How to turn your short-term failures into long-term success
Many producers are afraid of failure within the music industry. Whether it be rejections from their favourite record label, declined collaboration requests, or simply songs not living up to hopeful expectations upon release. No matter what the reason is, failure is something that we have all had to deal with at some point in our lives. But what if you no longer viewed it as a negative? What if you were able to mentally frame failure as a way for setting up your future success? Often that is the case with many people within music. For example, you could get rejected by labels multiple times – only to force you to work harder on your craft because it simply wasn’t good enough yet. In this article, we’re going to discuss how you can turn failure into success within the music industry so that you can develop a better mindset.
Failure can enable us to achieve things that we never thought possible upon starting out in this industry. Without it, there would be no opportunities to learn from our mistakes. Therefore, rejection is extremely important and absolutely crucial to success. As many people in music sales and pitching will be aware, rejection is something that they face on regular basis. Whether it is being rejected by 5 out of 100 people or even 85 out of 100 people, it is utterly inevitable that some people will not like what you have to offer. A marketing company may pitch to over 250 producers a day, but only acquire 3 people that are genuinely interested. Likewise, people handling licensing of music may be pitching to multiple film studios to get tracks featured and be rejected by the vast majority of them. No matter where you are positioned in the entertainment industry, fear and rejection are two things that we simply need to overcome.
Most people have a mental image of failure being at one end of the spectrum, and success being at another. Many believe that a project will either result in failure or success and thus they do everything within their power to move away from failure and towards success. But what if the model got changed? What if in order to reach success, you had to fail first. After all, it would allow you to learn from mistakes. So instead of failure and success being at opposite ends of the spectrum, you had to overcome a failure in order to obtain your goals within life. Instead of trying to constantly evade failure, convert it into a stepping stone so that you can springboard directly to success. To sum it up perfectly, there is a famous quote which says: “success is the destination, failure is how you get there.”
A great strategy for achieving success is actually to increase your failure rate. As the above paragraph shows, the more times you fail, the likelier you are to succeed in life. If that is true, then surely increasing the number of times you fail is going to lead you to more success and happiness. Although more people may be rejecting your music now, it’s simply setting yourself up for success in the long-term. After all, if you become motivated by the rejections of your demos, you will ultimately work harder to increase the quality of your music – thus opening the door for acceptance in the future.
Throughout the music industry, many people have goals of wanting to hit certain sales targets or wanting to get as many offers from record labels as possible. Instead of the traditional model, something more counter-intuitive may be appropriate in the modern age. Instead of focusing on how many acceptances you get, try aiming for a certain amount of rejections. If the first three people you send a demo to say yes, there will be no motivation to improve your product as a producer. However, if you try and aim for as many people as possible to say no, the amount of people you are contacting is much higher, and thus the number of acceptances you are more likely to get increases.
Another way to turn failure into success is by celebrating when things don’t go well. Of course, it’s natural to be happy when something goes well – that’s natural. But instead of dwelling on your failures, view them as an opportunity to move on and progress within your music career. The whole point of this strategy is to improve one’s mental health when in the music industry. So many people dwell on failures and thus bring out dozens of negative emotions when something goes to plan. But by celebrating your failures, you are constantly happy no matter what the result of your project is.
Finally, a great idea is to view courage as fuel towards achieving your dreams and ambitions. If you have the courage to pitch more people, send more demos, or simply ask for people’s feedback, the amount of no’s you get will substantially increase. However as discussed previously, any failure that you overcome will ultimately set you up for success in the future. Let’s use hunting as a quick example: if you shoot more bullets, you are more likely to hit the object you’re targeting than if you just shoot one bullet. Sure, some will miss. But ultimately, more will land on the target. No matter whether you are in the music industry, film, sales, TV, or any other industry, failure is something that you should appreciate & respect because it will set you up for your future ambitions.