Musician, Can You Solve This?
Discover your unfair advantages and stand out by seeking people’s rejection
A longform essay by Tommy Darker.
Intro
Sarah knew she was in a lucid dream. But it felt real.
As she was walking in the dark forest, she could hear a strange piano melody, as if it was coming from the clouds.
It was her melody. It was stuck in her head. It defined who she was.
Where was she walking towards? She had no clue. She was just walking on the green, wet grass. It feels stinky and uncomfortable.
The forest was dark. It couldn’t get darker. A bit more darkness and she would need some source of light to keep going.
The clouds were thick and gray, although there was no sign of storm coming.
Now she knew: it was a crack of light through the clouds that she was following. That was her exit. She stopped for a minute and contemplated her direction.
Confidence filled her lungs, time to speed up. This melody needed to be documented. She had to escape the lucid dream and get back to reality.
But the road was getting longer and longer. She was running, but yet stuck in the same place.
And then a crack!
‘Damn you tree branch. I thought this only happened in the movies. Who placed you there? I got no time to lay down.’
Why is everything so quiet? Where did the melody go?
The absence of music now fails to cover the footsteps towards her. They are heavy. She wants to look up and see who’s coming, but her body is numb. She is in a dream, don’t forget that.
She knew that nothing would hurt her. But she wanted to see the person standing behind her. To see the lips moving, as they said:
“The time to nurse an idea is at the moment of its birth. Every minute it lives, gives it better chances of surviving.”
Is it dead now? Is the melody gone forever? Will this charming forest disappear once she wakes up?
She will never know. She wakes up with a sweet kiss from her son.
Where’s the notebook? What did this man say again?
#1 Make Up Your Own Mind
“Tell The World What You Intend To Do, But First Show It.”
How do you translate this sentence? It’s extracted from Napoleon Hill’s book ‘Think And Grow Rich’.
N. Hill himself later explains: “This is the equivalent of saying ‘deeds, and not words, are what count most.’”
Let’s take a step back and think for a minute, shall we?
Before we exercise our mind’s power through actions and words, we do some brainwork first. Behind every action we take, there is a firm decision made. Likewise, behind every word we express, there is a thought about it.
Decisions and thoughts drive our actions and expression.
Pretty basic insight, but without these two elements, we cannot proceed to ‘tell the world what we intend to do’, let alone show it.
One step further, in my book, The Indecisive Musicpreneur, I stress that ‘decision IS the action’; once you’ve decided firmly, backed by strong desire and intention, action comes automatically, so you can fulfill the visualised outcome.
According to Napoleon Hill, leaders ‘reach a decision quickly and change it slowly’. And I agree, indecisive people tend to do the opposite; decide slowly and change their decision too often.
However, when people read ‘reach your decision quickly’, they tend to think ‘be sloppy and disorganised’. This is not what the advice means.
It means ‘be well-informed’ and ‘know why you decide to take action towards fulfilling a goal’.
The question remains:
How do we become well-informed, so we can make a firm decision and take action?
By acquiring feedback. Read on.
#2 Get Feedback, Create A Plan
Once again, let’s set things straight.
You’ll hear most people saying that ‘action is what counts’. True that, as we admitted in the previous chapter.
This is not all there is, though. Mindset, thoughts and decisions play a huge role in the baking process of your final actions:
- Mindset is an essential ingredient, so you can produce the right, positive sequence of thoughts and vibrations.
- Without thoughts, you cannot reach a well-informed decision.
- Without decisions, you cannot transform your thoughts into their equivalent in the physical world.
Mindset, in plain words, is habit; it’s how you think subconsciously, even while you’re sleeping, brushing your teeth or having a shower — where you don’t make extensive use of your brain. Thoughts, consequently, create and reinforce your desire over a specific subject, object or goal, and help you reach a decision. Decisions are the connecting link between intentions and visualised outcome. Action comes last, as a subsequent result of a firm decision.
As we betokened in the previous chapter, where does feedback come in?
Feedback can be the engine oil between thoughts and decisions, accelerating the action-taking process by providing useful information.
As the previous sentence reveals:
The goal of getting feedback is not to define your goals or help discover them, but to help create a sound plan upon a definite goal you’ve already decided.
