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The Entrepreneurial Musician with Andrew Hitz

The Entrepreneurial Musician, hosted by former Boston Brass member Andrew Hitz, features conversations with the best and brightest entrepreneurs in the music business today.
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Now displaying: March, 2018
Mar 26, 2018

TEM134: The Dip by Seth Godin (TEM Book Report)

A Book Report on one of my favorite Seth Godin books, The Dip.

What You'll Learn:

  • Why a famous Vince Lombardi quote is really terrible advice
  • What "The Dip" is and why there are spoils for anyone who can get through to the other side
  • Why it is vital to quit things at the right time (and not at the wrong time or in a panic)
  • Why being the best in the world is the key to success (and what Seth Godin means by 'best in the world')
  • What the biggest lie we are taught in school is
  • How quitting frees us up to excel at something else
  • Why it is so bad (and so common) to quit in The Dip
  • Why scarcity is the key to value

Links:

Show notes for all episodes of TEM including topics discussed, links to all books and websites referenced can be found at:

http://www.andrewhitz.com/shownotes

1. Help me get to my goal of $50 per episode on Patreon (only $8 to go!) by pledging as little as $1 per episode to support the show: https://www.patreon.com/tempodcast.

2. I need only FOUR PEOPLE to go leave a rating and review on iTunes to make my next goal. Will you be one of the four to help me out?

And finally, a huge thank you to Parker Mouthpieces for providing the hosting for TEM.

Produced by Andrew Hitz

Mar 19, 2018

TEM133: Alarm Will Sound Quotes (TEM Short)

This TEM Short features thoughts on my favorite quotes from Michael Clayville and Gavin Chuck of Alarm Will Sound in TEM132.

Quotes:

  • "We basically made a commitment to each other to continue to grow with each other. And what that means I think is that, the sustainability of the group is very much about giving everybody in the group a stake.”
  • "Why is it that we stuck together and what's different between us and those trios and those, you know billions of other small ensembles that exist in colleges around the country? I think a lot of it comes back to communication and feeling that your voice is heard, and feeling respected and appreciated by the people around you, even if you don't always get your way.”
  • "The skills and talents that you've built up as a musician, working collaboratively, having disagreements that are productive you know, learning to actually harmonize music together, all those things and many more, are skills that translate into organizational culture. If you can take that kind of thinking, then you're essentially repurposing a set of skills that you already have, and refining them towards I think a goal that becomes a sustainable career model.”
  • "So it's an experience that we can share with people who may not have heard things like this before. They may come into our concert and not know what to expect, and come out maybe, you know, completely blown away by, you know, the fact that they never heard anything like that. Or, they come out scratching their heads but they still had an experience. They had something that they can say was not run of the mill, and I think that's generally what you get out of an Alarm Will Sound show.”
  • "I have a feeling I don't know if this is true that people ... musicians that go through conservatory music schools, tend to need to think about the experience of a concert much more than say somebody who studied theater or dance. I know that dancers and theater people are trained from the beginning that they are performing from the moment they are in the wing. Everything about that is a performance, and that takes into account what the audience is experiencing. By contrast, when you look at say a symphony orchestra, before the concert quote unquote begins, there's a bunch of people that are sitting there disengaged or when they stop playing, they disengage and it seems that they are not thinking about the fact that actually the experience is continuous over those two hours or whatever it is. And maybe that partly comes from the culture where we focus so much on the notes and the technique that we think are our art and our performance lies in just between the double bars. And one thing that I want to always stress when I talk to people just starting out in their careers as performers is to learn something from our colleagues in theater and dance and to think about the concert as an experience. And one that has to be shaped just as much as you're shaping phrases within a piece, you have to think about what happens between the pieces. What happens in the two minutes before the concert and the 30 minutes after the concert. Those are all important parts of the experiences. When you think that way, it's going to lead you to more innovative and more rewarding involvement with your audience."
  • "So it's a constant thing you know, I'm on it every day. Marketing is not going to do itself, there's nobody sitting at home at any given second thinking that they want to hear us play, but hopefully we're trying to build that. And so, they are thinking that more and more frequently. It's like ‘Oh, hey, I remember that tune, I want to listen to that again.' So I'm just trying to get some mental space, some brain space and say hey we're there, and take a listen and if you make it to a show that'd be great, come on out to a show, too.”
  • "I think there are so many interesting things happening in new music today, and really in performing arts across the board. It's a really great time to start something new and to come up with a new idea. I mean we have the incredible power of social media that can make the barriers to entry lower than they were maybe 30 years ago. At the same time, the digitally driven world, where everybody has something in their hands, I think makes live performance more valuable. Having an experience that you share with an audience is becoming more valuable. And I think that's the really interesting moment that we're living in right now, for young musicians to be really thoughtful and intentional.”

