The Audience: Where the Focus Belongs

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It's Not Me It's You.

Music is often a me-focused enterprise. Independent artists are asked to develop their brand, social media presence, content content content, and "become their brand." All of this is supposed to lead to more followers, more gigs, and more opportunities to play music. However, with this me-centered approach, the music suffers. This is because a key component is often forgotten in the process.

That's right, the people out there. The audience. The audience which is going make an effort to come out and see the show. To address this, I challenge you to not just start thinking a lot about the audience, but to experiment by thinking ONLY of the audience, as a starting place.

If your focus starts only on the audience, imagine how that would change things. No more worrying about your image, brand, website, promotions or number of followers on TikTwitter. If the focus did happen to stray from the audience, what if its second stop was the music itself: the notes, the sounds, and to the appreciation and magic of those sounds. So between these two things, the audience and the music, that is where focus belongs.

If focus might go to yourself as the performer--the rarest exception--it might be to consider how your dress, demeanor, and heck, the angle of your hat, contributes to how the audience experiences the show or the song. Or, how your physical stance affects what notes you can play and how.

This is all bringing it back home: the goal is to emphasize the experience of the audience. If your thoughts are constantly, without wavering, focused on the audience, while writing, practicing, sharing your music (rather than focused on yourself), imagine how the music could sound.