Through feedback you acquire information, opinions and thoughts on a specific aspect of your plan. It’s your job to filter these incoming information, opinions and thoughts, and create a more well-informed action plan. It’s your duty to discover the facts in people’s words, which will be mingled with fears, regrets and insecurities, as well as their own ambitions, vision and positive thinking.
Remember, when it comes to getting feedback, musicians tend to think it’s a taboo topic to discuss.
“I’m creating my own music, I decide what’s best. It’s my vision. I don’t want to spoil it for others. I’m the artist, they expect to hear my story.”
Ok. Don’t take it personally.
For the record, I just need to inform you that the modern music industry as you know it today, from dusk till now, had always conducted research to acquire feedback and information. Then, after filtering and analysing, they were passing it on to their team members (managers, producers, PR agents etc.) and sometimes to the bands themselves, so everyone can help create a sound plan. No final decision was made randomly, as modern independent musicians might think.
The music industry we know today is the aftermath of years of research and feedback from the public.
Today, things are changing. We are in a transitional period, where the public changes its habits and gets its mindset reformed. Technology only accelerates these changes. What is the right thing to do?
We don’t really know. That’s why feedback has become more essential than ever.
The good news: you can do it by yourself, without the permission of a label. You can acquire your own information based on your very own needs. This way, you’ll collect targeted data that will benefit your career.
You can personalise the experience you provide to your fans and customers, based on your very own vision, your very own data, your very own audience’s needs, so you can maximise the value you provide and stand out from the digital ocean of artists.
Isn’t that wonderful? Yes. Let’s see how this can be done.
#3 How NOT To Get Feedback
I know you’re excited to read how you can gather your own feedback and deliver a better experience for your audience and customers, but hold your horses for a minute.
It’s my duty to first demystify the most common way that musicians use to get feedback today — which doesn’t work at all!
Can you guess who they refer to, when they want to get feedback on something?
Take a minute and think.
Yes, you guessed right: friends and family.
What’s the problem here, you ask?
- Friends and family cannot be objective; they will be sentimentally influenced by the fact that you are involved in the project.
- They will merely present opinions (mingled with their own fears), while you’re looking for hard facts and information.
- They are probably not knowledgeable on your area or vision.
- They usually refrain from objecting to your statements for the fear of looking bad.
How can they be helpful? What you’re looking for is the opposite:
- Objective feedback regarding the plan, not the people involved in it.
- Facts instead of opinions.
- People knowledgeable in your area.
- Objections and hints on things that might not work.
The reality is: most people are ignorant about your creative vision. Only you know what’s best for it. By acquiring information, you can connect the dots and create a more well-informed plan than before. I’ll stress it again: look for the facts in people’s words, don’t be easily swayed by their opinions. Don’t search for affirmation on your existing plan, look for the ‘no’, for valuable information lies in objections.
Everyone has opinions. And they are willing to give them away, because people love talking about themselves. Building a business and music career, though, is about you. Instead of accepting opinions as facts, get critical and filter.
“If you are influenced by the opinions of others, you will have no desire of your own.” — N. Hill
Now that we emphasised why you might have to ignore the mamas and the papas when laying down the plan for your vision, time to get to action and summon the collective power of the audience, which will really help you create a sound plan for your musical project.
Time to break down the various ways of acquiring feedback.
Ready? I sure am.
#4 How To Get Feedback Your Way
If I snapped my fingers in the middle of a quiet library, would you turn towards my direction? Probably.
If I shouted your name in a crowded street, would you look around to see if someone’s calling you? Most likely.
If 3 people pointed their fingers towards a specific direction, would you turn your head to see what’s there? Almost for sure.
What’s going on?
Simply put, the human kind responds to stimuli — signs that encourage people to respond and perhaps take action. This is how we’ve been programmed from the ancient times.
Since the human kind started sharing and getting organised in communities, the stimulus of participation has become a strong one. It enhances the notion of belonging, gives a goal and direction for the participants, boosts faith for a better future, and uses the principle of social proof; the more people participating, the stronger the desire for others not to miss out and join.
How can we Musicpreneurs spark that stimulus of participation and get people involved in our creative process, allowing them to open up and provide us with valuable information and feedback along the way?
