8 Lessons Bands Can Teach Your Business Smartmoney.com
&Ndash; it’s the amateur musician’s dream. One day, your band gets out of the basement and on to the radio. Then, suddenly, you’re a rock star, and it can be all about the music.Not quite.
Bland as it may sound, the reality is that the music business is still a business – and musicians are essentially small-business owners who need to think about contracts, taxes, marketing and building a brand.
“They’re in the arts, but when they’re playing professionally, they’re in a business,” says Frank Dusek, an accountant with the Chicago firm Weiss, Sugar, Dvorak & Dusek, Ltd., whose clients include musicians. “It’s about supporting yourself, making a living, making your house payments.”
The American Federation of Musicians, an international union, has about 90,000 members in the U.S. and Canada, about 85% of whom are self-employed, independent contractors, according to Paul Sharpe, the union’s director of freelance services and membership development. And whether they consider themselves business people or sing about the downfall of the financial industry, many of these independent artists have had to develop some of the same skills and mom-and-pop store owners in order to survive.
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