What I would do (Part 5)
If I were an artist like you, I would just be content with creating great content for the sake of creating it, not expecting any large returns in the arts industry because that’s just the reality of the situation. You are more than 99% likely to NOT make a living in this industry, EVEN if you have a lucky break with a viral video on YouTube or get a million Spotify streams. Seriously. Many of Aaron’s clients had lucky breaks and went viral and that’s how or why they connected with Aaron because they thought it was realistic with this momentum to continue to the next level and spend that money on him, but they always petered out or left. The arts being as challenging as it is to make money is just the nature of the arts industry. Aaron will talk bad about how predatory the major music labels are and how he’s different - and the major labels ARE that way, but he’s not much different. The major labels themselves have cut down on the money they make (gouging their clients in the process as well), AI is cutting into even more budgets, and the richest person in the music industry more than ANY musician alive or dead is the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek - worth 5 BILLION dollars. More than Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney, Elvis, Michael Jackson, you name it.
So I would just create art for the sake of it, not really expecting much in return monetarily, knowing it will cost you a decent amount of time and money to do so, but having a realistic recognition that you probably won’t make that money back or sustain yourself for a long time if ever. The arts industry is incredibly tough and in order to make money you have to do an INSANE amount of work promoting, advertising, finding work and the vast majority of your time would be spent NOT creating art, but working in order to sustain yourself to be able to create art. It’s not for the faint of heart at all. It’s being an entrepreneur times 100 in an industry that doesn’t pay well at all. I hope this gives you some sense of relief, knowing that you don’t need to prop up the unrealistic expectation to make money in the music industry because it really is so improbable long term. So save yourself the grief and stress of working yourself to death in an impossible industry and just create more because you love it. The arts is worth creating and pursuing despite the low monetary reward simply because THE ARTS IN AND OF THEMSELVES IS VALUABLE. You just need to balance how much monetary hit you can take because it is not cheap.
It’s one thing to be an entrepreneurial startup (startups in general have a high failure rate) in the tech world where you can actually make decent money from numerous or high paying clients, but it’s a totally different story to do that in the arts world where the income streams are practically negligible for over 99% of creators. Nonetheless, the only thing worse than trying to make it in the arts industry as hard as it is already, is paying someone and wasting thousands of dollars to later realize what a waste of time, money, and stress you had to pay to not get what you wanted. That’s actually worse.