From Banker to Mentor.
Tommy Zee shares his journey from banker and part-time DJ to full-time music producer and creative director for some of the world’s biggest brands, lets us in on how he builds trust with his audience and reminds us to jump before we’re ready.
You’re listening to Episode 82 of the Music-Preneur Mindset Podcast.
Hello! You’re listening to Episode 82: Music-Preneur Spotlight: Tommy Zee.
I’m your host, Suz – a mindset coach helping music professionals get clear on their goals and find the time to get it all done while maintaining social distancing and their sanity.
As we continue to move through these uncertain times, I know a big stress for many creatives is, “How am I going to make money?” Especially if your income streams depended on live shows, travel, public speaking, in-person music lessons, and so on, it can be stressful to have to build new income streams while you navigate social isolation and health scares.
I wanted to share this interview with you this week to bring some hope and inspiration for ways you, too, could make money from teaching others skills you already have – and realize you know more than you think you know. I also want you to realize you don’t have to have it all figured out yet to start.
Back in February, I had the pleasure of talking with Tommy Zee – a former banker by day/DJ by night who went onto become an award-winning music producer, composer and creative director. He is a sought-after music producer and advisor to some of the world’s top brands, and his keynotes and lectures have resonated with audiences at the Cannes Lions Festival, Amsterdam Dance Event, Belgium’s MultiMania Conference, Netherland’s Delft University and many more.
What I love most about Tommy and his work is that he fully embraces the music-preneur mindset. As you’ll hear in our talk, it’s not about being ready or perfect – it’s about trusting what moves and excites you and showing up for your audience in an authentic way. You have something special to offer and whether that’s teaching other musicians a skill or creating music for big brands, Tommy shines a light on how he’s built a successful career doing both and provides resources to help you get started. You can check out more about Tommy and his work in our show notes at www.therockstaradvocate.com/ep82. But for right now, take a deep breath in, exhale your worries, and join us for 30 mins of trusting what’s possible.
Suz: So, Tommy thank you so much for being with us today!
Tommy: My pleasure!
Suz: I love your story. I really love your mission statement! I just want to read it for our listeners. You say that your work is, “moving humans with music,” and that you use “songs, scores and sounds like magicians use spells” – I love that! So fill us in a little bit more about that – how did you come up with that mission statement and what does that mean to you?
Tommy: Well I always like to get to the bottom of things. When people write their bio, there seems to be this sort of automatic language that we start using, kind of this formal language. A lot of musicians contact me and it’s always like a similar kind of language – “I grew up here, played in bands there” – but I just like to get to the bottom of things.
What is it that you actually do in the most crisp, compelling possible way can you tell me that in one sentence? And so I had to think about that for myself because I had an allergy when I was hearing some kind of a bio that sounded similar to other people’s bios.
So what is it that I actually do? Well it’s not about anything other then I’m trying to captivate human beings, like literally put them in a spell with the kind of music that I produce. And you know songs, scores, or sounds is quite a descriptive way to to say what it is that I do because it’s not just songs. Sometimes their scores, right? And sometimes it’s not even songs or scores, sometimes it’s just putting a few sounds together in the proper sequence that, for some reason, people can’t explain it – we can’t sometimes explain it either, but it gives people goose bumps.
And this is always the goal – the goal is always goose bumps.
Suz: That’s great. I love that! “The goal is always goosebumps.” It’s definitely a skill set and it’s an artistry all of its own to be able to be concise and say what you mean and get all of it in, as you said, as crisp a statement as possible, so that people know exactly what it is you’re about and what it is that you do.
Instagram and Twitter only allow you to say so much in the profile bio – they often struggle with what to write there and when I came across yours I was like, “Yes!” Short and sweet and exactly what it is, and it was very compelling.
Tommy: Yeah, it’s all in those words like you said, “compelling,” actually when I mentor my students, those are the three things in the compass. We have a compass and the compass has 3 C’s – is a crisp? Is a clear? Is a compelling?
And though the first two kind of sounds similar – like clear and crisp – they’re not. We can argue over meaning, but for me clarity means that I instantly get something. But it’s not just about clarity, the crispness is the fact that it has a bit of magic sauce to it, right? It’s just like crispy, you know? And it has something that takes you beyond just the meaning of that word and therefore it is also probably compelling.
