Are you having trouble releasing more music?
I don’t know why you’re not releasing more. Fear, striving for perfection, afraid it won’t go anywhere, you don’t have the perfect image yet, the lyrics aren’t perfect yet, the list could go on and on.
Here’s some advice to help you with this delicate topic.
Work With Others
Working with others creates an even better product than working alone sometimes. The ideas you have can become more refined when there is someone else there to bounce them off of and you get to see first hand if the message and lyrics translate, or the feeling of the track.
It can be so easy for our egos to get in the way. They want to be the artist and the sole creator, so the whole world can look at them as a creative genius.
All of us might want to secretly be admired as that lone creative genius, off with a laptop doing everything themselves. And that is fine and some people do that at first, but eventually, you branch out.
Why?
At the end of the day, making music with others is just more fun. So don’t feel a need to hole yourself up alone for the pure sake of being worshiped as a solo creator.
If you look at any popular song, 9/10 you’ll see more than one creator on it. Does it make it somehow ‘less’ of a song’? Of course not.
In reality, its insecurity lying behind this motivation.
This tendency to prove yourself really dampers your ability to work with others and reap all of those benefits when you have this deep-seated insecurity that you have to do everything yourself or else it won’t be the real you, or your authentic sound.
If more people are working on the song, their excitement can motivate you. If you have trouble releasing music, it can help a lot if somebody else has invested their time into a track with you. They want to see their work pay off, and you get the positive pressure, so the record is more likely to get finished.
Deadlines
Setting deadlines can be great, but you have to walk the line of making sure the product is great and putting something out just to do it. It’s a finicky battle, but if you are already working with others then the project should naturally be expected to be released.
In any major label situation, of course, there are deadlines. Deadlines are shown to improve focus immensely, especially the night before a test.
There’s a principle at work here.
Work tends to expand to fill the time allotted for it.
Just like when your mother in law and you have a four-hour drive, and she talks your ears off to fill up those entire 4 hours and no less.
This is the exact reason why we can magically have all of the motivation and concentration in the world right when a deadline is creeping upon us. We humans will go great crazy lengths in these situations. Just ask any college kid out there.
The way to take advantage of this human phenomenon and hack it for your benefit is to set crazy short deadlines on yourself.
You could even put money behind it to legitimize it with my favorite site, Stickk.com.
Releasing art is a touchy subject, so make sure you’re really in the right mental space to set a deadline like that. I walk the line between quantity vs quality.
It is a fact that the more mixes you do and the more songs you write, you will get better. I don’t advise spending years on one track to get to some level of perfection. You’re better off just doing more songs instead.
But I’m also not saying don’t take your time and not really give each song your all. You know there’s a difference.
How do you guys feel about releasing music? What do you struggle with? Let me know in the comments below!