How to start artist development and finding a coach

Artist development onboarding

If you want to know how to start artist development or want to understand the process before committing, this page will help.

My artist development program is bespoke to your needs. It’s a one-on-one video call-based service, with ongoing project management and support in a dedicated online environment.

Every artist is different and might not always follow the same step-by-step path, but most artists like some structure in the way we work together.

The service has no fixed contracts and the calls are managed in a consultative way where action points can be taken away from each call. A follow-up call won’t be needed until previous tasks have been completed. Artists will maintain access to their development environment between calls.

The service is flexible and promotes self-empowerment and autonomy for the artist to guide the pace (with gentle encouragement to pick it up where needed!).

Step 1: Getting to know you

Once you’ve booked your first call, we’ll work together on understanding the deep layers of your artist history, story, experience, obstacles, resistances and goals. We’ll uncover your true goal and set realistic expectations on how to reach it.

Booking your first call will kick off your program. We’ll get you set up in your online artist development environment where we’ll start planning and tracking our work together.

Step 2: Planning

In the corporate world, we have managers who (when doing a good job) keep us on track, guide us to skills we need to develop, mentor us and highlight our blind spots. Developing artists are out there on their own, searching a vast and polluted ocean of online content about how to approach their music career, when what they really need is a knowledgeable sounding board to run their thoughts and plans by and grow with, utilising external feedback, validation, assurance and assistance.

Modern day musicians are encouraged to “DIY” and think they have to do everything themselves. They think that this is what empowerment and success look like.

But, digging deeper, we find that all successful artists have teams.

The problem is, that teams are largely inaccessible to developing artists because they’re not earning significant revenue.

I present an accessible option to developing artists, a solution that’s still human and won’t break the bank.

Step 3: Project management accountability and consultation

After a two or three calls together it will be clear exactly what you should be working on towards your goals. You’ll have a dedicated project management environment online where we can both communicate about what you’re working on and things you might get stuck on.

To succeed in our goals, we need consistency and course-correction towards a defined target.

For many people, we also need an external person to hold us accountable for that consistency and to sanity check we’re still doing the right thing.

Sometimes, people only need an artist development coach until the completion of of a project. Others see us as a valuable ongoing part of their team.

"I'm so glad you're teaching music industry knowledge to artists, it's so helpful and you're so good at explaining it! Most people act like you should know complicated things about royalties, publishing and what to send music supervisors but you make it easy to learn and not feel patronised."

Floralyn Singer songwriter

Note: because these services are bespoke and are based on human interaction, my time is limited and I can only take on a selection of clients at a time. Start now to avoid the waiting list!