Entrepreneur

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Finding Balance As a Music Freelancer: Nine Ways to Take a Mental Break & Reset Your Focus

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Finding Balance As a Music Freelancer: Nine Ways to Take a Mental Break & Reset Your Focus

As a musician, your work demands creativity, focus, and energy—sometimes all at once.

From teaching to practicing, performing to dealing with all the behind-the-scenes admin work, it’s easy to feel burnt out creatively, lose focus, and lack motivation.

You’re balancing multiple jobs and projects at any given time. But it’s not just about being productive—it’s learning how to find clarity and reset your focus.

Pushing through when your attention starts to wane isn’t always the best strategy. Instead, what if the key to doing better work was knowing when to take a step back, when to take a break?

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How to Practice When You Only Have 30 Minutes

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How to Practice When You Only Have 30 Minutes

If you’re a music student, you probably have anywhere from 2-6 hours a day to practice your instrument. Maybe more. Though certainly an intense time with many early mornings and late nights, most music professionals see that kind of practice time as a luxury.

Once you begin your music career, you may find your days otherwise occupied with gigs, teaching, traveling to gigs or lessons, writing, emailing, coordinating, marketing, networking, and other miscellaneous admin tasks.

When is there time to practice?

The secret is in the margins—those pockets of time you have in your schedule in between things, even if it’s only 30 minutes.

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Creatives and Copyright: What Every Musician and Music Teacher Needs to Know

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Creatives and Copyright: What Every Musician and Music Teacher Needs to Know

Copyright.

It's a sticky subject and one not often taught in music school.

Copyright law protects anything with intellectual property rights. This includes poetry, books, photographs, art, song lyrics, music, and more.

How does it affect what you do as a musician, teacher, freelancer, artist, or small business owner? What do you need to know?

Introducing Musician & Co. - A New Resource for Self-Employed Musicians

Introducing Musician & Co. - A New Resource for Self-Employed Musicians

Ten years ago, Steve and I finished our master’s degrees at the Eastman School of Music and set out to build careers in music.

We decided to make a move that was less common in our field at the time: Instead of heading to a big city with lots of opportunities to begin a freelance career, we moved to a small town in rural Massachusetts.

That became the impetus for everything that followed.

The Tools I Use to Run My Business (and My Life)

The Tools I Use to Run My Business (and My Life)

In today’s digital age, there are a number of software programs, hosting platforms, apps, and tools designed to help you do your best work.

Some are designed to simplify things or take the guesswork out of decision-making. Others are designed to save you time and help you focus more on creating than organizing or getting set up.

I'm always curious about what tools and resources others use to organize and run their creative businesses (and life in general), so today, I thought I’d give you a peek behind-the-scenes into my own life and business and the tools I use on a daily and weekly basis.

3 Things I'm Learning About Being a Musicpreneur

3 Things I'm Learning About Being a Musicpreneur

I always knew I wanted to be a freelancer. I liked the variety of doing different kinds of work: teaching, accompanying, writing, creating, designing.

But I didn’t really know what it meant (from a practical standpoint) to be a music entrepreneur (musicpreneur for short) until I was in grad school.

As a musicpreneur, you wear two hats:

  • You’re the CEO — the money person, the one making big decisions about your brand and values and the work you’ll do, the one paying quarterly taxes and reading about SEO and conversion rates.

  • And you’re the artist — the creative one, the dreamer, the idea person, the one seeking inspiration and doing the work, the one learning the music and planning the lessons and exploring the bounds of creativity.

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Work-Life Balance—Is There Such a Thing?

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Work-Life Balance—Is There Such a Thing?

We’ve heard it all before: the lore of work-life balance. Of doing it all, and doing it all well. And so we set out in search of the magical formula that will keep us in perfect balance, the solution to all our problems. 

But secretly, we kind of wonder: is it real? Can it be achieved?

There’s been some debate recently as to whether or not this idea of balance between work and life is actually attainable. The thing is, the word balance makes it feel precarious: the feeling we have when learning to ride a bicycle, that we might lose our balance and fall over at any moment.

Not a great visual for life, just saying.

How I Save Time by Batching Tasks (and How You Can, Too!)

How I Save Time by Batching Tasks (and How You Can, Too!)

It’s an age-old paradox:

How to get more done in less time.

We buy new planners. We sign up for new digital task organizers. We keep a notepad handy at all times and have a running to-do list on our phones, in our inboxes, and in our heads pretty much all the time.

And yet, we’re still trying to find ways to be more productive. To stay on top of everything and keep all the plates spinning.

One thing I’ve found to be helpful in the past few years is batching.

Is a Freelance Music Career Right for You?

Is a Freelance Music Career Right for You?

In music school, we learn about performance style and theory, analysis and history. We study and read and listen and write. We soak up rich musical experiences and learn to dedicate ourselves to practicing our instrument and refining our musical skill set.

And if we're lucky, we learn about music careers and the business side of things: arts leadership and advocacy and community engagement, taxes and finances and grant-writing, websites and social media and marketing yourself: the extra-musical skills needed to make it in the 21st century music world.

Will you graduate and land one of the coveted symphony jobs? Will you join the ranks of academia and start down the tenure track?

Some of you may. Some of you did.

But what if you want to do a few different things? What if you want to teach and have a podcast? What if you want to perform in a professional chamber music ensemble and run a YouTube channel?

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Jumpstart Your Music Career with These Helpful Tips

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Jumpstart Your Music Career with These Helpful Tips

The beginning of a new career is an exciting time, full of energy, motivation, and possibility.

Maybe you’re taking that first step from music student to music professional, newly-printed diploma in hand (or in the mail - sometimes these things take a while).

Or maybe you’ve been working for a few years and are ready to make a change and set off in a new direction.

Maybe you’re in between things: trying to figure out what you want to do and what kind of musician you want to become, or maybe you’re beginning a second career later in life.

Wherever you are today, and wherever you hope to be in the next few months, here are 5 helpful tips for getting started:

Follow along with my creative work and daily adventures: @ashleydanyew

A little February recap: 1. Finally picked out art for over the bed. Rory approves. 🖼️ 2. Winter hikes on sunny days. ❄️ 3. Lost a dear friend and next-door neighbor who felt like a grandparent (he always loved fresh flowers). 💐 4. Came down
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion— But in this season of goal-setting and checklists, I think it’s important to acknowledge that not everything can be measured. Not everything follows a set of orderly steps (as much as I may try!). Tha
What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing in your music career? Here’s what I hear most often: “I don’t know where to start” “I don’t know where to put my focus” “Not sure which path to ta
Sending you love and warm wishes this season! Here’s to another year of teaching, writing, creating beautiful music, and building community wherever we are. 💛🎵🥂 Love, Ashley, Steve, and Rory