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151_up2you.html
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151_up2you.html
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<title>Nobody's going to help you. Does that encourage you or discourage you? </title>
<p>
<strong>Nobody's going to help you. It's all up to you.</strong>
</p><p>
<strong>Does hearing that discourage you or motivate you?</strong>
</p><p>
The reason I'm asking is that a musician friend emailed me two questions last week (December 2008):
</p><blockquote><p>
How can I find a great/major booking agent?<br />
And how can I find an investor? I need someone to invest $500,000 into my band for radio, touring, recording, videos, PR, payola, etc.
</p></blockquote>
<p>
My answer was:
</p><blockquote><p>
Sorry, but when it comes to this stuff, I think the healthiest attitude is the most cynical one:
</p><p>
There are no great agents that would want to take you on unless you're already earning $5000 a month gigging, so that their 10% cut (only $500) would be worth their time.
</p><p>
There are absolutely no investors that would invest in a musician now. Even solid profitable businesses with customers and employees can't find investors these days, (December 2008), so just assume you will not.
</p><p>
So: No agent. No investor. No one's going to help you until you're already successful. So <strong>how do you get successful with no help from anyone?</strong>
</p><p>
<strong>How can you make $5000/month from gigging, so that an agent will be interested enough to take it to the next level?</strong> Only you know.
</p><p>
<strong>How can you call so much attention to your music online, that a company will gamble on you, and finance the expensive offline campaign?</strong>
</p><p>
<strong>Those are the healthy questions to ask.</strong>
</p></blockquote><p>
Unfortunately that's not the answer he wanted.
</p><p>
To him, my answer was really discouraging.
</p><p>
To me, (if I was receiving that answer from someone else), it would be really encouraging.
</p><p>
<strong>I like being reminded that nobody's going to help me</strong> - that it's all up to me. It <strong>puts my focus back on the things I can control</strong> - not waiting for outside circumstances.
</p><p>
But it got me wondering: is that just me?
</p><p>
<strong>When you think that nobody's going to help you, does that encourage you or discourage you?</strong>
</p><p>
I'm really interested to hear everyone's honest answer. Please leave a reply in the comments here. Thanks!
</p>
<img src="http://sivers.org/images/stranded.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="http://www.flickr.com/photos/eric_tank/2061351808/" />