Let’s find out.
In my experience, the method of acquiring feedback is the following simple formula:
- You communicate with another human being and get their permission,
- You show/explain them your concept/context,
- You ask for feedback,
- You receive feedback.
And… that’s it! If you don’t ask, you’ll never receive. Everything starts with asking.
As we mentioned earlier, feedback is another cool word to say acquiring information. When you receive feedback, you must filter what’s been received and translate it into useful information; otherwise you’re wasting your time.
A ‘swipe right’ or ‘swipe left’ on Tinder is feedback. You provide the other parties (the person and the platform) with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. (The way you use a platform/tool provides a lot of feedback to its creators — Google tweaks its algorithm according to the searches submitted — but that’s another story we won’t analyse here.)
The point is, as a creator of multi-faceted experiences (music, visuals, videos, live experiences), most of the times a mere ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is not satisfying enough. That’s why dry numbers and metrics fail to reveal why certain things happen.
Ideally, you want people to sit with you on a table, mentally aroused and attentive, and spend a few minutes opening up and revealing what they think about the stimulus they’ve just experienced: the presentation of your project. It is your job to stimulate them (before the session), as well as filter the information provided, to be translated into useful data for your project (after the session).
Now, for people to be willing, inspired, motivated, and thoughtful when providing feedback, you need to take into regards the purpose/vision of the project, the context of your session, what you request feedback on, how often you do it, and the medium you use to ask them.
Remember, the final goal of acquiring feedback is not to merely reaffirm what you already know, but to seek objections and gather information that will change your project for the better.
Let’s analyse some effective ways of acquiring feedback for your musical project:
Mastermind Groups (or Roundtable Discussions)
A group of trusted people gathering regularly ‘around a table’ in order to brainstorm and reach decisions about a specific subject is called a mastermind group.
More often than not, there is a moderator who controls the flow of the discussion — and usually that person is the brain behind the vision. The common characteristic of all participants is that they care deeply about the subject discussed, know well the given context, and communicate in harmony. Such discussions are conquered by positive attitude and willingness to overcome difficulties by collectively accumulating knowledge and angles from all the participants.
Mastermind groups can be truly powerful, because the participants are usually knowledgeable and powerful minds who want to contribute towards building a bold vision. Each person’s experience adds a new dimension to the discussion, which often leads to surprisingly innovative paths.
It is said that most big accomplishments in human history were a result of the agenda of mastermind groups who met regularly and tackled most problems along the way.
A group of people thinking in harmony is always more powerful than a single brain.
As a musician and artist, you can create your own mastermind group by summoning people who are knowledgeable and you trust. The aim of these meetings is to tackle problems and create an actionable plan, not to identify a mission and vision — that’s your job.
The participants of your mastermind group don’t have to reside in the same place — meetings can be conducted online, through conferencing services. It is important, though, that the meetings are held regularly, maybe once or twice a week.
If approached correctly and the group is in harmony, the result will be an astonishing acceleration of your plans, through well-informed resources and objective feedback.
Who could participate in your mastermind group? Your band members, people you admire, your business mentor(s), bloggers, innovative people from other industries, academics, other successful artists, hardcore followers of your art, and so on.
Reach out to them, get their permission, organise the concrete details of the group (frequency of meetings, place, date/time, topics of discussion, goals, agenda etc.) and start committing to these meetings. Don’t skip them, or else their power cannot be harnessed.
Community Surveys
By now, probably you have 20, 50, 100, 1.000 people that care profoundly about your music career, art and story. Time to energise this group of people and crowdsource their collective knowledge to build something brilliant.
Your existing community is a great place to start, when it comes to acquiring knowledge that will help you make more well-informed decisions. A key aspect: your community does care and knows the context.
Make a list of people who would like to see you succeed. Reach out to them personally in their most preferred way (in person, through email, by phone, via social media etc.), provide context of your situation, ask them specific questions, and spend some time with them discussing their answers. Keep notes all along the way.
The type of questions can vary, from simple yes/no answers (and why) to an elaborate analysis, from a quick poll (‘pick your favourites from the list’) to the creation of a list of solutions to a problem (‘what would you do if you were in my position?’).
