JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Musician Message Forum They turned her away. She came back again.

This was a link to an article about young Lady Gaga, trying to interest the industry in her musical product, and being turned down.
She's more than a musical artist, a physical, visual artist, an actress, an explorer of all she chooses to examine.
There is a philosophy that the more 'rejection letters' you get, as a writer, the more 'no's' you get as a submitting or applying musician, artist, performer, the closer you get to a 'yes'.
Endeavor to persevere.
Attitude is more important than any outside circumstance.
I came back to see their article again and the link did not work so I deleted it. www.YourMinds.com I think it was. Now it's for sale.

It mostly is just never giving up and always working hard. I know from personal experience if you just keep moving forward towards a dream, success is inevitable if you have reasonable talent, you will land somewhere positive you never thought you could. I am proof of it!

No you won't you'll end up in debt trying , You need to be a prodigy to succeed in music, like lady Gaga. Now with all the AI songs bullshit its worse

YOU can't buy your dream you don't have that much money-Brian Austin Whitney, ca 1999.

I didn't say spend any money. I said work hard, never give up and have reasonable talent. It is a fact. Like my comment said, you WILL end up in a positive place better than you expected. If you want to be a rock star, you can't buy that. But for free you can go out and meet people, not be a jerk, but be USEFUL and friendly You circulate with regular people and find ways to bring them towards what you are doing. You do it personally, one person at a time over years. If you are young, dedicate 5 years to widening your circle in every direction. Don't worry about pushing your "thing" worry about helping OTHERS with their thing. Especially people slightly, but not hugely, ahead of you. Each new friend you help now exposes you to that next rung, what to do, who to know, how to do it better. Rinse, repeat. I did that enough to score as many shows as I had time to play and more and more money doing it. I never spent money to release an album (super DUMB when you are a nobody) instead I found FREE ways to do everything I wanted to do. This was all PRE internet! Once the internet became a thing, I was so good at creating shows, promoting events, helping artists, understanding the business, that my little group turned into, at the time, the largest music org in the world. Because I was no greedy, I maintained ownership of everything and had complete freedom. I did giant music awards using REAL people to judge who loved music, and not paid listeners like "contests." Because we did it free, we had INCREDIBLE numbers of volunteers who LOVED it! I used industry people, artists, writers and actual fans to judge. At peak, we had 565K songs and over 42K albums entered from 185 countries in over 100 genres. We also had 125K members, all in 2009/2010. I had the numbers of every small to large non stadium venue booker and owner in the USA, Canada and all across many countries in Europe. I had over 100 Live monthly chapter meetings run by volunteers in cities across North America and in 40 other countries! I could tour anywhere I wanted, I could perform (I did until I got to 48 States, and over 30 countries, but the Org was so big and successful I just didn't have the energy anymore to do that as well). To make a good living, a musician should aim at a real number. I chose 5000 fans. That means find 5000 people into your music enough to give you 20 dollars for an "all in" fan benefit. That means any and all music you make, access to you over social media (all this is SOOOO easy in the era of social media!) and a presence now and then where they can meet and see you in person. I created a world wide network FOR FREE to musicians, all by myself with a cell phone, a laptopm and fairly average live music ability (though I am a really good songwriter, especially after 40 years of education). I stopped playing altogether in 2001 and I never wanted it to be all about MY music, like so many other org chiefs did (and a few still do). So I made it a bright line and did not cross it. Even in my playing days, I played LAST after everyone else got to go. I was doing so well, I really no longer needed it to be about ME. I got plenty of positive benefits to helping others reach their dreams. Meanwhile, I turned down a major label deal plus a major publishing deal because I just didn't want to be their slave and utterly dependent on their whims.

In 2010, as I was about to launch a digital music company in partnership with a lot of tech people based on my work, I had a major stroke. Then another. Then another. It became about staying alive at that point. The pandemic, 10 years later, ended all our income streams and events, and Hostbaby/CDBaby, my partner of over 2 decades (who had been sold to another company), literally deleted our website with millions of photos, millions of pages of articles and information and history, our entire digital video history, along with 4 different failsafe backups including the cloud. Most of the files were private, so they can't be found on the way back machine. This board was the only thing we could save in the few hours notice they gave us. And that was just barely. They had promised to send me a hard drive (they had already lost our server we paid for with 3 of the backups on it of over 4 terrabytes of content dating back to the dawn of the internet) and since the company literally no longer existed, I had no legal recourse. But, I did what I said. Anyone with reasonable music talent, and a healthy body, could start right now, and in 5 years never work for anyone else again, except their fans. I have taught MANY artists and writers to do it. You don't always arive at the exact destination: ROCK STAR, but you become your own self contained, free person with six figures (or a LOT more in some case) income each year. It was a LOT of work, but it was also all the best years of my life. This board is creaking along, but it is one of the very few archives of the dawn of the internet through to A.I. I think it's important that for this brief window, the little guy could take off the slave shackles and have their OWN music career outside of gatekeepers and sleazy record company creeps.