The 6 Key Factors Required To Make It In The Music Industry

At Sound Syndicate we believe that ultimately, there are 6 critical factors that determine the success of any artist, producer, etcetera. Let’s keep it real: success doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s not just about making bangers. It’s about having the mindset, work ethic, and strategy to back up your talent.

In this blog, we break down these essential elements: the traits, habits, and decisions that build not just a career but a legacy. From sharpening your character and focus to delivering consistent quality and reaching the right audience, this guide is all about helping you navigate the industry with purpose and a clear vision for your future.

1. Character & Morals

Basic human decency, integrity, networking skills, willpower & work ethic. If you want to work alongside good people, remember: good people work with good people. Always be honest and upfront, don’t play games with people, it can, and most certainly will backfire in the long run.

We've noticed this is a reality check for a lot of people in our industry: you are not entitled to anyones contributions. No one is supposed to work with you or help you out. If they do, they're being nice, so give them their credit and show your appreciation. In the early stages of your career, you haven't proven yourself yet, and unless you're paying, there's probably nothing to gain for anyone else but you.

We believe that if you want to excel in any industry, you need people skills, networking skills and a great work ethic to succeed. Seek out ways to build character. Whether you’ll succeed as an artist or not, these first two factors are going to set you up for a fulfilling, worthwhile journey, in the music business as well as in life in general.

We believe the most surefire way to build character is to pursue a vision worthy of pursuing. Find a worthy pursuit, perhaps by asking yourself; why would you actually want to be a successful artist at all? What does it mean to be a successful artist? What does that success even look like to you? But we'll get back to that.

2. Patience, Consistency & Focus

We whole heartedly believe that if you master all of the factors on this list you are most likely to reach your goals as an artist. It probably won’t happen instantly, but if you believe you already have, or are able to gain all these factors, stay patient and stay consistent.

Consistency will cause every single thing to compound over time. You need consistency to gain and make the most out of all of the other factors. In order to maximize your potential outcome, you have to maximize your input. We’ve all heard stories about talented athletes who wasted their potential because they were too lazy to get in the gym and just wanted to party. If you want to be at the NBA level of the music industry, you’ll have to outwork the competition at both the High School and College levels first. That means learning all there is to the music business, applying yourself consistently and banging out (finished) songs. (Half a song is not a song you know). 

This is also where focus comes in. It seems people usually tend to think of focus in the confines of ‘everything that’s necessary to reach your goal’. True focus however, is the opposite of that. It’s cutting out all the bullshit that’s actually keeping you from reaching your goals.

There’s plenty of people who say they never really have time to work on their music careers, but they play video games for multiple hours every single day and go clubbing every weekend. Then when they finally do hit the studio, they’re spending more time scrolling on their phones instead of actually creating music. To get the most out of your time, you need focus. When thinking about focus, remember, focus is what you don’t do. Be honest with yourself, set priorities and apply yourself consistently.

3. Quality

How good is your music? This is a no brainer. Your songs are in constant competition with millions of other songs. If they’re not good enough to compete, you’re not really in the race.

Always look for areas to improve, whether it is live performance, songwriting, delivery, production, mixing, mastering, etcetera. Don’t forget the quality of your team, strategies, marketing and branding; what does your product (music) actually look like and how do you present it to people? High quality artworks are just as important. I think that as artists, we tend to overestimate the quality of our own product.

From my own experience; I thought I was making very high quality music about 3 years before I actually started receiving that feedback from anyone else. That’s 3 whole years worth of practice and making songs later! I finished at least 200 songs in that period. Whereas I probably finished about 100 songs before I even felt like I was making quality music at all.

A good marker for your own confidence in the quality of your music is if you are able to play the music for other people without constantly delivering commentary along with it. A lot of artists and producers tend to do the following; They start playing their music and immediately talk over their own music, boring the other person with all the little things they still want to change about the song.

Not every artist that blows up has amazing quality music, but the ones that stick around usually do. This is the outcome of patience, consistency & focus. Don’t underestimate the impact practicing and ‘getting good’ will have on your career in the long term. Perfection is unattainable, but you can damn sure get close.

4. Operational Excellence

How well do you and the people around you know their way around the music industry and business? Are you making the most of your time? Are your schedules and work flow optimized? Does your team get along and does everybody work well together? Is your business as an artist running as smoothly as possible? Or are you constantly running into trouble on the business side? Are you doing everything in the most efficient order and manner? It is important to take care of business in the best way possible.