Such a method can provide brilliant feedback and information about the future plans of your projects, since the providers are the ones who will also buy what you create, spread the word of mouth and recruit more people for you.
The goal of community surveys is not only to acquire feedback and strategise the next steps, but also to emotionally connect with your audience.
Once you’ve made your story interactive and have involved your community actively, they will feel privileged to ‘own’ a part of your work and contribute. This not only fosters the sense of belonging and connects the members of your gang with each other, but also creates network effects that spread awareness of what you do.
Astonishing results can come when people feel emotionally aroused and inspired to take action. This happens predominantly when people are ‘involved’ rather than ‘shown’ or ‘being told’.
1-on-1 Mentorship
You have a mentor, right? If not, then consider finding one.
I observed a friend of mine stating something quite obvious, but profoundly enlightening. He positively focuses on hanging out with three kinds of people:
- People who are ambitious, yet just starting out,
- People in the same success level like him, and
- People way ahead of him in terms of experience and accomplishments.
He tries to keep good balance among these three groups. Pretty obvious, huh? I guess most of us do the same. But there was something in that statement that led to a lightbulb moment.
Ambitious people starting out help us remind ourselves where we came from, get positive energy and enthusiasm, and pass on some of our existing knowledge. Our co-walkers in this journey will help us discuss current problems, share common experiences, and motivate ourself to keep on, while the experienced and accomplished ones will become our mentors, will show us how to avoid short-sighted pitfalls, and will make us believe that succeeding is possible.
People who play the role of a mentor in your life usually have two things in common: they have made a lot of mistakes (and learned from them), and they have experienced long journeys (and have completed them with patience).
Your mentor will be a person — not necessarily older than you — who can see your situation clearly, sentimentally detached, and give you objective advice that will get you unstuck during dark moments. They will also inspire you and give you practical advice and suggestions on how to innovate and stand out. Finally, they will give you food for thought and will challenge you to think further by questioning and ‘testing’ your current actions.
In short, the mentor’s role is to see things objectively and inform, inspire and guide.
Whether about business or art, you don’t always have to follow your mentor’s advice, or you might end up getting excessively influenced and assimilating his character traits, along with his own fears, insecurities and well-hidden weaknesses, or, one step further, become a tool for his own ambitions which never came true.
Remember: feedback of any kind is to give you information/facts, and help you reevaluate your plan and strategise, rather than define your goals and vision. This is entirely your game.
Where can you find a mentor? Start by hanging out with the right people.
Private Screenings/Listening Parties
Have you ever organised a party? Probably you have. It’s fun, isn’t it?
Imagine a party, where people drink, chat, snack, and then sit in a room quietly and enjoy a piece of art, so they can give detailed feedback about how they felt later.
This is the simple premise of a listening party or private screening. You gather relevant people in the room, treat them nicely, and then you all pay attention to your new creation.
The participants of such an event could vary: they could be friends and family, other artists, journalists and bloggers, mentors and local influencers, die-hard members of your community. Such events are effective when invitation-only, because this way you can provide context to the attendees and ensure their attention throughout the happening.
At the end, you will have well-thought and discussed feedback by a group of people who care.
Such a feedback-attaining method can be successfully used when launching a new album: attract many prominent local bloggers for a private listening party of your new work, treating them with wine, snacks and witty discussion. They will enjoy it more than you think, and they’ll have the chance to network with each other, which will make you a connector — not just another music artist. This is what our patron, Kay Darens, did with his band’s latest release.
Questionnaires/Polls
Attention is a valuable thing, and you never know where it will come from. That’s why it’s great to drop questionnaires and polls to your community every now and then, via social media and your mailing list.
The premise is simple: you create a poll through a reliable service (Survey Monkey, Typeform, and Google Forms, to suggest a few), including 2–3 questions maximum, and drop it to the public.
Since this method is not a personalised experience, it doesn’t guarantee people’s attention as effectively as the aforementioned approaches. That’s why the shorter the poll is, the more responses you will get. 1–2 minutes of their valuable time is a great place to start.
Multiple choice questions, voting, ticking the box, and ‘anything else to add?’, are some popular options for such an approach. Needless to say, the bigger your community and the more well-designed your poll is, the more the responses you’ll receive.
