Updates and current suggestions for aspiring professional Christian musicians

I know posting has been light here recently. Let me give you a quick update on what is going on and then get to the main point of this post.

Yesterday, I finished the initial draft of a book for Lorenz (Christmas arrangements). I need to go back through them and wrap up my initial changes over the next month. I also have the Composers Symposium at Pine Lake here in Atlanta in mid-June and am speaking at Church Music Georgia later in that same week.

In July, I plan to record a new album. It is a piano-only project that will feature a lot of the free arrangements I have posted here on the site (though I will enhance them some). And I am planning on getting back to my orchestration as soon as I can as well. I have had to put that on hold for a few months.

Because I just mentioned the Composers Symposium, let me take that as an opportunity to segue into my thoughts for aspiring professionals in 2016.

If you are a writer that wants to be published in the world of Christian music, besides honing your craft, the most important advice I can give you is to attend that conference. The gatekeepers are all there (or represented) and you will have a chance to demo a piece and get feedback. Usually there are about 60 people in the room and many of them will sell pieces that week to the top publishers in Christian music (Hal Leonard and Lorenz being the biggest). It is an incredible networking opportunity.

I don’t know how long this opportunity has been around to be honest. That particular conference is held every year and I know it is held at more locations than just Atlanta but Atlanta is by far the biggest and most beneficial. Most of the attendees come year after year because they see the value in it. I have never really pursued getting published so I am relatively new to it. In fact, this will only be my second year. However, it is a gold mine for any of you that want to get published. I know it is late notice, but if you are interested in that, you need to come this year. (I don’t get paid anything for telling you that. It is just the truth.) If you want to hang around the full week, you can come up to Toccoa (north of Atlanta) for my conference too.

Now, let me give a few other trends I am noticing these days…

The industry continues to shrink
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but Christian music is not in a good place overall right now, at least when compared to a few decades ago. That is due to a lot of factors that I will not get in to now. However, if you are interested in writing or performing Christian music professionally, you just need to know that it is going to be harder to earn a living than it was in the past. This has nothing to do with you. It is about forces at work that are much bigger than you.

Self publishing is here to stay
If you want to sell music, you don’t have to get published at all. I do not want to talk very much about my sales of sheet music here on the site but this I can tell you for sure: there is no traditional publishing scenario I can imagine that would be nearly as financially beneficial as my self publishing. I am in a unique position in that while many traditionally published writers are using self publishing to augment their income, I see self publishing as my base and use traditional publishing to augment my exposure.

The benefit of self publishing is you keep 100% of the profit (assuming you own the songs or the songs are public domain). And because the songs are delivered by download, there is no investment cost in printing. The drawback is that you have to do your own marketing. If no one knows who you are, you cannot sell.

Concerts are on the wane and no longer necessary
In Christian music, night services (especially Sunday night) been very traditionally been very important for concert musicians. To be very frank, those services allowed musicians to not have to market–essentially they have a captive audience in the regular churchgoers. As church attendance has waned and Sunday night services have largely disappeared in the last decade, that opportunity is almost gone. This creates a huge problem for almost all Christian musicians except for the top tier that can draw an audience outside of church.

On the flip side, the good news is that concerts are not nearly as critical as they have been in the past. As many of you know, I pretty much stopped doing concerts when I started having my series of eye surgeries and it has not negatively affected my income in the least. Online streaming (Pandora, Apple, and Spotify) is a huge huge deal and has the potential to get your music in front of infinitely more people than you could ever reach through concerts.

Physical music sales are no longer important
It goes without saying that physical CD sales are way way down but that is not really bad news. There is nothing significant about selling music on a CD versus a tape or a download. I still release everything on CD but CDs are moving slowly. Yesterday for example, I walked into my warehouse where my children were packing orders and they mentioned that they had not seen any orders that day for my music. I was surprised at that because I knew that the day before, I had sold a very significant amount on this site. However, when I checked, I saw that 100% of those sales were downloads (either of music, courses or sheet music). That is the new way things are going and should be nothing to fear.

You might wonder if there is any way to sell physical product well anymore and the answer is pretty much no. Christian bookstores do not move CDs these days either. Nor do online stores. Concerts are the one exception and are still a great place to sell physical product. But as a rule, while you can expect some CD sales through bookstores, distributors (like CBD), and online stores like Amazon, those CDs sales are going to be a fraction of your music revenue and will continue to dwindle in upcoming years.

As you may realize, the things I am saying here are way way against the grain. In fact, my perspective here is pretty much 180 degrees different from the traditional way aspiring professionals have tried to enter the industry and the way that many music experts still tout. The music world has been turned upside down though and the old rules and methods will not work any more. It is time to make some adjustments.