Sometimes the simplest things become your foundation to build everything else around you. When it comes to aspiring hip hop artist looking to create a successful career in the music business for themselves building a foundation can seem to be one of the most difficult task.
As an artist in today’s music business your success is determined by more than your musical skill level. Now a days you need to build your career up through the independent market and the challenge for most artist is not knowing where to start.
Although there are many areas to cover in order to build a complete and comprehensive foundation for your music career I have put together a list of 5 essential areas you can tackle quickly.
By all means you’ll need to continue your research efforts towards building the strongest foundation you possibly can. Until then check out these 5 Things Aspiring Hip Hop Artist Should Know How to do Themselves for Initial Start-up Success.
HOW TO SEND AND RECEIVE EMAILS
You wouldn’t think it but in my experience of dealing with aspiring hip hop artist a large number don’t really use email and trust me I’ve been trying to figure out why.Many of them opt for social media direct message options of communications when trying to conduct some sought of business dealing.
For me personal along with many tons of other business owners this practice sends a red flag to us and it complicates the overall communication process.You see email for most business owners is the center piece for our respective company dealings. We can organize pretty much anything into perspective with the right email service.
I can assure you that by reaching out to a business via direct message looking to conduct business chances are you’ll be disregard as an unprofessional.
Think about this if reaching out to a midsize to large business the person maintaining that social media profile is not there to speak to you about conduct business. And if your reaching out to smaller businesses trust me the owner is not checking dm’s across account to find your business inquiry.
But if they do happen to open it and check it out I can guarantee you they will direct you to there email addresses which is already available in the profiles about section most of the time.
Bottom line is if you want to position yourself in a more professional manner you’ll need to make email your first choice of communication when your looking to discuss business.
HOW TO USE FILE SHARING SOFTWARE
File sharing tools like Dropbox, Google Drive or Hulk Share are similar to the benefits of using email but different.
File sharing tools are designed for sharing large files that standard email is unable to accomplish. For an aspiring artist sending a complete press kit through email can be complicated and it will also separate your files which can be confusing to the person receiving them.
Also those separated file cause hassle on the receivers end to the point where a lot of people will not even entertainment the idea of opening your email.
The point of understanding and utilizing file sharing tools is to send large files and also to package things like press kits, transcripts and other large files together for easy access and organizational purposes.
HOW TO USE PAYPAL
In my personal opinion this one is a must and it is very frustrating as a business that handles transactions online to run into a new client that has no idea how to use a seemingly simple payment processing system.
Understand that PayPal is a trusted easy to use payment process that aspiring artist should learn to use. Not only for paying other’s for services but to also receive payment for their own products and services.
Yes there are other payment options but why would a company use anything else when they’ve set up a system through PayPal’s easy and insured platform.
Therefore I’ll advise all aspiring hip hop artist to open a PayPal for sending and receiving payments for products and services you wish to buy and/ or sell.
Now don’t get me wrong here PayPal isn’t the only online payment system but for the most part it’s an industry leader among small businesses. And it can provide to be of great benefit to you and your business needs.
HOW TO PURCHASE ORIGINAL BEATS
As an aspiring hip hop artist in today’s music industry you have the opportunity to begin generating income from your music as soon as you decide to invest in the collect things you’ll need to make that happen.
One of the most important parts of that is your understanding of how to purchase original beats and why you need to purchase original beats.
Without having permission to use a beat for monterey gain your just creating promotional use only music. Which is not bad if your just looking to what people think about your music or possibly gain new fans of your rapping abilities.
But if your looking to begin the process of creating an income stream from your music you’ll need to either get permission from the owner of the beats you use or purchase the rights to the beats you use.
Bottom line here is this is the music business and you need to create sellable products to add to the market and give yourself a chance at build a long term income stream. And to make that happen you’ll need to understand how to purchase original beats.
HOW TO DO SIMPLE BOOKKEEPING
As you begin to align all your ducks in a row toward your music career growth it is essential that you create a bookkeeping system. No business will ever become success without implementing a form of bookkeeping.
The good thing is that as a beginner you can easily setup a simple bookkeeping system that will keep your finances on point. There’s many reasons bookkeeping is important to your business. Tax purposes is one and the reason I would like to express to you is that you want to keep track of your spending vs your income vs your profit.
You see if you don’t know how much money your spending on your career you’ll never know when you’re actually making money for your efforts. So you need to know how to setup a simple bookkeeping system and stay on top of it.
CONCLUSION
So we’ve reached the end of this post and I would like for you to understand that there are tons of things aspiring artist should know; I just thought that this list of 5 would be a good place to start.
I would also like to advise you to continue to not only invest in your music quality but invest in your music industry and business education because it will be the only way you’ll truly reach success.