I don’t know why it is… musicians, we are creative beings and I’m not clear how sometimes musicians can be so genius in coming up with a song, but they somehow forget to put that magic into everything they do – whether Instagram, your website, your business card. At every step of the process you should be building your brand.
They can get a very good impression of who you are just by the way you communicate online, and I see a lot of musicians struggling with that – their website, their email already gives me a bad impression. Do I even want to listen to the music if the aesthetics visually are not pleasing?
I don’t know. So, I think it’s very important.
Suz: It’s almost like they give up before trying because they came into this to do music and if it’s not about the music, even though as you pointed out, it’s all connected, they either don’t want to do it or they psych themselves out and think that they’re not good enough to do it.
And as you said, if you’re creative, and I say this to clients all the time, if you’re creative then you’re creative. It doesn’t mean you can only be creative by playing the guitar – you can also be creative in coming up with a copy for your website or being creative with your social media posts.
Creativity bleeds into many different areas, and sometimes you just have to relax into it and have the confidence to know that you can try and make it happen.
Tommy: Yeah it’s just not being automatic. People box themselves in and they give themselves a certain identity like, “I’m a master guitar player,” and you could be other thing, too, AND a master guitar player. It’s just that mentality that everything is a canvas – your website is a canvas, your business card is a canvas, your clothes are a canvas – do something that will interrupt people with it.
We are forced to abide by the way Facebook looks, for instance. So you kind of lose your edge, I mean it’s good to appear on those platforms, but you don’t get a chance to express yourself uniquely, visually at least, because you’re kind of conformed to that standard. So I’m a big fan of, as much as possible, expressing your identity in a way that will give people a good idea already of who you are before they even have a chat with you personally. And then when they have a chat with you personally, you reinforce all of that and more.
Suz: Yeah 100%. What I love about what you do is that you are able to take what you’ve found for yourself that works, and where you had your success, and you teach it to other musicians.
And I definitely want to dive into that, but first, I want to go back to what you do as an artist. You’ve worked with some real heavy hitters – you’ve worked with Google and Nike and BMW, and those are just a few of the many bigger clients that you’ve worked with. So many musicians, and I know many of them listening right now, as you said, box themselves in, and kind of only see one possible path for themselves or see, almost like a ceiling of, “Well, I’m an independent musicians, so without a big label there’s only so much I can do” Which is such a falsehood,
because I know plenty of people, yourself included, who make a great a career for themselves doing a myriad of things.
And so, I’m wondering if you can share your story with us a bit in terms of – before you started working with those bigger clients – what was that journey like for you? Are you kind of where you always saw yourself being? Or did it take a lot of twists and turns – how has your journey been so far as a musician?
Tommy: Well the thing is that I’m a former banker, I used to work on Bay Street, which is like the Toronto version of Wall Street, and so I always say that because a lot of musicians are not doing music full-time. If you are a musician you probably dream of doing that – like I haven’t met a musician yet who said, “Well I’d rather do music part-time.” Most musicians will say, “If I could do music full-time, I would do it full time,” so I was kind of in the same shoes.
I was always into music but I couldn’t really imagine it being a full-time career, so what I did is I finished university. I ended up working at this bank, and I was there for about five years – just feeling the soul getting sucked out of me slowly. And the only way that I kind of stayed alive during that time is I was a DJ in Toronto, so I played in all these quite popular at the time venues – I had like four residencies.
So imagine, I was going to the bank every single day Monday to Friday 9-5, then going home, taking a nap, having something to eat, and then I would change my clothes and go to the club before 10PM. Start at 10, finish at 2:30am, get home at 3am and then go to the bank the next day.
So that kind of worked from the time I was 25 to the time I was 30, but as I started to lose my energy – like riding two horses at the same time, having these two lifestyles, I was like, “I can no longer stand knowing that my precious life is passing you by while I’m sitting in this damn cubicle, but at the same time I can’t be a full time DJ, producer, remixer.”
I was starting to get into production, remixing – looking at the horizon and looking at the landscape I was like I get these occasional remix projects. At the time, this is like 2002/2003, I’d get paid like $1,500-$3,000 to sometimes $4,000 per remix but it was so sporadic, I was like I can’t imagine making a living out of this.
