Find your audience. 

We all start making music because we love it, but when it comes to being fulfilled, is love enough? 

Well, if we want to keep music firmly in the hobby space, then yes, loving the process is more than enough to generate fulfillment. 

But if we want to make that transition from music-as-a-hobby to music-as-a-business, then we need something more. 

We need customers. 

But long before we can ever hope to earn customers, we need people who love our music outside of just us. 

We need an audience. 

So where do we begin? 

Make what you love 

The surest path to misery is to spend your time working on things you hate. 

Music included. 

Your love for the craft is required.

It’s infectious.  

Passion translates to those your art engages once it leaves your desk. 

So become obsessed with the process, but just know that, eventually, you’re going to need to start thinking about what others want too. 

This is what’s called finding product/market fit. 

And every business has to go through this process in order to succeed. 

To help explain this, let’s start with a visual. 

This image shows you on the left. 

Specifically, your love of music and what you are putting out into the world. 

But what you love is only half of the picture. 

So what about the other half? 

What people want 

Businesses require customers, and in the music business, customers start as fans. 

These are the people who listen to your music on Spotify, follow you on social media, and maybe even subscribe to your email list. 

Now when you first start releasing music, these numbers are going to be pretty small. 

But as you keep going, you’ll see your fanbase grow, most likely in response to a small fraction of your overall body of work. 

One or two songs will pay for the whole party. 

Two or three videos will earn most of your followers.

This is a good thing, because it will tell you precisely what your audience wants from you. 

If you pay attention, you can lean into that and start to produce even more of what they enjoy. 

So now the image looks like this: 

You’re making what you love and you’re also making what people want. 

Time to double down. 

The overlap 

The point where what you love overlaps with what people want is where you will build a business on top of your music, your creativity, and your passion. 

This is the confluence of what you do well and what people will pay you for. 

When you finally start to identify this intersection in your own career, you have to go all in. 

Yes, art is experimentation, and there is plenty of space for that too, but if you’re pursuing sustainability, profit is important. 

And profit is found in the middle: 

So start by making what you love, and do it purely for the joy of doing it. 

But as you progress, pay attention to what your audience enjoys, and lean into it. 

Identify the sweet spot, and go all in. 

Build something sustainable, and you will have a career, a business, and a passion that pays dividends for years to come. 

And then you can spend your days simply doing what you love.