So I got to interview an artist from my hometown who didn’t start taking music seriously until after college in his mid-20s. He’s now 30, graduated from Berklee College of Music, and is starting a career in the music industry. He’s also formed his own band, performed on countless stages, and is on the verge of releasing his second album.
He goes by Luca Max and the three lessons highlighted in this breakdown of our talk can help any artist do the same. Now let’s start with the first one, which he says is one of the main reasons he’s in the position he is today. And that’s putting yourself in a community.
Find A Community In The Music Industry
There are around 6000 students at Berklee! Can you imagine being around that many like-minded people? Just putting himself in the mix not only allowed him to improve his skills as a bass player. But it also let him find his team and ultimately take his sound to the next level.
And just the amount of experience he got probably raised his confidence allowing him to do more than he would have before. Performing well in front of people is an absolutely amazing feeling. I can say after performing my songs for people I walked away a completely different person with more confidence across all parts of life. So I can’t imagine the artist I may have become after doing that maybe once a week for four years. But that takes a lot of dedication. That said, how many artists do you think drop their first album in year one and expect to blow up? Which is fine, because sometimes it happens. But did it take you four years to develop that sound? Or to possibly phrase it a little bit better – do you think an album released in your first year as an artist would be as good as an album released in your fourth? Probably not.
So enough preaching, everyone knows it takes practice to become a good artist but to go to school for it and immerse yourself in a community takes clarity. Knowing exactly what you want. This was something we brought up in the Lite interview; make sure to check that out if you haven’t. But that clarity is what helped them both form their message and know exactly what they want to do as artists. Are they trying to just express themselves or are they trying to do something more? This leads us to our next lesson about making timeless music.
Keep Going
My biggest takeaway from this interview is that this process takes time and that the message you put out might not always be received right away. Even after all those years of practice, your first album may still not be a “success”. And I put that in quotations because success is defined differently for everyone and that’s what we focus on in this last lesson. It’s important that you define what you consider success. It may not be money, it may not be streams, it may just be to make good music. And if that’s the case, then uploading and getting 10 streams shouldn’t get to you. Luca explains it way better than I can so I’ll let you hear it from him in this last lesson, define your success.
If you made it to the end of the video as always thank you so much for watching! Subscribe to our channel to watch the full interview when it’s released and subscribe to our newsletter! See you in the next video, peace!
