What is music to you?
For many of us, music is central to who we are. You might love going to gigs or listening at home, you might work in the industry as a promoter, agent, or manager. Or you might be a creator, writing or playing or performing – or all three!
Whatever your involvement, music brings joy, connection, and meaning. So, no surprises then millions of people want music to be a bigger part of their lives and spend most of their time doing it; professionally.
At Midnight Mango, we’re lucky to work with some of the most exciting live artists around. Helping them grow their careers is what we love most about our job. But here’s the truth: before we can step in and make a real difference, there’s a lot an artist needs to have in place already.
This article is about those crucial early steps, what you can do yourself, what an agent will bring to the table, and how you can set yourself up for success when the time comes to find representation.
First steps: laying the groundwork yourself
We get it, you’re an artist, and your priority is writing great songs and performing them well. But in the early days, building a live career means wearing a lot of hats.
You’ll need to:
🎟️ Book your own shows and learn how to promote them
📣 Build and engage your audience, online and in real life
🎬 Release music with videos that stand out
📧 Grow your mailing list and nurture your fanbase
💡 Start developing your image and brand
This is hard work, and there’s no shortcut. It’s also vital, because it shows potential team members, like managers, PRs, labels, and agents, that you’re serious, persistent, and capable of making progress independently.
It’s a classic Catch-22: you need a team to grow, but you need growth to attract a team.
We talk more about this in the post How Agents Take On New Talent.
The agent’s toolkit: five ways we help artists grow
Once you’ve built enough momentum to attract an agent, we bring a toolkit of strategies to take your live career to the next level. But remember, these are tools we can only use effectively when the groundwork has been done first.
🪧 1. Showcase gigs
Showcase gigs are a chance to get your music in front of promoters, PRs, labels, and other industry professionals. We’ll help you secure the right slots, in the right cities, at the right time, avoiding common pitfalls like empty rooms or poorly placed set times.
These gigs aren’t about making money; they’re about creating opportunities. As we explore in How Agents Help Artists Join the Dots, building relationships with key players starts here.
🎪 2. Festivals
Festivals are fantastic for building national recognition. Festival programmers often look to agents they trust for recommendations, and we use our relationships to get our artists onto lineups where they’ll get an audience.
🎟️ 3. Small headline tours
These early tours are often a rite of passage, hard work, rarely profitable, but vital for proving you can draw a crowd beyond your hometown. We’ll help plan strategic routes, negotiate deals, and count the tickets sold so you can adjust your marketing.
🌍 4. Conference events
Events like The Great Escape, Eurosonic, and Folk Alliance are key opportunities to showcase your music to bookers and programmers from around the world. But timing is everything, you often only get one chance at these. We’ll help make sure you’re ready.
🤝 5. Support tours
Tour supports can be great exposure, but they’re not the silver bullet many artists imagine. Headline acts usually choose their supports themselves. We can suggest and pitch, but getting the slot often depends on your own buzz and momentum.
Loving the music is the easy part
As agents, we can only work with a small number of emerging artists at a time. We invest a lot of in those early years, so we need to know an artist has got what it takes, by laying the groundwork themselves. For us loving the music is the easy part.
The takeaway
Growing a live career isn’t easy. It takes time, persistence, and a willingness to do the hard yards yourself before others can join your team.
When you’re ready, an agent can help you take huge strides forward. But the story doesn’t start with us.
✨ It starts with you.
I did a talk on Sound Roots a while ago on this topic. It’s quite lengthy so there’s a ‘contents page’ below the video, so you can jump to key bits, if you want to.
0:00 – Intro
Tom Besford from English Folk Expo introduces the lecture
1:30 – Part 1 – The importance of music in our lives…
Here I look at the role music has in our lives and how it is different for different people. From there I discuss what it means to become a professional musician.
7:30 – Part 2 – What you have to do to attract an agent…
What we look for in a musician before we sign them up to our agency. It’s a science don’t you know!
17:30 – Part 3 – The agent’s toolkit in the first two years…
This section is about what we do with our emerging talent, I break this down into five sections:
- Showcase Billings
- Festivals
- Headline Shows
- Conference Events
- Support Tours
45:00 – Recap – Well it’s a recap!
And that’s it – I focus on the early years, it’s a big topic, so I don’t go into what happens once the artist has become successful – that will have to be the subject of another day.
