It’s been a month since the release of “Bottom (A Live Collection)” … a month when most of my musical energy has been directed toward marketing and promotion. I’ve been posting on social media, pitching the album to playlists and radio shows and bloggers and friends, and just generally trying to get people to listen to it.

I’ll be honest, I don’t love this part of being a musician. I tend to find it exhausting and stressful, whereas I find actually creating music exciting and rejuvenating. If I’m sitting down with a guitar, or recording/mixing something on my laptop, literally hours will pass and I will be totally absorbed and happy. Marketing, though, feels like work, and comes with the fear of rejection and all the psychological dark sides of engaging too much with social media.

When I’m making music, I tend to think “why can’t I just make music all the time?” whereas when I’m doing the promotion side of things, it’s more like “why do I even bother making music at all?”

I know I’m not alone in this! And sure: no one’s forcing me to market my music. I do it because some part of me thinks there’s value in sharing it with others. Marketing is the necessary evil if you want to share music with people.

A success cycle

I recently ran across a useful framework for thinking about these different phases of creation, something called the Musician’s Success Cycle. It’s a framing invented by Cheryl B. Englehardt, a professional coach and a grammy-nominated artist in her own right. (There might well be other versions of the same thing, but this was the one I found first!)

Basically, the Musician’s Success Cycle asks you to conceive musical projects as flowing through a predictable series of temporary stages that require different mindsets and different kinds of engagement.

• Phase one is the beginning where you learn new skills and determine your goal for the project.
• Phase two is the creative stage where you Make The Thing. Definitely my favorite, and I like to hang out here as long as possible! But if you stay here forever, you never actually finish anything.
• Phase three is preparation and admin, where you lay the groundwork for taking your work public. In the case of the Bottom release, this meant uploading files and lyrics and metadata, designing release plans, a bit of website redesign, etc, etc.
• Phase four is pitching and promoting. The site of my current woe.
• Phase five is monetization and maintenance. You start moving this project into the background and consolidating your gains in preparation to move on to the Next Thing.

You could probably redefine this as a system with four phases, or eight, or fifteen if you want, but for me, the number and content of the phases isn’t exactly the point. What I find valuable is something so simple it almost feels A Bit Too Obvious:

The phases are temporary!

By thinking about music (or any creative endeavor really) in this kind of a framework, you’re starting from two basic assumptions. One, you expect to move from each phase to the next at some point, so none of them should last forever; and two, you’ll be back around the cycle again in the future, so you shouldn't fret too much about moving on from the fun parts.

Knowing those two things, I can give myself permission to venture out of phase two, the Most Fun Phase Ever, by actually finishing a project. That’s possible because I know I will come back later and do more fun stuff. And when I find myself spending a few weeks in the dreaded phase four, I’m less likely to give up in despair if I remind myself that it’s only temporary, and I’ll be back around to phase two before I know it.

Giving myself permission to think about music this way has definitely leveled up my sanity! And helped me release an album that had been sitting on my hard drive for a couple of decades.