The disadvantage of such a method: you will receive numbers, which are great indicators, but, unless you’ve included a ‘why?’ blank text box below each multiple-choice question, you will not know the rationale behind each response, through the participant’s own words. And that’s all that matters most of the time.
Check out below for the case study on questionnaires/polls:
[When you read the case study, don’t forget to hit ‘Recommend’ at the end!]
Emailing Influencers
When it comes to feedback, most musicians instantly think about this method: let’s email the bloggers!
Unless you’ve crafted the perfect email to get responses for your cold-call approach, and targeted carefully the people you want to reach out to, then hoping to receive replies is all you can do. These people are busy, most of the times.
Approaching bloggers and influencers is a great approach when it comes to receiving press and mentions online. However, if your goal is to attain constructive feedback, you might get disappointed: they usually want your finished tracks (no demos), and they don’t have much time to give you feedback, unless you are established in their minds (then why not get them to a listening party?).
Some food for thought: you want feedback on your demo tracks or draft plans. Once you’ve made the decision and perfected your music or plans, what’s the point of asking for feedback? You won’t change much anyway.
Press Releases
“When we come up with an idea, we first prepare a press release about it!”
This is a brilliant idea I heard from an attendee a while ago, in a growthhacking workshop I was invited. This way, they make things official and definite, giving themselves strong reasons to squeeze their brains and visualise the final outcome of the soon-to-be creation.
As an informal press release, you can design the project in your head and then start talking about it with people you trust, as if it’s happening already. Why is this beneficial? Because you’ll observe yourself, noticing what words you use consistently to describe your project. Such interactions with the public, even if they don’t give you practical insights on the project, they will give you information about what is essential to best describe it.
Reverse engineering, it is rumoured that Apple’s Steve Jobs used to create his own rumours about his upcoming products and features, so they can start circulating around the web, giving him valuable feedback on what sticks with the crowd. Essentially, if this is true, he was creating a ‘press release’ of their product, and was throwing it out there to see if it sticks with the public. Please excuse me if I’m spreading wrong rumours about Steve Job’s tactics.
Blog Comments
How do you get quick feedback when you don’t have an existing community? You publish your creation/project online, in the form of a blog post and ask for comments.
This is a cheap way to receive feedback, since most blog posts don’t attract much attention, unless you already have an established audience. However, you can take advantage of other people’s audience, by guest posting in their blogs.
Since every blog wants fresh and interesting content for their readers, as well as clicks, do your research and write down 20 blogs that could post your content — whether a new track, the idea of a project, or a new concept you’ve just invented. Find the angle that would best match these blogs and write a pitch to the owner of the publication. Tip: whilst doing this, don’t forget to include 2–3 attention-grabbing headlines as suggestion for your proposal — it will help the receiver envision the clicks the post will get, thus be more receptive to your pitch.
As a Call To Action, mention clearly that you’re looking for feedback and you’ll reply to all comments. If there is decent traffic and engaged community in the blog, you’ll receive comments that will be useful.
The downside of this tactic? Trolls and lack of attention. Most people online try to have fun, rather than leave constructive comments, so be picky with the blogs you’ll pitch to. Their audience is what you’re after.
A great platform to receive feedback in the form of blog comments is Medium (where you’re reading the current essay), because it allows you to highlight content and leave feedback on specific paragraphs or phrases, unlike the traditional blog comments, which refer to the whole article. Especially useful for long articles.
Feedback Services
As proposed by our supportive patron, Greg Wilnau:
When you’re asking for feedback, essentially you’re conducting marketing research.
That’s why he proposed using services like Audiokite.com, where music creators can submit their work and get real feedback from the service’s audience, which is based in the US.
The premise is simple: you upload the song, get the report and pay for the service. This way, you get unbiased feedback from people you’ve never heard of, and expose your music to new audience. The features I love the most:
- The attention diagram, where you can see how long you’ve managed to grab the listeners’ attention,
- The reviewers’ individual responses, where you can see your song described through the audience’s own words, and
- The listener sentiment diagram, where people connect your song with feelings.
An example report on Audiokite.com can be found here.
Another service where you can get feedback on your music is Fluence.io, where you can connect with music influencers and ask for their professional feedback on your music creations and videos. Simple.