There’s some shady stuff going on also where I’d put out singles they would get picked up by a promoter who would license them to compilations somewhere in Spain and wouldn’t ever tell me. So, I’d see my music being licensed to some compilation in Spain and I never got paid for it, so I was like, “Man I just can’t imagine doing music full-time. I really can’t. It’s just too stressful.”
At the same time, I hated myself for choosing comfort, for choosing to stay with my day job when I knew I could do better, so a friend of mine worked at an ad agency and he said to me, “Hey, you produce music, right? In addition to DJ-ing?” I’m like, “Yeah.” He goes, “Well I’m working on this campaign for Pontiac Aztec.”
I don’t know if people remember that car, but it’s probably one of the ugliest cars in the world, no offense to Pontiac. But that sounded very interesting to me – it’s funny when I look back because like everybody’s familiar with advertising and commercials and brands doing content and all of this content includes music.
For some reason I never connected it like, “Hey I’m making music. These guys are using music. They need music. That’s like a thing! Isn’t that an opportunity?” So anyway, I did that project and I was still at the bank, so I had to do it in the evenings – took me a couple of nights to create a track. I passed it over, they had a few comments. It took me another evening to address the comments, and that was it!
I almost forgot about doing that because I just had fun doing it. I went back to the bank then the check came like a few weeks later and I just nearly fell out of my cubicle. I looked at this check and I’m like “Is this what they’re paying for me to sit in the studio a couple of nights to do this thirty second track?” When I say this story, I always say I quit that day. I walked into my boss’s office and quit.
The fact is I didn’t quite right away, but I did quit not too long after that. I thought, “Okay this is a concrete path.” Dealing with shady promoters with these sporadic remixes, this kind of unstable chaotic – that’s how I pictured the music business – I’m not sure how I can survive selling my music. But this, this is concrete!
There’s a crap-load of advertising going on everywhere and it’s not as if I have to create something crap – a lot of these brands are making or curating or creating music that is world-class and they have to do that because if you’re a world-class brand, you literally have to move people with your content.
So, I basically left the bank and I thought, “Okay I have it made. I’m gonna make music for commercials.” The problem was, I was kind of naive about the industry, how things work. So, I left the bank, I invested in the designer to print me beautiful logos and business cards. I hired a web designer because at the time it wasn’t that easy to create a website, so I build a website, and I rented a studio which we ended up making really fancy, just outfitting with all the gear. And I started reaching out to ad agencies and going, “Hey, I’m a composer. When you’re working on a commercial, I can make the music for you.”
And for some reason nobody was getting back to me. And I’m an aware kind of guy – that’s why did my logo. That’s why I put together my business cards, my website. I was almost considering going back to the bank at this point because I don’t have much savings left and not much is happening. So, I called a friend at the bank and first of all, she said, “I don’t know where the hell you went like nobody knows where you went because you disappeared.”
So, that’s a lesson also that I always talk about. Whenever you have a certain path you’re pursuing, or you have a certain intention be public about it – let people know. Why? Because they might know people who can assist you in the journey. Right? So, that’s exactly what happened with her. She’s like, “I know this guy named Johnny. He’s a
copywriter at an agency in Toronto called Taxi.” Which was one of the coolest agencies at the time because they were doing MINI. So Johnny met with me, and he listened to what I was doing and he’s like, “Dude you’re totally approaching everything wrong. This is not how the business works.”
He said, “First of all you might have gotten a project from a friend because he was your friend, but, in reality, ad agencies who represent these brands who come up with campaigns for these brands, they do not deal with individual musicians. They don’t deal with individual composers.”
What they do is they hire a bunch of different production partners, so they hire a film production company to shoot the commercial. They hire an editing company to edit the commercial. And then, they reach out to what’s called a music production house, we call it a music production house in our business, but it’s a music production company that specializes in advertising. And I was completely oblivious to it. So, I started basically addressing music production houses that specialize in advertising and said, “Hey I’m a composer. Here’s some tracks that I’ve done. I think they belong in advertising,” and they happened to agree with with me.
One of these production houses said, “Why don’t you come on board full-time? Because you’re personable guy, you can go out there and help us get business from ad agencies,” and the rest is pretty much history.
