Musicians and bands can get stale, no matter how successful they are. When that happens they need to Renew their career which is what the final stage of the Artist Development process is all about.
Video Highlights:
0:07 - Renewing your music career
0:30 - Taking risks with your music
0:50 - Reinvention
1:00 - Reconnecting with your audience
1:27 - Rediscovering your love of music
2:00 - Building new audiences
2:25 - Case Study
3:06 - Bringing it all together
The sixth stage is all about renewing your music. It's about renewing your brand, renewing your music, renewing your live shows. It's about injecting new life and ideas into your music.
I've worked with artists at the Maximize Stage who have become stale and they need to take risks and renew their music. The classic examples of this are Davie Bowie and Madonna, who every few years will give a new lease of life to what they are doing. Maybe it is new collaborations or new inspirations.
Now we look at the 'Three R's' of his 'Renew Stage'. Firstly their Reinvent. They are masters of reinvention.
Secondly they are looking to reconnect with audiences that were perhaps with them right at the very start but have maybe lost that relationship with them. They want to reconnect with those audiences and reconnect with what they feel makes their music. Maybe it's about renewing their sound.
Then they are Rediscovering. They are rediscovering their love of music. At this stage I've seen artists who are on a bit of a treadmill of just touring nonstop, releasing music, the press interviews and they get burnt-out. They have to sometimes take a step back and rediscover and fall in love again with why they got into music. Why do they write songs, what do they love about playing live, what do they love about being in the studio. So that's an incredibly important point.
Also here they are looking to build new audiences. What you will always find is that as you work on your next project or album you'll find people leaving you. That's fine. They move onto new artists or they may leave your music for a while and then rediscover it again.
I did this very successfully with an artist who'd had lots of big hits in the 80's and 90's but who had gone away because they had some issues. What they needed to do was renew themselves as a band and they did it incredibly well and one of the ways they did it was appealing to these new audiences. In this case it was appealing to the children of their original fans so that the parents and the kids would come along to their shows. And suddenly they were filling out arenas again, having top ten albums. They had reconnected with what fundamentally made them a band and why they got involved in music in the first place.
I hope these six stages have been useful to you. They provide you with an overall framework on how to think about your career. As you can see the kind of things you are looking to achieve at the Explore Stage are very different to those at the Supercharge Stage. Don't ever be fooled into thinking that you need to do all these things all at once. As you progress you will need to do different things. You are going to want to put different emphasis on building different parts of your career.
At the Explore Stage you want to be spending your time woodshedding. You want to be in there writing new tunes, trying out new concepts, experimenting as a musician.
At the Validate Stage you want to find out if your music is connecting with people. Does it hit them. Does it make the impact that you want your music to make.
At the Refine Stage you are polishing your music and live shows.
And then you are Supercharging, having great fun knocking it out of the park.
Then you are looking to Maximize all of this and create new revenue streams.
And finally you need to Renew yourself as an artist.
I hope this video has been useful to you. I'd love to read your comments and answer your questions. Please leave them at the bottom of this video. I look forward to catching up with you soon.
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If you missed the first video in the series you can find them here:
Stage 2 - Validation for Musicians