Links:

  • TEM132: Gavin Chuck and Michael Clayville of Alarm Will Sound on Having Conversations With Your Fans, Creative Collaborations and Sharing Meaningful Experiences With Your Audience (TEM Rewind)
  • Alarm Will Sound

Show notes for all episodes of TEM including topics discussed, links to all books and websites referenced can be found at:

http://www.andrewhitz.com/shownotes

1. Help me get to my goal of $50 per episode on Patreon (only $8 to go!) by pledging as little as $1 per episode to support the show: https://www.patreon.com/tempodcast.

2. I'm up to 69 ratings and 46 reviews on iTunes. Help me reach my goals of 75 ratings and 50 reviews (so close!) by taking just a couple of minutes on iTunes!

And finally, a huge thank you to Parker Mouthpieces for providing the hosting for TEM.

Produced by Andrew Hitz

Mar 12, 2018

TEM132: Gavin Chuck and Michael Clayville of Alarm Will Sound on having conversations with your fans, creative collaborations and sharing meaningful experiences with your audience (TEM Rewind)

Alarm Will Sound is a 20-piece chamber ensemble that challenges and reshapes musical conventions through performances of music by today's composers.

What You'll Learn:

  • How Alarm Will Sound began as a group at Eastman and what has enabled them to survive for so long when most student groups dissolve after college
  • The importance of communication and transparency in any group
  • Why they rely on a Strong Executive Model rather than a straight up democratic process
  • How working as a team in any healthy organization is a moving target as the amount of effort individuals are able to put forth shirts over time
  • Why groups like Alarm Will Sound are not only competing for gigs with other ensembles with similar missions but with any artists offering an experience which is literally everyone
  • How musicians can learn from dancers and actors who are taught to perform from the moment they are even on the wings of the stage
  • The details behind an initiative called Alarm System, where Alarm Will Sound does unconventional collaborates with a variety of musicians
  • Their collaboration with one of my favorite groups in the world, Medeski, Martin & Wood
  • The group’s overall approach to marketing and branding and how Michael goes about executing it
  • Why sharing an experience with your audience at concerts is more important than it’s ever been

Links:

Show notes for all episodes of TEM including topics discussed, links to all books and websites referenced can be found at:

http://www.andrewhitz.com/shownotes

1. Help me get to my goal of $50 per episode on Patreon (I'm getting close!) by pledging as little as $1 per episode to support the show: https://www.patreon.com/tempodcast.

2. I'm up to 67 ratings and 45 reviews on iTunes. Help me reach my next goal of 75 ratings and 50 reviews by taking just a couple of minutes on iTunes!

And finally, a huge thank you to Parker Mouthpieces for providing the hosting for TEM.

Produced by Andrew Hitz

Mar 2, 2018

TEM131: Jeff Nytch Quotes (TEM Short)

This TEM Short features thoughts on my favorite quotes from Jeff Nytch in TEM130.

Quotes:
  • “The lesson that I try to share with my students about that is that no educational experience, no thing that you throw yourself into, is ever wasted. Even if it might seem at the time like it's a dead end, or you pursue something for a while, and you say, "Well, I guess that's not what I want to do." It still has intrinsic value, and you'll be amazed at how sometimes things can come back to serve your career in new ways, in ways you never would have guessed at the time."
  • "I would look at them and say, 'There's no way that I could ever be as good as they are as teachers' not realizing, of course, that they'd been doing it for 30 years.”
  • "I spent a lot of the book talking about things that musicians do already that are, in fact, entrepreneurial, to help dissolve this idea that these two things are mutually exclusive. So, I talk about customer focus, for instance. Well, that just means that we are trying to reach our audiences. Isn't that what we all say we want to do? Entrepreneurship gives us a vehicle for doing that.”
  • "One of the most important things that any entrepreneurial venture has to have is that there's something distinctive about it, something defines itself as being different from or better than whatever else is out there. And if that's at the core of thinking entrepreneurially, then for us as artists, that means our artistic voice, our whatever it is that I personally bring to the world that is uniquely mine, that's my most valuable asset. I don't want to compromise that. If I compromise that, that's not only quote-unquote 'selling out' or 'hurting myself artistically.' That's just not good business.”
  • "Entrepreneurs are constantly asking questions. Both, 'How can I do what I'm doing right now better or differently' But I think even before they get to that point, young musicians need to answer the question, what is it that they're really passionate about? And not just the music. What else are you passionate about?"
  • "Yeah, and that's entrepreneurship, really, at its core, because it's about identifying that opportunity that solves somebody else's problem."

Links:

Show notes for all episodes of TEM including topics discussed, links to all books and websites referenced can be found at:

http://www.andrewhitz.com/shownotes

1. Help me get to my goal of $50 per episode on Patreon (I'm getting close!) by pledging as little as $1 per episode to support the show: https://www.patreon.com/tempodcast.

2. I'm up to 62 ratings and 42 reviews on iTunes. Help me reach my goals of 75 ratings and 50 reviews by taking just a couple of minutes on iTunes!

And finally, a huge thank you to Parker Mouthpieces for providing the hosting for TEM.

Produced by Andrew Hitz

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