You know, when you’re on the right path and you belong there, your results are exponential. At the bank, I was there five years slowly, slowly going up the ladder. Here? It was like boom! Two years later I was made partner in the studio, then it’s another long story but I fell in love with the Polish girl and ended up leaving everything to go to Europe. It’s important – love. Without that you can achieve all sorts of stuff and you’ll always feel empty.
When I was in Europe, I ended up becoming a creative director at Massive Music, which is one of the finest music production companies in the world that works on the biggest brands, and then after five years at Massive Music, I decided to go out on my own. So, for the last three years I’ve had my own company.
I’ve discovered a way that I can make music, to be in the studio but not have to necessarily be an artist who’s worried about streaming royalties, about digital single sales, about getting record deals. So, essentially I feel blessed because I just wanna make music. I just want to produce music.
I’m not the kind of guy who wants to chase a million streams. I’m just not built that way. I’m not built to be a star. I am definitely built, and I believe many musicians are built as craftspeople – like we just want to sit in the studio and create an amazing piece of music. It is brands who are paying for this. Right? They need it, they have the money to pay for it.
Suz: And I love everything that you said especially in this last part about what are you really made to do? And something we talk about a lot on this podcast is, “Are you chasing somebody else’s dream?” Meaning you feel like, “Well, if I decide to be a musician and I want a full-time career, then I guess I better anti-up and I have to be that extrovert who’s out on stage and who’s on social media all the time and chasing those followers and getting those streams,” and as you said, if you don’t feel you’re meant to be the star in the spotlight with thousands of people screaming your name, and if you don’t want to be that person, too, you don’t have to take any of that on.
You can be in the studio if that is where you feel most at home and still make a living at it, and more often than not, make a better living at it than the person who’s trying to get the label deal and go out on tour, because there’s so much overhead there, right?
There’s so much more that they have to pay for in terms of their team, and touring, and making music videos, and doing all of that marketing stuff on that end. You know who your clientele is, your audience are the bigger brands that have their own audience and I love what you’ve built around it.
You don’t know what you don’t know until you know it. And, as you pointed out, you didn’t know that this whole other area existed or at least how it worked, and so when you finally started speaking up about it, it was like all these other opportunities are there that you weren’t aware of or not educated on how it all worked. So, I love that you shared that in your story, and thank you for shining a light on that for our listeners because it’s so important.
Tommy: Indeed.
Suz: And so I wanted to talk about then, since this is a big part of your work as well, that you teach other musicians and that you have students that you teach, so I’m curious how did that come about? Fill us in a bit about what your teachings are like and the type of people that you work with.
Tommy: Sure. So how it came about is that I’ve been intrigued by the online world especially the fact that I’m not really a social media guy. People go to my profiles, they’ll see some activity, maybe I should be better about it, but I’m not really a social media guy. What does intrigue me is the fact that you can reach people at scale, right?
And to be honest with you, I have a lot more fun having conversations like this and creating Eureka moments for other musicians and mentoring them because I’m such a combination of business and art – that’s just my DNA. I just can’t be an artist full-time, but I also can’t be a business guy full-time.
I really love mentoring other people and just helping those who have a musical talent to transform it into some kind of meaningful traction, you know? And so, a lot of those opportunities exist in our world, but musicians have no idea about it because it’s like my world is hidden.
We always talk about music for films or sync or synching your song to a TV show, but how many people talk about creating music from scratch? I’m talking about songs, not cheesy jingles. I’m talking about real, beautiful songs that were never existing before this Honda commercial was made, for instance. Like it was written for that commercial, and then people on YouTube are asking, “Who is this artist? Who is the song?” And then, you know, the brand has a chance to sort of start a dialogue to say, “Actually we commissioned this artist or we work with this person to create the song,” and that’s cool for the brand, too.
So, I had this itch for like years now to get online and to be a mentor to open people’s eyes to this because I simply love teaching, and when I’m working on the campaigns for brands sometimes it’s exciting, sometimes it’s not exciting, sometimes it’s very stressful. I haven’t counted exactly, but I’ve done close to a thousand commercials for big brands. So, at some point you’re looking to stimulate yourself also, and, for me, creating this masterclass was a way to stimulate myself all over again, to give myself a challenge, to say, “Can I teach my life’s work? Can I teach everything I know? Can I get uncomfortable again, as a creative person, and go out there and try to sell this thing?” Like go out in the street and go, “Hey, I have this thing.”
