CW #60: Approach Your Creative Career Like a Rock Band

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Hey everyone!

Hope you've had a great week and are enjoying your weekend.

It's been 40C (100F) all week in Belgrade and I've been grateful that our apartment has AC. Hope you're keeping cool wherever you are.

As always, you can see what I've been working on lately in my weekly update post.

This week, we're talking about a constant tension I've experienced in my life and career that I know others have as well:

How do you commit to one niche, business or specialty when you have multiple interests and skills?

Let's get into it.

The Album-Tour Creative Career Model

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As multi-skilled, multi-passionate, multi-interested creators, we often get stuck in our careers because we feel we need to commit to just one thing and become an expert in it. We’re told that niching is the only way to gain traction with our work and if we don’t we’ll remain forever anonymous.

We have no problem coming up with ideas that could work. But we have just enough uncertainty that we’ll stay excited in them that we hold back from committing. And so we sit and wait for greater clarity and greater certainty to come along.

They rarely do.

We need a new model for approaching creative careers. One that gives us the confidence to commit to our short-term interests and create projects around them, while knowing that we don’t need to (and maybe even shouldn’t) stick with that pursuit forever.

It turns out this model already exists.

It’s the Album-Tour Cycle followed by musicians, consisting of an ever-repeating loop of writing → workshopping → recording → touring. Let’s have a look at how this model applies to our creative careers.

Developing Your Craft

Before the cycle can begin, the first step is developing the tools of the trade, learning your instrument, refining your craft. Your start out as playing covers, riffing on what others have created and starting to add your own flair to it.

Studying what’s already worked is an invaluable form of practice. It helps us learn how to piece together the structure of a song and helps us understand what already resonates with people who are already interested in our genre.

At this stage, the goal is less about generating new ideas of our own than it is learning to use the tools well enough to say something with them, whether it’s original or not.

Somewhere in the process of building and riffing on the work of others, however, we start experimenting with work of our own. And here, once we start writing our own songs, the Album-Tour Cycle begins.

Playing Local Gigs

To musicians, playing live is not the culmination of the writing process, but an integral part of it. Much like a comedian testing new material, playing live allows a band to get real-time feedback on their songs. At this point, these are small local shows, and the purpose is two-fold: To workshop their ideas, and to start building and engaging a fan base.

At this point, the ideas are fluid. There might be a core idea in each song, but it's not committed, it's still free to be tinkered with and played with. During any given show, they might experiment with the structure and tempo of each of the songs they've written.

Leonard Cohen, for example, wrote 80 draft verses for the song Hallelujah. Even after recording the song for his album Various Positions, Cohen spent years performing different combinations of the song live, continually seeking to find the single best version of the song.

For us, the local live show stage of the process is publishing content online. We can think of our short-form content on social media like a collection of licks and riffs that then get combined and expanded on in longer form blog posts, podcasts, or videos.

Much like a band playing live local shows, the point of this content is to both test and play with different versions of raw ideas, while also building and engaging an audience. We try a lot of ideas, express them in different ways, and see what gets the kids in the first row nodding their heads along.

Over time with repetition and feedback, the work begins to settle into it’s final form. As the songs take shape, it then becomes time to enter the studio and commit them to an album.

Producing Your First Album

A band might have a solid collection of songs they’ve honed over months or even years of playing live, but the first step of the recording process is running those ideas through the creative gauntlet.

A producer is brought it to provide an experienced set of outside ears and a fresh perspective to determine what’s working and where the songs could be improved. A good producer will help take the raw materials of the collection of songs and help turn them into a cohesive finished album.

In addition to honing the individual songs themselves, the band and producer will whittle down the selection of songs that make it onto the finished album. A 10-song album might have started out as a collection of 20 or 30 songs that had been written. Many of the songs are cut because they’re simply not that good while others are fantastic songs that don’t fit with the larger vibe of this album. Part of crafting a good album is maintaining a consistent theme or tone.

For us, the album recording phase of the process is about distilling a core theme of the collection of ideas we’ve been working into a cohesive, consumable offer or series of offers.

Your album might be a course, a workshop, a book, or even an entire business with a suite of related offerings. The important thing is that the thread that runs through everything you offer is consistent.

As with producing an album, our job during this phase is to narrow down the ideas we’ve been workshopping and then pressure test them, refining them into the best possible version of themselves. This will almost certainly require outside feedback and perspective.

This outside perspective might come from a coach or consultant, mentor, mastermind group, or our customers themselves. If we’ve been workshopping our ideas in public already, chances are we’ve already been able to get a sense of what’s most interesting and valuable to our audience and can double down on that.

At the end of the production process, we leave the studio with a finished album, load into the tour bus, and hit the road to promote it.

Going On Tour

By playing local gigs, a band will have already built up a small, loyal fanbase who is primed and ready to buy the album as soon as it’s released. A national tour, however, gives the band a chance to introduce their music to new audiences, and sell more copies of the album to casual fans.

When a band has only a small audience, the best way to grow is to team up with one or more bands with similar audiences and go on tour together. This allows each band on tour to cross-pollinate audiences with the others. As a result, everyone’s fan base grows. This same strategy works perfectly for us.

There are likely dozens of creators and business owners who offer complementary products, services, and content to you, and thus have similar audiences. Find ways to team up with them that serve each of you as well as each of your audiences.

This might mean offering a joint workshop, guesting on podcasts, finding referral partners, or cross-promoting through your newsletters, social media, and elsewhere.

Much like everyone likes discovering new music in the same vein as what they already listen to, people are also eager to find new content and creators in a similar vein.

