Musician Mistakes: Learn from History, or You’re Doomed to Repeat It!
At the beginning of a new year, Kevin Breuner (CD Baby’s VP of Marketing) and I like to look back on the previous year in our own music-making and think about what we’d do differently today. I’m not sure we’re ever any wiser for it (lots of musicians keep making the same mistakes over and over again — myself included), but it’s a fun exercise all the same.
With that in mind, I wanted to do two things:
1. Ask you about YOUR biggest mistakes as a musician (signing a bad contract, band infighting, onstage mishaps, poor creative or business choices, missing a big opportunity, etc.), and what you learned from them. Holler in the comments below!
2. Share some of the many “mistakes” articles and podcasts we’ve published over the years, in hopes that you can keep history from repeating itself.
10 articles about (avoiding) common mistakes musicians make when creating or promoting their music:
Top 5 Album Release Mistakes [Podcast]
The Top 10 Website Mistakes Musicians Make
The Top 5 Mistakes Musicians Make with Their Live Show
The 3 Most Common Mistakes Made by Independent Musicians
25 Common Crowdfunding Mistakes That Can Make You Look like a Money-Hungry Fool
The Star Wars Episode: What Musicians Can Learn from Epic Mistakes! [Podcast]
7 Common Mistakes Musicians Make on Instagram
5 Common Studio Mistakes You Can Easily Avoid
The 4 Most Common Online Mistakes that Artists Make
The 7 Deadly Sins Musicians are Committing on Facebook and Twitter
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So, what’s your biggest gaffe, blunder, fumble, flub, or failure? Fess up in the comments below.
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[Cassette image from Shutterstock.]
Chris Robley is an acclaimed singer-songwriter and award-winning poet from Maine.
His Beatlesque indie-pop and milltown Americana songs have been praised by The Associated Press, No Depression, KCRW, The LA Times, Boston Globe, NPR, American Songwriter, and others.
His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Review, and more.
Robley has received a Maine Literary Award in Poetry, Boulevard’s Emerging Writers Prize for Poetry, and in 2016 was selected by former US-poet laureate Robert Pinsky as a finalist for the Dorset Prize.