips will define how long you can stay and where you fall in the game.
This lesson is likely not new to you, and you've probably heard this before, but it's one of the key things that I've seen from the artists who remain at the top. They don't blow their money on frivolous things. There's a few things here and there that they bought, but for the most part, they understood that this was a long game, and that you're going to need food for later. So most of what they spend their money on is either stuff to make themselves or their art better, or it's some kind of appreciating investment.
Many of the artists I know, when they started making money, invested in multifamily real estate because it was an appreciating asset that took their money and made them more money. And I won't spend too much time here because you get it. Save your money for a rainy day, or invest in real estate, or ideally both.
Number eight: Don't quit your day job until it's time. This is probably the question I get asked most from the mid-tier artists that are in the $2-5K per show range. They start to make money in music, and then they feel like if they have more time outside of their day job to work on music, that they can scale the business faster. And for some artists, the answer to this question could be yes, it's time to dive fully in as soon as you make music the primary source of income and the thing that drives the quality of your life.
So many of the aspects of music begin to change, and your relationship to it begins to change. The decisions people make around their music changes when it's more of a question of survival. When you bring the concept of survival into your mind, it often drives stress, and that kind of stress, from what I've seen, doesn't make for the best music. And artists that are trying to get another hit so they can tour and make money usually aren't making their best music.
And I don't know how many people know this, but Arnold Schwarzenegger was a millionaire before he ever started acting. He always wanted to be an actor, and his dream was to be Hercules on the screen in movie theaters all over the world. But he saw that many of his friends were having to take bad acting roles that were hurting their brand so that they could eat and survive. So before he got started in his acting career, he worked as a bricklayer, and he took that money and he invested in multifamily real estate. And then once he was financially secure, he was able to strategically choose his acting roles, and he tried never to take a gig that would hurt his brand or might hurt the chances of his dreams coming true.
Once music becomes your full-time job, it's hard to keep it pure and have it not change the art. And for most artists, they actually won't see that this is happening or learn this lesson until they start making $20K plus per show. They get the cars, they get the houses, headlining festivals, sold-out shows everywhere. They realize that this is actually not the thing that is bringing them the happiness and fulfillment that they've been working so hard for, and they'll notice their writing process has absolutely been affected. It's so important to find ways to keep the act of making your art pure and not bringing the audience or previous successes into the studio with you.
Number nine: Own your masters. This is another one I won't spend too much time on, as I think you know this one, but it's a conversation I've unfortunately had with more artists than I'd like to count. It's often their biggest regret in their music career. It's your original art. If you made it, you should own it. Simple as that. Protect as much as you can.
Number 10: Health is paramount. The other day, my wife Lindsay and I were talking about cold plunging, as I've been getting super into it over the last couple years. And she asked me, who of the big artists I know or I'm friends with are doing the cold plunge thing? My response to her was, "All of them." She was like, "Really? All of them?" I was like, "Yeah." I listed a dozen or so artists that are all household names in dance music, and in some capacity, all of them are doing it.
So why do they do it? I'm not going to spend this video getting into the benefits of cold plunging, but a major lesson that I've learned from the top artists in music is that they're obsessed with their health. They are top performers who travel all over the world and have schedules packed down to the minute. They need to be sharp. They need to have energy to perform. And most important of all, they want to feel good so they can actually enjoy and be happy in these incredible moments that they're having and experiencing.
All the ones I know are biohackers, and I'd say 95% of them don't drink heavily or do drugs. And maybe this isn't very rockstar, but they're people who are obsessed with their dreams. They're dream chasers. They perform in front of tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people, and they want those performances to be memorable. They want to be on point in their studio sessions, and they want to be strong and sharp in the meetings surrounding the many layers of their business. And it's really tough to do all this hungover. And this doesn't mean that I'm judging partyers or I'm judging artists that are partiers. This is just an observation that I've seen from the different top artists that I know.
Number 11: It's all about obsession. Obsession beats talent every time. But are you obsessed enough? This is by far the one unifying thing I see from all of the top artists that I know. They're all obsessed with the game. They are constantly in pursuit of getting better. And once they master one area, they move to another voraciously. You can tell that they're in a game where they're competing with themselves, and the game is growth.
Now, what that growth is is different for every artist. Some are trying to grow their fan base, some are trying to grow awareness, some are trying to get better at their craft and their art. But a lot of them are trying to grow as people, finding deeper layers to themselves. All these artists are trying to get better. They say that if you want to run faster, run with people who are faster than you.
The reason I even get to work with the artists that I do is because of their obsession around growth, getting better, getting faster. And part of this obsession around getting better is who is helping them get better. The top artists are excellent at building their teams and hiring people to fill in the gaps where they may not be as strong. They are looking for the best people to collaborate and build their projects with, and it's very rarely about cost and more about the caliber and pedigree of the people they keep around. They say that you're the sum of the five people that you spend the most time with. So if you want to up your game, up your crew. And just like a child, it takes a village to make these projects come to life. But who's in the village? Who do you have in your corner? That can define a lot.
All right, last one. Number 12: Make it remarkable. The entire world of music is built on the concepts of impact and sharing. Someone is impacted by a song or performance, and then they tell their friends about it. They share their experience. I have a video on Neighborhood Art Supply all about why people share, and if you're interested, you can go watch that one. But sharability and impact is everything.
Very often, artists or their management teams will come to me at Cult and tell me that they feel like their brand is broken, no one seems to be caring about the new stuff, and no one is engaging with it. That's usually the first thing that I'm assessing: are people impacted by what's being created and presented, and is it remarkable? And not remarkable meaning incredible, remarkable meaning to remark about. Will people remark or tell someone else about this?
And usually, for brands that are broken, the answer is no. The content isn't connecting with the audience, and the majority of the time, it's not the music that's the issue. The music is often pretty good, but the story and the marketing of that story is often lacking. There's nothing remarkable about what's going on. You want fans texting or telling their friends, "Have you seen this yet?" or "This is crazy," or "This is so good, I think you'd like it," or some variation of one of these.
When you're crafting and coming up with your marketing strategies, don't just post to post. Don't just do what you see all the other artists doing. Do something that will stand out, something that people haven't seen or heard before. Run it through the filter: Is this remarkable? Will people remark about this?
I have other videos on the Neighborhood Art Supply channel that go more in-depth on this particular topic and a lot of the topics that we talked about today. And if you found value in this, feel free to go check those out. But I appreciate you. Thanks for hanging with me. I'll see you next time. Peace.