This stage of the album-tour cycle is about capitalizing on the work you’ve done, getting it in front of new people, and converting them into customers. But it also marks the point at which the Album-Tour Cycle begins to repeat. Only this time on a bigger stage.

Repeating The Cycle

On a given night at the beginning of a tour, a band might play almost every song off the album they’re supporting. As they near the end of the touring cycle, however, they begin to inject more and more new, unrecorded material.

In this way, they return back to workshopping phase of the cycle, seeing what resonates and what doesn’t with a new batch of songs. Only now, while on tour, they have a larger and more varied audience to gain feedback from.

Often, by the time one tour ends. A band will have already written and workshopped enough songs to head immediately back into the studio for the production phase of the next album. In this way, each phase of the album-tour cycle blends seamlessly into the next.

In our own creative work, we can achieve this by dedicating a small percentage of our creative output to experimenting with new ideas, topics and interests. While 90% of our content might remain consistent to serve our existing audience and push people to our existing paid offers work, the remaining 10% might explore new territory.

Over time, if we find something through that exploration that resonates both with us and others, we might choose to allocate more and more focus to it. Then, when the time comes, we record the album around that idea or topic and then kick off a new tour in support of it.

Don’t Be Afraid To Change Lanes

The album-tour model provides a much better way of approaching our careers as creators than the view many of us grew up with. While we might not stick with a single industry, job role, topic, or niche, our work still has a through-line. That through-line is the unique voice and perspective we bring to any work we choose to do.

How we apply our voice and perspective is always changing. Sometimes our next album is a subtle refinement of the last. Sometimes it’s Bob Dylan going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

Despite the criticism Dylan faced from long-time fans at that point, with hindsight, we can see clearly that Bob Dylan was still Bob Dylan after shifting from folk music to rock. In fact, you could make the argument that that’s when he really became Bob Dylan.

To me, Dylan’s story shows clearly that the danger is not in switching career lanes, but in failing to switch when we feel the urge. Bob Dylan was already famous in 1965. But his decision to shift lanes and everything that ensued has made him legendary.

Sometimes the lane we’re in–no matter how secure–simply doesn’t lead in a direction that will allow us to fulfill our potential. And so we, like Dylan have to change lanes when we feel called to do so.

Remember, no one wants to hear the same album recorded six times, anyway. We already own that album and can listen whenever we want. What we want from our favourite bands is their voice, their perspective, their particular sensibility presented in a new and refreshing way.

So commit, not for the long haul, but to the next album. Make the best album that only you can make at this point in your life.

And then start working on the next one.
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1 // Marketing: How To Develop An Effective Differentiation Strategy

With a near-unlimited supply of content available online, our job as creators is not only creating work that is good but creating work that is different. Compared to creating work that is the absolute best in our niche, creating work that is different is relatively easy.

And yet, so few of us as creators are clear on what exactly differentiates our work from similar offerings in a way that is compelling to our audience. Differentiation is one of the most challenging and important components of your marketing, which is why we spend so much time covering the topic in Podcast Marketing Academy.

This article by CXL offers a fantastic overview of how to craft your own differentiation strategy and some of the most common methods of differentiation.

👉 Read the article (25 min)

2 // Wellbeing: How (and how much) Time Outdoors Boosts Your Creativity

Creative work requires a consistent supply of new inputs. We usually think of those as articles, newsletters, podcasts, etc. But what about our environmental inputs? As Michael Easter shares, time spent outdoors in nature is essential for resetting our brains and boosting our creative thinking. He also breaks down the simple 20-5-3 formula that dictates just how much time we should be spending outside (and where) each week, month, and year for optimal wellbeing and inspiration.

👉 Read the article (6 min)

3 // Think: Non-Financial Debt

We’re well aware of the concept of dept as it applies to money. But it turns out there are many other types of debt as well, some of which we’re likely taking on without even realizing.

Technical debt, for example, is the hidden cost of implied future rework caused by choosing the faster, easier, short-term solution today. Jay Clouse shares how technical debt has its advantages, and can even be necessary at times. But let it pile up, and we’re in for trouble.

👉 Read the article (4 min)

4 // Resources: Growth Currency

One of my favourite new newsletter finds in the past few weeks is Growth Currency. Written by a fellow (almost-)Vancouverite, Dylan shares a weekly dose of high value actionable tools +tips + resources for creators. He’s also a rad dude who’s worth following on Twitter.

👉 Check out the newsletter​

5 // Creativity: The AAAA Idea Framework

One of our most important skills as creators is being able to generate ideas. And yet, at times it can feel like we’ve already said everything there is to say on a topic. That’s where the AAAA Idea Framework comes in.

Dickie Bush shares that every idea or topic can be expressed in four different ways, Actionable (here’s how), Analytical (here are the numbers), Aspirational (yes, you can), Anthropological (here’s why). Check it out and watch your ideas multiply!

👉 Check out the thread​

If someone sent you this newsletter and you want shiny new issues of your own, you can subscribe here.

As always, thanks so much for reading, it truly means a lot.

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This week I’m grateful for: I never really got Twitter in the past. But in the past month, I’ve been exploring how to actually use it properly and have been having a blast. In particular, I’ve had a number of Zoom calls with awesome people doing really interesting work and walked away with a few new friendships.

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Win(s) of the week: Aside from the above mentioned new connections and friendships, I finished the first 30 emails of the evergreen 50 Days of Podcasting email series I’m working on. I think I’ll pause here and get them set up in ConvertKit before writing more. My list of ideas for this series is now well over 100 emails long so I might start off with a 30 day series that people can then opt in for more once they reach the end of it.

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I’m currently excited about: Taking a week-long vacation the week after next!

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