Female Entrepreneur Musician with Bree Noble

I am excited to be here with Stacey Bedford from Bandzoogle. It is one of my absolute favorite companies that help musicians. Stacey has been the CEO for a few years. I’m getting to talk to her, which I’m excited about. I’ve had many great relationships with Bandzoogle. Dave Cool, we’ve hung out together at conferences. I met Melanie in 2019. It’s great to talk to Stacey and get the perspective of the CEO on how Bandzoogle is helping musicians. I got excited when I saw an article that they put out a few months ago that said, “Musicians earned $5 million during the pandemic through Bandzoogle.” I was like, “My audience needs to know about this because musicians are thinking nobody’s earning during the pandemic."

Michelle Sabolchick Pettinato has had an incredibly successful career as a concert sound engineer for some of the biggest names in music including Gwen Stefani, Elvis Costello, Janet Jackson, Adam Lambert, Melissa Etheridge, Goo Goo Dolls, Kesha, Jewel, Styx, Mr Big, Indigo Girls, and many more.She is a Full Sail University Hall of Famer and Co-Founder of soundgirls.org. Michelle is also Creator of the online program LISTEN! Master the EQ Techniques of the Pros to Create Brilliant Mixes.

This time of the year could be really crazy, busy and fun. This year, we don't really have that. The challenge with this year is not being able to do these things and we tend not to get in the spirit and it's easy to feel not-Christmassy.I have with me my Community Managers in the Female Indie Musician Community, Beth Matthew and Cayla Brooke. They go live once a month to talk about subjects that affect us all and this time, it's about how to keep a spirit of peace in your music career and during this holiday season.

Today, I'm talking with multi-faceted artist Cassandra Kubinski. She has been with us on the podcast in 2018 and was in our Profitable Musician Summit talking about crowdfunding. Today she talks about how collbas have helped her get more streams, new fans and opened new doors for her.

Over the years, I have become known for helping musicians become more focused, more productive, use time more wisely, deal with distractions and get rid of stuff that don't serve you. I love talking about this kind of stuff especially since the year is ending and we're looking forward to the new year.I have a very popular mini-course called "Get More Done in Less Time" and I'm going to talk about that in our boot camp. You femusician.com/bootcamp. Get signed up ASAP since it starts on December 7th.Do you pride yourself on being a highly-creative musician with tons of great ideas? For musicians, having too many good ideas can steal your time, divide your focus and keep your stuck and broke. You may actually end up with unfinished projects and half-baked plans.I'm going to show you how the plethora of ideas you have is actually your worst enemy and how it's putting the breaks in your career momentum, and what to do about it. This process has been incredibly helpful for my Female Musician Academy members. It's helped them maintain focus, create clarity and actually build momentum in their music career.As creatives, we are often praised for our ingenuity and imagination and I know we mostly consider this our greatest strength, but some of time, it becomes our greatest weakness. We have a limited amount of resources to work with, especially our time. We only have so much time to spend so we need to be very intentional on what we choose to spend our time on. When ideas creep in, it can take us off course. We need to figure out a way to harness them. The other thing that can happen is you can get ideas by watching other artists and you want to add those things to your plate, which actually dooms what you're currently doing to the unfinished pile. The biggest problem with this is not just the time management issue, or not just that it is dooming what you currently do, but also that you are adapting something that you don't know if will work for you. The artist may be in a different stage than you. You need to assess anything you add in your plate in that way but decide if it fits to your current plan and goals. If it doesn't fit, you need to put it in a place, where you can come back to it when it's already applicable for you.What to do with your ideas:Create an inspiration vault. Keep the ideas for safekeeping so you can access them at anytime when it's the right time. You can use a notebook, your phone, or anything else where you can write it down and not forget it.When to access those ideas:When you are ready to do your next 90-day goals, you pull out your ideas and put them on your brainstorming document and decide if they fit in to what you want your goals to be in the next 90 days.If you ever felt pulled in a million different directions by your goals and end up accomplishing nothing, the bootcamp can definitely help you. Go check it out at femusician.com/bootcamp.Link mentioned in this episode: femusician.com/bootcamp