5. Expectations & The Way Success Is Defined

Your expectations are essentially what will determine if you’re successful or not. While this is super obvious, if your goal and expectation is to gain 2 fans, you’re very likely to achieve your goal. Learn to manage your expectations and define what actually constitutes a successful outcome for you.

Since most people like money. Let’s say you define success by financial compensation: If you know the characteristics of your target audience, you could research how many people actually possess those characteristics. You now have an estimation of your potential audience size. If your potential audience is too small, this will decrease your chances of a financially stable career as an artist. If your target audience typically does not have a lot of money to spend, or does not like to spend money on merchandise, you’d have to figure out how to source other income streams through your music.

Calculating these things is difficult and might take up too much of your time, but if done right, doing so will give you better expectations of what would constitute a success story and what constitutes a perfect outcome. When doing this though, remember these are just numbers and estimations, unexpected things happen everyday and the industry is constantly evolving. It’s okay to dream big and challenge conventional thought, just make sure you maintain an understanding of what’s actually happening. Set goals to make sure you live up to your own expectations. What’s the necessary input to meet your expectations? What constitutes a successful outcome?

Keep in mind; goals should never be end-goals or if-goals. (An example of an if-goal is: “if I have this then I will;” etc.). In most cases, setting if-goals is just a form of setting pre-conditions to chasing your actual goals, prolonging your journey, perhaps unnecessarily. If you set an end-goal, you might reach your goal, and then what? Setting an end-goal is great if you wish for something to actually end. But in case you wish for something to continue past the end-goal, having an end-goal in place is a surefire way to set yourself up for a crisis of faith once you achieve that end-goal.

Don’t limit your goals and ambitions to your career. Make sure to set goals for your personal life as well. Imagine you’re a successful artist, what’s your health like? What are your financials like? How do the relationships with your loved ones look like at that point? There’s truthfully no point in setting out to conquer the world if you don’t have anybody to share your journey with. It’s scary how easy we, as people, can get caught up in our ambitions and forget investing time and effort into ourselves and our personal relationships. As humans, we need a home base, your body is your temple. The music industry is stressful enough, so it helps if other areas of your life are stable. Goals should be aiming points which you can use to keep track of progress and keep yourself pointed towards the right direction. In your career, as well as in your personal life.

6. Reach

If you are a pleasant, honest and hard working individual, your music is incredible, you have well defined goals, your business is on-point and the people around you love and support you, this is simple math really. If you grow into a position where everyone that knows about you inevitably wants to see you win, the only question left to ask is: how many people know about you?

If 1 in every 100th person is a fan of your music. You’ll have to reach 100.000 new people to gain a thousand fans. If those 1.000 fans are willing to spend $ 20,- per year on your merchandise and shows, this means you could potentially make $ 20.000,- in merchandising and ticket sale revenue per year (before expenses) in addition to your streaming royalties. 

Figuring out a way to maximize your reach is critical, especially as an independent artist, since labels have a lot of fire power in this criteria. This is where the power of the current label model resides. Essentially, labels have become marketing agencies. Maybe only 1 of the 100.000 people you’re able to reach turn out to be fans of your music. If you can identify the key characteristics of that 1 person, you could target your attempts to gain reach more specifically to similar people (forming a target audience). If you seek out opportunities to increase your reach with your target audience in mind, this will increase the effectiveness of your efforts.

Generating reach is by far the most difficult factor to consistently achieve. We have found providing free value to your audience and network along with tactful collaborations to be the most effective way to maximize reach for the long term. When setting up collaborations, always make sure there’s something to gain for both parties and that the expectations and reasoning for the collaboration is communicated effectively. As to prevent a ‘falling out’ between the two parties, so that you can continually collaborate and grow together even if a project fails.

Conclusion

We’ve noticed some artists possess all 6 factors, while some artists only possess 1 or 2, with someone else in their team having the remaining factors on lock. It is our perspective that; in the cases where the artists themselves possess most, or even all of the factors, the artist is set up for longevity. This is the most favorable and a true embodiment of one of our favorite things to say: ‘artists are CEO’s’. When other people on an artist’s team possess most of the factors, the artist’s career will most likely die out as soon as these people leave the team without a proper replacement.

We also believe it is entirely possible to blow up as an artist while only possessing factor 3 (a great song or project), this is the case of the ‘over-night-success’. If an artist fails to manage the over-night-success and does not master the other factors soon enough, or does not place people in charge of the other factors, they’ll end up the classic case of the one-hit-wonder. We’ve placed each factor in this list in what we believe is the most efficient order in which one should master each factor in order to groom themselves for a successful, long career as an artist.

The most sure fire way to achieve an above average outcome, is to become an above average performer in your respective field. Now get after it.