Happy New Year!

Hey, what's up gigging pros. It's Jared Judge and welcome to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. I want to start off by wishing you a Happy New Year it is now January 2023. The day I'm recording this is actually Tuesday, January 3, I took off for New Years, and it was great. I hope that if you had holiday party gigs that they all went well. I hope that if you had New Year's Eve gigs, they all went well. And then one of my Fulltime Music Academy members, Robert Fortunato, his band played this really awesome looking New Year's Eve party at a Swanky Hotel. And he was just super pumped about it. And he got some really good footage too. I can't wait to see that. Alright, so it is the New Year. And New Year's always tend to come with resolutions. And that is the theme of today's podcast, which is setting your New Year's resolutions for your music career. And, you know, it's always tough to do this. Because, you know, in our musical education, our musical upbringing, not all musicians talk about career goals, they tend to talk about performing goals like, by the end of this year, I want to play this really hard song, I want to play this solo that I've been dreaming of playing, or I want to be on XYZ stage by the end of this year. Which by the way, that last one is a bit of a career goal. But it's not concrete or specific or measurable. It's a great goal. Getting on a stage is cool. But like the path to that is not as clear. Instead, I'm going to bring back, you know, a theme from a previous podcast episode, it was one of the earliest ones I did, which was goal setting for musicians. And when I talk about setting music, career goals, I am very focused on numbers. And I think you should be too. I mean, take my advice, however you want it, but I just love helping musicians advance and I think one of the best ways we can do this is by focusing on certain numbers in our music career. Not how cool we could play this lick, not how many songs we could play, although number of songs is a number that we can measure. But I'm talking about dollars brought in from music performances, isn't that the point of being a gigging musician is to be able to play as much as possible. And the way to do that is by earning a sustainable income. So you could focus on playing instead of having to spread your efforts, then, among other activities that generate money like teaching or recording or renting out gear, whatever you might do for money, having a full time job is one of those two, how can we focus on the numbers that make music possible? And to me that is by setting an dollar number. That's Specific, Measurable, Attainable, and time bound? There's an art in there, I was trying to get the SMART goal, but sometimes I'm not very smart. But I'm a gigging musician. I love doing what I do. Alright, so we're thinking about what numbers can we set for our music career, specifically, within the next year within 2023? Think about this, how much do you want to earn from your music from performing music, maybe if you're trying to replace a side hustle, maybe it's $10,000. Maybe if you want to make this full time, you'll you'll need more than $10,000 just with the way the economy is and how much rent and housing payments are. So you'll you might want to set that number higher. Maybe this is the year that you break six figures with your music. And so think about that. I also when I mentioned the SMART goal, I do the A and the SMART goal is attainable. And I asked them, well, how much do you want to make in a year, We want to make these realistic goals. I've had musicians come and they say, a million dollars in a year, which is awesome. I to me and you know, I do a lot of meetings with different musicians helping them set their goals. love being ambitious. But when I look at all of the stuff that they send me, you know, their videos are not very good. Their website is non existent. They have no followers, they don't have any marketing presence. And so a million dollars in a year is not necessarily realistic. Although I would not discourage you from going after that. I always say shoot for the stars. And, you know, if you come up short, you'll at least land on the moon. So I'd say, you know, think about what's realistic, what have you done in the past and how can you take that to the next level, like 10 axing something, you know, say you did 10,000 Last year, multiplying that by 10 for the following year. I think that is realistic, that is doable. And you might not even need to, you know, put in 10 times more effort than you did in the past. So that's what I would encourage you to do as we start the new year, is to set yourself a goal. How much money do you want to bring in from your music in the year 2023. And if you're listening to this in a future year, change 2023 For whatever year it is right now. And then that gives you your goalpost. And that that is not an upper limit. That's just, I want to meet this. And maybe I'll even exceed it. Because I think there's an abundance of opportunity now 2023, you know, everybody is getting better at online medium, we're coming out of COVID. So people are craving live music more so than ever before. And so I feel like your goals are totally doable in this time period. So set that goal for yourself. And then the second question is, how do you attain that, which I think I'm gonna have to do on a separate podcast episode, because I simply have to run I have a minute until I've got my next thing. But in our last minute together, I really hope that you went through this exercise and thought about what concrete number based goal. Do you want to set for yourself for 2023. And then if you're interested in learning how to do that through private event performances, then I would love to invite you to attend my free 5-day Fulltime Music Challenge. It is free. It actually starts next week, January 9 through 14th. And I go live for five days give you a concrete strategy to hit your 2023 goal with live musical performances. So you can join absolutely free at FulltimeMusicChallenge.com That's f-u-l-l-t-i-m-e, there's no dash in between fulltime, FulltimeMusicChallenge.com and register, grab your spot and then I will see you for five days straight starting January 9. Alright, thanks again for tuning into The Gigging Musician Podcast. Happy New Year and I hope that your new year is off to a wonderful start. And I will see you on the next episode. Remember, "You are just one gig away!".