More often, we, as a society, love to hear the success stories of certain people and what they did to achieve that success. Surely, these success stories are awesome and inspire a lot of people. Despite their inspirational effect, we believe they only tell us a single-sided perspective.
In this article, we swing on the opposite spectrum and discuss why 90% of electronic music artists fail in their quest to turn pro. We aim to bring awareness to this topic which is usually not discussed. This article is not to discourage any artist or to bring any negative thoughts or emotions to it. Rather, it is aimed to give you a perspective, a profound truth based on our experience of seeing our peers and artists’ peers who have gone through it. Instead of understanding what you need to succeed, it is more important to understand what to avoid in order to not make the same mistakes as many artists made — hindering your chance and opportunity to reach that success.
Here, we discuss the three main reasons why most electronic music artists will fail. These are:
Whether artists have the right mindset or not is determined by how they set their goals and how they define their success. All these things, believe it or not, are derived from their own needs, from their own mindsets, and how they view and perceive their own artist’s journey to be. More often, new and eager artists have big dreams such as playing for a major festival, fill-in-the-blank, EDC, CRSSD, Movement, etc. These are great goals to have and they should not be something that you hinder away. It is very important that you set goals and have milestones. But, what everyone should understand is that these goals and milestones should not be the determining factor of why you feel successful.
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It is something that we discuss deeply during phase one of ArtistMap. Moreover, most artists often set limitations on their journey. It means that they do not treat their artistry and their journey as a lifestyle, i.e. they are not fully committed for the long haul. The long haul means the 10-year mark which is really just a starting point for all artists. If you ask any of the big dogs that have been there for decades, they will all tell you the same that the 10-year mark is really just the beginning of your journey. On this journey, usually, most of the artists either quit or leave around the period between that eight to nine-year mark because they were unable to reach the milestones or the goals that they had set for themselves. Most of the time, the reason behind it is that they did not have the right mindset coming into this journey, thinking it is going to be easy and attainable within a few years of hard work, and oftentimes that is just not the case.
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The second reason why 90