This is the kind of subject that is not necessarily business-oriented but has so much impact on your business. Gratitude is so important to be able to approach business in a healthy way. You cannot avoid experiencing huge highs and huge lows in your business. Gratitude allows you to balance out the mistakes you learn with the great things that are also happening. This allows you to create longevity for your business. I try to have some kind of gratitude practice on my walks everyday. When I fail to do that, I noticed that little things start to annoy me. My two Community Managers in our Female Indie Musician Community, Cayla Brooke and Beth Matthew, will discuss this on today's podcast. If you're not in our Facebook group, go to Female Indie Musician Community or to woscommunity.comGratefulness has a lot to do with our mindset. When someone is grateful, their mindset is different. If we come from a state of gratitude, it makes our music better. When we're positive about things, that makes life worth living. We become more solution-oriented than problem-oriented. It's a really important subject that changes a lot of things in our lives. We can choose to focus on the good things going on instead of the bad. Imagine going through this pandemic without technology, we would not be able to do Facebook lives or access courses at a price next to nothing. Depending on our mindset, we can either sit at home and whine or look for something to be grateful for. Even if you don't have support at home, you can actually find support online. We are so fortunate. Gratitude is the quality of being thankful, the readiness to show appreciation and return kindness. When we're grateful, we tend to look for the positive and attract more opportunities. We can help train our minds to be grateful. We can also do small routines like sending thank you cards to people weekly or thinking of three things to be grateful about each day.People who are more grateful are less-stressed, less-depressed and more satisfied. It lifts our wellbeing mentally and physically. Even if we don't feel grateful, we can cultivate an attitude of gratitude. Practicing gratitude makes us happier. If we can start being grateful even in really tough situations, it can help us process things and lessons we've learned. Why don't we start practicing gratitude everyday?Link mentioned in this episode: woscommunity.com

Today, we're talking about Performance Anxiety or commonly known as Stage Fright. I've had a lot of people wanting me to discuss this particular topic. Although I've had some bad experiences onstage, I've never had stage fright from the beginning. I know there are a lot of you out there who have a lot of talents to share and a lot of things to say but are afraid to get out there. So I have invited Academy member Allison Anderson to talk about this with us today.Allison is a musician and licensed therapist from Alberta, Canada. She started playing the piano at 6 years old and singing at 7. After she did music school, she suffered performance anxiety and it lasted for three decades. During a certain performance around seven years ago, she was off-key and everything was going wrong, then she found herself laughing it off during the performance and letting it go. That was when she heard the most beautiful tone come out of her. She eventually learned that her stage fright came from bad experiences in music school that were enough to shake her confidence. Performance anxiety is classified as a social phobia. It can be caused by different origins of thoughts such as a previous bad performance, trauma in childhood, learned behavior patterns, some strong personality traits or anything else that could have caused that impact in a person's deep self-esteem. A person may have tendencies but it could be developed by biological or environmental causes. Whatever the origin is, the result is the same onstage, which is stage fright or performance anxiety. No matter what the cause is, this is more about how you respond to a situation. To prevent having stage fright, you can do practices outside of the time so you can apply it when you're onstage onstage such as mindfulness, breathing, or being in the moment. Mindfulness is a practice about being in the moment using your five senses. We have to be in our bodies to get grounded in the moment and not live in our heads. When we have stage fright, we're activating our fight or flight response and we need to be aware of the present reality so we can allow our body to be mindful of the true situation and not of our fears or thoughts. As human beings, we always have the right to create. Nurturing your muse is giving yourself the freedom and fertile ground for creativity. It helps if you allow yourself to respond in the moment as an improvisation. The skill of mindfulness is being able to return to the moment. You also have to let yourself go and accept that your creativity is limited if you keep on thinking of being perfect. Developing this skill allows you to deal with Performance Anxiety and control your body's reactions.If there is one step you can take to move out of your stage fright, Allison advises it is allowing yourself to be horrible or to be the weirdest in your own space. Letting go and being free allows you to get rid of stage fright and discovering your best voice.You can find more about Allison at andersonarts.ca.Link mentioned in this episode: andersonarts.ca