Because now with brands, I can sell in my sleep. I’m comfortable in the board room, it’s nothing for me to take a big paycheck from a brand. I don’t feel sensitive about it because it’s a big brand, but with this new adventure, as people started enrolling in my masterclass, I was like, “Holy crap! I’m actually dealing with human beings. They just gave me their credit card.” You know, some of these people ask me for an installment plan on the half-price discount.
These long email saying how much this resonates with them, how much they want to try, and that’s been quite an experience for me because imagine for over a decade I’m just used to working with brands, which is quite impersonal in a way. You’re just creating the music, you’re shipping it over, whereas here, I’ve been dealing with humans.
So, my instinct was to teach. I put together this teaching in what I thought was gonna be like a 7-hour online course. It ended up being like 37 hours. It’s amazing, every time you think you’re gonna pass on your knowledge, you have no idea what that would look like. You always think, “Oh that’ll be like 90 minutes. How much can I teach?”
And then I was like, “Well I got at this thing!” and, “I gotta tell them about this and I gotta tell them about this!” So, it’s been a lot of fun. You know, I didn’t know what to expect. So what I did is I did an interview with the Graham Cochran at Recording Revolution. He’s got such a huge fan base that if I announce this thing there and it resonates and people come over and then I sell them on that idea, once they sign up on my email list, and they actually put down the credit card, then I’ll go ahead and make it.
I was like, “If I make like $3000 off of this idea, this email – ‘Hey guys, I wanna launch this thing next month, you wanna sign up?’ – and, you know, I was quite surprised by the results. I think we did like $14,000 just on the pre-sale and then another $7,000 like four weeks later, I think it was Black Friday, we put it on special again.
So then I really had to get my crap together and create this thing. It was a very intense six weeks or seven weeks because I was actually working on this thing while still doing commercial projects, but it was very rewarding.
Honestly, to get in touch with real human beings as opposed to brands, I’m still exchanging emails with students every single day because we’re going through it all. I’m teaching people how to write emails, teaching people how to build a portfolio, teaching people how to build a website. It’s not like I’m teaching them from some kind of a vague generic formula. I’m just basically teaching them what resonates with me and other music producers on this side of the fence when we get contacted by musicians.
Suz: I’m so glad that you shared that piece of your story because earlier this year we had, I believe it was Episode 76, was a Jordan Valeriote, and what I love about what you said, and it’s something that I had to learn how to trust when I really fully start to understand what it meant to be an entrepreneur, is to start before you’re ready.
Is to get it out there and tell people. Don’t wait till you’ve done all 37 hours of video and then it turns out, “Oh, they didn’t want this.” Or, “Oh, they wanted this piece of it, but with this focus and I didn’t focus on that piece.” So, the fact that you did that market research – that you said to them, “Hey I’ll commit to this, but I need to know you’re on board.” – it can feel very scary. I know a lot of people don’t like to do that, because it’s like oh-my-goodness, but what I have found, and what I’m sure you found as well, when you said you know it’s time to get your crap in order, is you’re more likely then to make better content because now your feet are by the flames and there’s this excitement that, “Wow people have invested now, so now I’m invested in them just as much if not more,” and you’re going to create better content that way!
So done is better than perfect, start before you’re ready, do your market research before you create a whole bunch of stuff – all of these lessons are so important and I’m just thrilled that you shared that with us so people know that this can happen and that you don’t have tens of thousands of followers on Instagram, you had your email list.
Tommy: I had nobody! Before I got interviewed by Graham Cochran, I had nobody, but I was pretty confident about the fact that my story is unique. What I’m offering is unique, because a lot of sites for musicians… like I still don’t see my world represented on all these sites where musicians are learning to do whatever it is that they do – whether it’s mixing or mastering or producing. So, I’m basically going to these folks and saying, “Okay so you’re teaching folks this, this and this, and how would you like me to now introduce this subject?”