The database of influencers is curated manually by the creators of the service, such as Shamal Ranasinghe, who has also co-founded Topspin Media, later acquired by Beats Music.
Examples of feedback provided can be found here. If you have some dollars to spare, it would be wise to try these services and see what they can do for your music and projects.
Joint Partnerships
We talked about exposure to other people’s audience through guest blogging before. Now it’s time to approach this tactic more seriously and upgrade it to a strategy.
Starting a joint partnership with another company or artist is a great way to receive consistent feedback on your creations and business. Open your email contacts, phone contacts or CRM, and scan for influencers and artists with whom you could start a partnership. The goal of such a partnership would be, in this case, to get each other’s work mentioned on their newsletter, social media, and special announcements (through competitions, giveaways etc.), in order to receive feedback from each other’s audience.
Through partnerships, both parties’ audiences get exposed to valuable new music and ideas, and both collaborators get to receive diverse feedback beyond their own sphere of influence.
Such partnership will not succeed, unless they provide mutual benefits to each party (reciprocation, that is) and are done consistently (so they can become an organic part of the narrative).
Out Of The Building
As Steve Blank says “take your idea and go out of the building to test it!”
Sometimes all you need to do is get real and make contact with the world outside the digiverse and the four walls of your room.
Let’s get creative. Grab a survey clipboard, get an mp3 player with your music and get outside.
Put a stand in an open-minded part of your city with the sign ’50 free coffees for 50 music lovers’. When somebody comes, ask them if they have 3 minutes to listen to a song and tell you how it makes them feel. In exchange, warm up their day by making them coffee for free :) Or something similar, you get the point! A cookie will also do.
One step further, you can collaborate with a street coffee or food vendor, and negotiate to pay for 50 coffees at cost-price, which will be given to 50 people who would like to stay for 3 minutes to listen to a song and provide feedback. You can be there in one corner, observing the progress and talking further with the listeners.
By the end of the day, you’ll have conducted marketing research, similar like my very own project ‘30 Free Coffees For 30 Musicians In 30 Days’ when I first arrived in London, where I discovered what ‘bugs’ most musicians today. (Hint: it led to the creation of my startup, Darker Music Talks.)
I bet that the attention you’ll receive this way will be much higher than the hip-hop artists in London who spam you in the street asking “Hey man! Do you support independent music? Listen to my music, man!”
Again: be creative! People’s attention is valuable.
Taking Action
Final piece of advice: don’t expect things to come by themselves.
Attention, constructive feedback and interest follows and favours sons of action.
If you’re planning to strategise for a month, then ask for feedback from 1–2 people, then go back to ‘think’… don’t even start what you’re doing.
Feedback-based learning, also known as Validated Learning (coined by Eric Ries from The Lean Startup) is a methodology that requires: fast experimentation, analysis of data received, work-in-progress (creation of demo song or prototype project). Then back to the first step.
We’ll discuss that in the next chapter. Final-final piece of advice:
Listen to the world. Creative geniuses have their ears open and listen to the people who have something to say. They don’t expect to have an answer for everything.
Next time you acquire feedback, keep this in mind: there is strength in teamwork. Once a vision is clear and definite, all you need is a plan — that’s where feedback comes in. The ideal feedback comes from a team of people who put their hearts, minds, souls and bodies together, in order to contribute to the accomplishment of a vision.
Once people have provided feedback, they carry with them a part of your vision. They are spiritually connected with what you’re doing.
The more people that carry your message in their hearts, the stronger and more likely your vision is to be fulfilled. And this advice is fail-proof.
Time to see the big picture and systematise our approach.
#5 Big Picture, The Y Circle
You’ve got out of the comfort zone, you’ve asked people what they think, you’ve set up that ‘free coffee’ stand in a busy road, you’ve launched a legendary listening party.
Now what?
It is true that most musicians, music professionals and music startups will not know what to do with that precious feedback.
But fear not, for I have prepared a framework for you to use: the Y Circle.
This simple method is based on exercising three of human’s key abilities that separate us from animals:
- The ability to ask,
- The ability to imagine, and
- The ability to refine.