This episode focuses on marketing your music. We're going to talk about how you are going to find the perfect people, how you're going to connect with them using tools online and further that relationship, and how to use data to figure out ways to convert them into raving and paying fans to support your career.We're going to discuss a lot of information about data and it may feel overwhelming at first but if you know what your data can tell you, you will love it and will turn you into a fan of knowing your data. If you want to learn more about what we talk about here, go to femusician.com/modernmusician and sign up for the free workshop that Michael Walker will be doing for my community on November 11th.Michael Walker from Modern Musician is a fellow summit host. Through his brand, he teaches musicians how to build their fanbase and make money from doing what they love. He started from being in a band in South Dakota and he grew his fanbase through grassroots. What they did was approach people who were fans of the bands they have similar music with. Michael shares the following steps they use in building fanbase:1. Find out where the people who will benefit from what you offer hang out2. Find out the best way to introduce yourself3. Build a real relationship with them4. Generate value for them5. Provide more value over timeHow do you use online tools to connect with people and have that deep relationship with them? We need to make sure that even while using automation, you will still have traction and real connection.What is important either with personal or online connection is to make sure that you are getting on the same page and reaching out to your fanbase where they can really get in touch and resonate with you. Being in tune with them is very important.Michael will be doing a workshop with us and he's going to teach you his system that will help you figure out about your artist identity, nailing that down into creating a passionate fan base and revenue multiplier. This is mainly based on a marketing funnel and his system will help musicians develop the skillset of using the right online marketing tools. They have a 3-month program that will equip musicians to develop that skillset and get comfortable enough to run it, keep optimizing it and create their own funnels. They also have a team of 18 trained coaches that will do a lot of heavy-lifting for the artist and do one-on-one sessions every week. When you start building something, you emulate then you innovate. Once the foundation is built, the last step is the revenue multiplier. They will teach you about a funnel accelerator which allows you to track your metrics weekly. The spreadsheet may be overwhelming but it it best to not know what to track and how to do it. Data also allows you to understand what's happening to help you get motivated about what you do. You will also be taught how to segment people into different categories based on how they answer sets of questions. Then you offer value based on their answers. You also have to analyze the Cost per Acquisition vs Value per Acquisition. The Fanbase Growth Workshop allows musicians to have clarity on what they have to offer. One requirement is to have at least one song that has high quality on it. How do you put it in front of people, create traffic with it and put it in front of the right people. The workshop will teach you how to go from scratch to your first $5000/month. Michael is going to break it up for you so it would be simpler and easier to understand. To join Michael Walker's workshop, sign up at femusician.com/modernmusicianLink mentioned in this episode: femusician.com/modernmusician

This week, I'm bringing back in my two Community Managers from our free Facebook Group, the Female Indie Musician Community. What we will talk about is something that is so poignant right now because of the pandemic. We need to feel realigned with our purpose and our passion for our music career. With what I am doing for musicians, I wouldn't have stayed this long if I didn't love what I do and if I'm not that passionate about what I am doing. I've always encouraged my Academy members to keep a reminder of wonderful testimonials that fans have given them about themselves or their music so they can use that as a reminder if they're not feeling motivated enough. But the key is really to have your passion for music deep in your soul, deep in your heart and deep in your belly because pursuing music is not that easy. Beth has been singing and playing the piano since she was a child but she has tried to push it to the side. She kept having this urge to pursue it and later in her life she eventually decided to listen to it and pursue her music. Knowing your passion is really about knowing what you love, what you're good at and what the world needs. After figuring that out, you need to find out what you can do that people can get you paid for if that's what you like. It would be wonderful to have our passion, profession, vocation, and mission all rolled into one. In pursuing it, there will always be some aspect that you need to learn and get help with but whatever it is, there's always hope to do what you're created to do which is your purpose.Cayla wanted to perform since the age of three. For her it's like a curse and a blessing at the same time. If you don't follow it, that nagging feeling stays with you and you know that you are on the wrong path. When she started her career, she just wanted to sing and take every opportunity to do it. Later on, she discovered that she didn't like the performances she did at restaurants and bars during that time and that she was looking for something else. For a long time, she toured the show about Eva Cassidy. When she gets off the stage, she felt great and happy and she knew she was doing what she wanted. One night she just realized that she was done with that part of her life and it was time to write and sing her own music. Then afterwards, she found herself needing to speak infront of people. As we grow, we need to rediscover ourselves, rediscover our purposes, learn something new towards our new purpose and following the opportunity when it arrives. We should learn to not be afraid to pivot when needed. We should not regret what we did in the past because you learn from them. Some experiences would help you figure out that that's not you. Some would make you feel alive. Following your intuition since it's usually good and usually right. Before Beth turned 50, she knew she wanted to do more with her music. She didn't have fans or a website. She had an opportunity to record her album in Nashville and she did. She had the time of her life, she felt good about herself and learned a lot. Another thing is she had a desire to move to Connecticut from North Carolina. That's when she had the chance to be seated next to her now-husband and they eventually got married. Understanding what your values are, what makes you alive and what makes a difference in our lives to is really important. We might let what other people think prevent us from living our purpose and passion but living through what's feeding our soul is what will really make us happy. Your passion should also be aligned to what's really core important to you just as being a voice to people who are voiceless. Your core message comes out in your music because you can't help it and that's who you are. Our Music With A Conscience has a lot of songs that were written by people about really amazing themes. You will hear a lot of different viewpoints from those songs. It's so important to hear different point of views instead of just the one we believe. Just like what was in the Netflix documentary, "Social Dilemma", we may have a tendency to stick to our own views and it is important that as musicians, we are critical thinkers and we should not lose that. Just like those artists included in the Music With A Conscience Series, you have the power and you have the mission to get your message out there and make an impact to the person listening to you. Don't be afraid about negativity on social media. Get your music out there and share your message through music. Your purpose is stronger. With your music, you can make a difference.