There’s like an army of musicians around the world who you’ve never heard of, who are actually making a full-time living sitting in the studio making music for all these commercials for big brands. So I always thought like deep down that this would probably resonate with a lot of people, but yeah you’re never sure. I wasn’t sure.
And you’re so right about once people put their credit card down, once people started writing me emails like, “I’m excited when is it coming out?” I got way more nervous than I did working for the biggest brands in the world – it’s so weird! For this group of people that just handed their money over to me, I don’t know how to put this, it’s a different quality of pressure because they’re human beings and I don’t want to fleece anybody. But, I had a fear that I would be perceived as such.
Even a year earlier, I was trying to build my email list so I’d go on to Reddit, and I’d be like, “Hey guys, I have this PDF that will show you 7 different ways that musicians make money in the world of music and brands,” and I got so much hate from like Reddit, like “Why is this guy asking for my email address?” All you gotta type in is “Tommy Zee” and see is there anyone complaining? Does this guy actually do what he says he does?
So, I was just like, “Oh man, I don’t like doing it this way.” So, then I decided I’m actually just going to tell my story to folks like you who already have a trust of a lot of musicians and then everything just flows from there. People get you.
Suz: And I know a lot of our listeners are sitting at home, nodding their heads and definitely resonating with a lot of what you’re saying, so if they’re interested in reaching out, what’s the best way for them to join your community, find out more about working with you, what’s the next step they should take?
Tommy: You can go to Making Music for Brands and that’s where that PDF is that we just spoke about which will get you on my email list. This is a nice, colorful 40 page PDF which basically goes through 7 different main ways that different kinds of musicians participate in the world of music and brands and how much money they can expect to make for each role.
If you want to learn more and this is something that resonates with you then you can check out the course and see if that’s something you wanna enroll in. I feel like I want to do something for your folks. I’m just gonna make this up right now, okay? If anybody decides to purchase the course and you’re checking out, all you gotta do is just click on “Add Coupon” button and what shall we make this coupon? Let’s say “rockstar30” you get 30% off the regular price, okay? rockstar30 that’s what you gotta type in the coupon.
If you get lost, I’m always available to people. This is, I think, a big difference between my masterclass and a lot of other courses that I’ve taken. I kinda felt lonely sometimes, you know? I felt like I would have liked more interaction with the person who sold me the course, and so I’ve never had any complaint about that. My students know that I might not get back to them immediately, but I always get back inevitably.
Suz: That’s wonderful. Thank you for that generous offer! And folks if you are resonating with this, and I have a feeling a lot of you are, head on over to the show notes for all the links that Tommy just mentioned. And I want to thank you for sharing that with our audience that’s really great and very generous of you.
If you could go back and tell your younger self a lesson and save yourself some time, what with that lesson be?
Tommy: Don’t delay. Don’t delay, as soon as you feel in your conscience that you’re pulled toward something, get traction as soon as possible. I don’t mean that you’re gonna achieve overnight success, that doesn’t happen, but do something meaningful. Call someone. Ask for a meeting. Something that is going to literally push the thing forward, and that’s why you’re hesitating and delaying because you think it needs to be perfect – it doesn’t need to be perfect.
Don’t delay. Get traction as soon as possible because you might find out this is not the thing you want to do, but you gotta do it in order to find that out.
Suz: Yes! I say that all the time and I couldn’t agree more with everything you just said – 100%. So the next question is then if you could have any superpower what would it be?
Tommy: Patience.
Suz: That is definitely a superpower. It’s a virtue, it’s everything.
Tommy: I am impatient. I want things to happen much quicker and unfortunately sometimes I ruin things by not allowing things to ripen. So patience for me.
Suz: I love that. And if you could invite three musicians, or creative people, living or dead, over for dinner, who would they be?
Tommy: I would invite Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer. I would invite Rick Rubin.
Suz: Oh yes!
Tommy: And I would invites Johan Johansson.
Suz: Ooh, okay!
Tommy: Someone from the other realm, yeah.
Suz: Definitely, I’m sure there’d be lots to talk about and take from one another at that dinner. That’s great! And so the final question: What’s something that you would like our audience to go do?
Tommy: I would say look at your hard drive, scour it – maybe it’s one hard drive, maybe it’s three hard drives – but from the time you began to save sketches, unfinished even on your hard drive, I want you to collect your best pieces.