By asking, we acquire new information. By imagining, we synthesise and connect existing information to create concepts that don’t exist. By refining, we remove the unwanted elements to make our creations better.
As creators, we all imagine, come up with ideas, create and tweak the products of our work. However, most of us end up where we started, indecisive, disappointed, and with lots of wasted resources, such as money and time.
What is missing? Acquiring consistent feedback and working towards one definite vision. That’s when we manage to well refine our creations.
In short: feedback provides us with information to connect and stirs our imagination, while our unique vision is the driving force of our work, giving a direction to our actions.
Vision, Creation, Data, Ideas: it’s only when these four elements are present that we manage to fulfill our creative vision, whether a musical composition, a music concept and project, or a music startup idea.
It’s really simple, like all useful concepts in life. It has worked for me since the beginning of my career as a musician and educator, going from ‘nothing but ideas, faith and a vision’ to making a full-time living out of what I love doing the most.
Let me know how this works for you.
Epilogue: A Final Note
Maybe you have been wondering, what’s going on with the title (‘Can You Solve This?’)?
The answer is simple.
It was a Sunday morning and I had just started writing. I decided the next topic would be about getting feedback for musicians. Pretty boring subject, most would think. ‘How do you make it more interesting?’, I thought.
I was looking for an impressive headline to start the essay with. Looking for inspiration, I opened my archived video folder and started scouting its content for ideas. (Keep an ‘inspiration folder’ for yourself, it’s a great hack.)
At some point, I stumbled upon a video by Veritasium, called ‘Can You Solve This?’. It was a simple project, where the host of the show asked strangers to solve a riddle. He gave them a number sequence and asked them to figure out the rule by suggesting their own sequence. He would simply reply ‘fits the rule’ or ‘doesn’t fit the rule’.
Initially, they all failed big time. Everything they were proposing was fitting in, but the rule was not correct! What was going on?
As it seems, they were only asking questions that were reaffirming what they had already set up as a rule in their minds. That’s why every single answer was ‘yes, fits the rule’.
This was not the point, though. Inspired by The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb, the host wanted them to think and ask questions that disprove what they already believed, so they can get information and solve the puzzle. A ‘no’ gives you more feedback than a ‘yes’.
Here’s the video. Watch it, it’s worth it:
Isn’t that what we all do in out daily lives? We are looking for reaffirmation (likes, retweets, comments etc.), creating an echo chamber of our own beliefs and discarding everything that doesn’t fit it. But that’s not how we grow, is it?
We can only grow by receiving rejections, negative answers and clues that disprove the little world we’ve constructed in our heads.
Right?
Think about it, next time you kick back when it comes to getting feedback for your work. Constructive feedback gives you the information you want to progress and expand your universe.
Your responsibility is to decide firmly and know what your vision is. People can help you figure out the plan.
Now go ahead, get some answers.
Tommy Darker is the writing alter ego of an imaginative independent musician and thinker about the future of the music industry. His vision is to simplify scalable concepts and make them work for independent musicians.
He is a writer about the movement of the #Musicpreneur and founder of Darker Music Talks, a global series of discussions between experts and musicians. He and his work have been featured in Berklee, TEDx, Berlin Music Week, ReThink Music, Midem, SAE Institute, University of Westminster, Hypebot and Topspin Media.
51 passionate patrons have supported this essay. Thanks for supporting my dreams and Musicpreneurship, beautiful people:
Guilherme, Tobi, Marcia, Kay, Matt, Mike, Caroline, Kleopatra, Sarah, Héllena, John, Laszlo, Linda, Axel, Yossi, Timothy, Igor, Christophe, Lydia, Lily, Corey, Masa, Cachin, Nate, Alessandro, Royce, Lorraine, Corinne, Greg, Jens, Osmar, ZoZo, Darren, Wendy, Chris, Tom, Argiris, Nikos, Iustina, Meghan, Warhol, Murray, Ross, Elisa, Solveig, Andrew, Christopher, Romeo, Atul, NYM, and Neal.
Also thanks to: Mike Casey, Royce Gustafson, Yossi Sassi, Warhol Oliveira, Audiokite Research, Greg Wilnau, Abraham Martinez, and Justin Zupnick for providing early feedback and corrections to this essay.
