Nothing gives a new artist more joy than finding out that a significant number of audiences have started listening to and enjoying their songs. That’s why ReverbNation, as a platform, offers both new and old artists this type of service across the globe. It’s also an opportunity for artists to grow a sustainable career by exposing them to a qualitative music audience and building innovative tools that can help promote their handiwork, one of which is the Song Plays with ReverbNation feature.

How Present-day Artist Measure Success

Modern-day artists have various parameters by which they measure the success of their music career, some of which include;

Number of Song plays

While it’s the current trend among music artists to get excited over an increasing number of ReverbNation song plays, should you also join the trend? As a new artist, can you really judge your success by the number of Song Plays with ReverbNation?

If you think about it, using metrics like song plays, hits, and views to measure your success rate as a song artist may not be a good idea because they do not necessarily translate into enough money needed to earn a decent living.

Throwback to when artists played as a band, and their songs got regularly aired on mainstream radio. Those were times when artists find it easy to translate their popularity into monetary value. But in 2020, earning a handful of play count across various platforms may not necessarily translate to the same.

The reality is that for play counts to translate into a significant amount of money, it has to be an extraordinarily high number of song plays.

Popularity

A majority of modern-day artists know about the possibility of becoming popular by having millions of song plays across various platforms and how that popularity translates into much money. They, therefore, do whatever it takes to get as many play counts in the shortest time.

However, obsessing over the number of listeners playing your music is a problematic approach because it can become addictive, discouraging, and distracting. Yes, your singles having 50,000 to 100,000 plays deserves some accolade; however, you should think about how to get your next single up to a million and above in play counts.

The best strategy to increase your popularity is to write and release terrific songs that get millions of people to listen and want more from you. Obsessing and getting discouraged over the numbers you’ve got so far won’t help you achieve that.

Money Earned

It’s a common trend among modern-day artists to compete and brag about how much money they earn from their music-making artistry. Maybe you’ve also placed the definition of your career success upon how much money you earn for your work. There’s nothing wrong with that!

While there’s nothing wrong in seeking to earn enough money from your work, defining your music success by how much money you make may not be the best. You would have lost an essential component of a successful music career, which is the joy and emotional fulfillment you get from making music.

That’s the kind of love that sustains any musicians through the many years of discovery and artistic development. These development years usually get accompanied by hardship, disappointment, and heartbreaks that only genuine emotional fulfillment can survive.

Best Way to Measure Music Career Success

If the number of song plays, popularity and money is not the best way to measure your career success as a music artist, what is the best way to do it?

The fact is that you’ll become a better music artist if you spend more time with your craft and worry less over whether you’re successful or not going by the perceived definition of success in the music world. According to a Forbes article released in 2019 and tagged “Finding Passion and Purpose Through work,” most successful persons across various fields are those who found purpose and passion in what they do.

Many such persons have long forgotten about the obsession for success and have traded their obsession for passion. This same principle can apply to you as a music artist where you find joy and excitement in what you do rather than the result you get from it.

But, for advancement, there must be a way by which you measure progress in what you do. However, your quest to know how well you’re doing must lead back to you. You’ll have to define these parameters on your terms and refuse to do it the general way of fretting over play-counts, streams, and likes. Here is where setting personal goals become helpful.

Setting Personal Career Goals

You must have healthy dreams and goals as a musician. However, as you progress in your music career, it’s best to break down your dreams and goals into small and actionable goals. Not only that, but your goal must also be real and long term.

For example, your goal can be to get signed to your favorite record label. However, rather than seeking to get signed because of the monetary gains or because you need a partner to help you with your music’s promotion and sales, your long-term goals should be to find a producer to help work on your music and make it stand out.

Have it in mind that creating terrific songs is one of the keys to a sustainable music career according to the musicway blog, and it must be the metric by which you measure your success. Other small goals like monetary gain, likes, play counts, etc. can form your short term goals, but terrific songs promoted on a platform like ReverbNation get you the audience, personal satisfaction, joy, and emotional fulfillment needed in your music career.

How Your Goals Can Help You on Reverbnation

Sustainable goals have always been an essential success-index in music, and they’re more important in today’s complicated music industry. Listed below are three reasons why you need sustainable goals in your music career;

Goals help you define what you want

You probably get a lot of fulfillment in writing and making music, but what else do you want? You might need to sit yourself down to define what you want out of your music career. When you’re just starting, your goals do not have to be significant.

Your goal could be to release three songs annually, learn to use various ReverbNation tools to produce quality music, bring out a group of thirty people to bless them with your songs, etc. Small goals like these can lead you into bigger goals as you grow in experience and your career follows suit.

Goals get everyone on your team on the same page

You may be the writer and singer of your songs, but you definitely will not work alone. Therefore, having clearly-defined goals about every one of your songs will get everyone on your team on the same page with you.

Creating terrific songs that get people on ReverbNation to listen requires teamwork, but your goals and objectives are to be the core of the team. The idea is to know what your team is about, the type of music your team needs to create.

Big Goals are important

While your team and you are permitted to start with bite-sized goals, you cannot stay at that level for long. It would be best if you challenged your team to difficult and goals that may seem unattainable. The reason is that, without the big goals, the passion needed to succeed can quickly fizzle out.

Ask yourself, what can you achieve with your music if anything was possible? Ask the right questions and set the bar high enough. You might not reach the peak of the bar, but you’ll be where you need to be. Goals like that are what make a successful music career, and they help you on ReverbNation.

Final Verdict

The music industry might be complicated, but if you understand and set the right goals, you’ll triumph despite all odds. The competition on ReverbNation might be fierce; however, setting out to express yourself through terrific music should be your driving force. Such a goal will eventually help you on ReverbNation as you seek to build a strong music career.