Just spend one day going through all the stuff that you’ve done that you’ve forgotten about. Just uncover it. Take time to listen to it. Highlight the ones that really resonate with you, that strike you immediately, and put them all in a single folder because this will not only energize you again, you’ll surprise yourself what kind of magical moments you were able to create.
You’ll find this exercise very valuable because it will motivate you, it’ll surprise you to see how much great music you have on your hard drive, hopefully, and to decide which one of these pieces really represents you as a musician, which one of them expresses your superpower.
And I feel like that’s going to help you to find some patterns, to find some some kind of a DNA or something that you keep hearing, and that will help you to sort of focus in and hone in on what is it that keeps happening in all of these sketches? And if it’s resonating with you, double down on that.
Suz: That was great, so thank you so much. And Tommy, thank you for spending the time. Thank you for this very refreshing and inspiring conversation. We really appreciate it!
Tommy: It was my pleasure! Anytime.
Suz: Take care.
Tommy: Take care!
A lot has changed since Tommy and I spoke just a few months back, but the lessons from our talk are more relevant than ever, especially Tommy’s actionable for you this week. Take stock of what you have to offer, remind yourself of what you’re capable of and get re-inspired by your art.
You can find details about his actionable, his free guide, and his FREE TRAINING in our show notes page: www.therockstaradvocate.com/ep82. When we first spoke the free training wasn’t yet available, so if you go to the show notes or simply to www.makingmusicforbrands.com you can sign up for his free training and THEN you’ll be able to access his masterclass where you can use the coupon code rockstar30 for 30% off the course price. You can use the discount on the payment plan option as well, so I wanted to clarify all of that.
Whether you want to build your own course, produce music for brands, monetize your live streams or something entirely different, now’s the time to take action on what you want. Not later once you’ve learned A, B or C. And not a week ago, where it now feels like you’re super behind and too late to do anything about it. You’re right where you need to be.
As they say in Rent, “There’s only now, there’s only this.” So if you’re needing to figure out a new plan and reconnect with your audience – keep it simple, show up, and let them know what it is you have to offer. If you’re interested in what Tommy has to offer, head on over to the show notes to sign up for his free training and download his informative freebie.
No matter what you choose to pursue, act before you feel ready, because chances are you’ll never feel ready.
Jump in and no matter what happens, show up to serve. Your audience will forgive mistakes, and accept 2nd tries as long as you’re honest with them and there to connect with them. So what do you have to lose?
There’s never been any rule book for the music industry and there certainly isn’t one for life right now, so do what feels right for you! No matter what, keep creating and keep expressing yourself.
If you want extra support, head on over to the show notes page and check out my Rock/Star Slackers™ community where we hold you accountable on the goals you set. Over these next few weeks we’re running daily challenges, hosting group calls to get more writing done, and more and we offer it all for less than $1.50/day. Everything you need to know can be found at www.therockstaradvocate.com/ep82.
Until next time, Rock/Star! Have a wonderful week and I hope to see you back here next time so we can get grounded to get rising! Take care.
Key Highlights
- Why it’s important to have a clear, crisp, and compelling bio
- How he quit his job as a successful banker and went from DJ-ing to landing his first scoring job for a major brand
- Why it’s important to tell your network what you’re working on
- How to pitch to music production houses
- Why he decided to start mentoring other musicians
- How he made over $20k off his first masterclass launch
- The lesson he’d go back and tell her younger self
- The super power he’d like to have
- 3 musicians Tommy would invite to dinner
- His actionable for YOU this week:
- Take a day to go through your old projects on your hard drive(s) and put all of the pieces that resonate with you into one folder. Study the similarities and use this to being to build your portfolio.
Links/Rocksources
- Theme music brought to you by DC-based Indie/Pop band Sub-Radio
- More podcast episodes can be found here
- You can download a copy of the episode’s transcript here
- Check out Tommy’s work here
- Download Tommy’s Making Music For Brands 40-pg freebie
- Sign up for his FREE training w/ access to his masterclass here
- Should you decide to purchase his masterclass after the training, use code rockstar30 at checkout to get 30% off!
- Connect with Tommy on Instagram or Facebook
Start Slacking Your Way to Success!
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