Pros and Cons of a Portfolio Career for Music Producers (Part 3)
Part 3 of our “Portfolio Career for Music Producers” series looks at adding teaching as another part of your skillset. We’ll also be looking at the pros and cons of a portfolio career for music producers. Part 1 looked at exactly what a portfolio career is and some traditional job roles for a music producer to take on, while Part 2 looked at some more entry-level online income streams to kickstart your portfolio career.
Teaching
As a producer, you already have the mass amounts of passion and fantastic interpersonal skills needed to be a great teacher. If you have the enthusiasm and patience for sharing knowledge, then teaching or tutoring can be a very rewarding addition to your portfolio career. This may include instrumental or vocal teaching if that’s your thing, or perhaps music theory, songwriting or of course production.
As a teacher, you will have the opportunity to form connections with people of all different ages and backgrounds. They will introduce you to their own musical passions, even artists and genres you haven’t heard of before. It can quickly widen your music knowledge and inspiration bank.
Another added benefit is the chance to practice more often. If you’re an instrumentalist, you’re very familiar with struggling to fit in time to practice your instrument. By teaching, you’ll have a chance to practice every time you have a lesson, and be able to infuse in the student’s motivated attitude to learning.
There are plenty of third-party sites out there to teach with, or you may choose to work independently through word-of-mouth.
Online Courses
In recent years, online courses have become a major source of income throughout the creative and technology industries. There is a huge community of creatives looking to take on new hobbies. That’s why being able to share your skills in a digital format is highly valuable.
Producers have shared their knowledge to fans, including Joel Zimmerman (better known as Deadmau5) who hosted a 5.5 hour-long course sharing his methods for the music development process. Or audio engineer Brian Jackson, who delivered a comprehensive beginners’ guide to Ableton.
Creating an online course yourself is surprisingly accessible. All you need is a topic to teach, a microphone and a visual element like screen recording. There are plenty of platforms where you can post your course, though you might prefer to host it on your own website for more control. This is not only a great way to give back to the community, but also a clever way to create awareness for your skills.
Pros of a Portfolio Career
Whether you’re teaching, exploring the online world of beatmaking and sample packs, or harnessing your production skills as a live engineer, there are benefits and downsides associated with a portfolio career. Let’s start with some of the positives:
- Creative freedom. If you consider yourself multi-potential, you have the chance to find fulfilment in many disciplines. Writer and artist Emilie Wapnick refers to people with multiple career interests as ‘multipotentialites’ in her TED talk Why Some of Us Don’t Have One True Calling. Even if you don’t relate to this description, the variety of a portfolio career could still suit you when compared to a typical one-job approach to working.
- Flexibility. It is an ideal choice for anyone who wants to fit work around other parts of life: working according to your own schedule. You get to set your hours and you can decide how much work you take on at any one point. Scaling your projects up or down as you like.
- Reliability. Having multiple incomes means you can feel reassured that if one role is lost, the others will still be there to support you. In Part 2 of this series we looked at some ‘passive’ income streams, such as library music and selling beats, referring to income that can run on its own once it’s set up. For every week that you’re working on a project, you’ll be secure in the knowledge that income will continue to arrive from these passive streams even when you don’t work.
- Impressive skill set. Potential clients may be impressed by the broad skill set needed to fulfil multiple job roles. You also have the unique opportunity to offer extra services to your existing clients. For example, if you’re producing for them you might also offer some of the services we discussed in Part 1 like artist development and management, mixing and mastering, sound engineering in the studio and live, etc.
Cons of a Portfolio Career
Of course, there are also some difficulties with this type of career. Challenges may include:
- Fluctuating work and insecurity. Naturally when working on a project-to-project basis, you will have months where you are completely booked and others where you’re struggling to fill the calendar. It’s not always possible to predict the volume of incoming work or when and where success will come from. If you have a particular specialty offered at a higher rate then you may struggle to fill your calendar with it consistently. Instead, you’ll need to supplement it with a different offering.
- Time management. When focusing on multiple projects at once, it can be difficult to assess just how much time to assign to each task in order to ensure steady progress overall. You’ll also be working outside the standard 9-5 hours, so must keep your working hours in check – overworking is exhausting!
- Responsibility. With a portfolio career, every part of finance, planning, management and accounting will be entirely your responsibility, rather than handing some of the load to an employer or co-worker. This sounds a little scary, but it doesn’t have to be. If you are disciplined, organised, aware of your finances and able to problem-solve, the responsibility can become very freeing.
- Maintaining a strong network and community presence. No matter the job role, reliably finding new clients takes consistency in communication and in showcasing work to suitable audiences. You’ll need to understand how to find and nurture a client to gain their trust in the long term. For some, this might look like posting on social media every day, while others might be building an email list. You could also be maintaining a website, networking at live events or asking previous clients for referrals.
Is the Portfolio Career Right For You?
If you are a creative person with many interests, the portfolio career could be a perfect fit.
The very point of a portfolio career is that it isn’t one-size-fits-all. You can shape and mould it to fit your interests and areas you would like to explore. The skills you learn as a music producer are so varied that they will open doorways to many new opportunities.
Our CUA60520 Advanced Diploma of Music covers all of these skills and gets you ready for these opportunities, giving you solid ground to kick-start your career in music production and build the ultimate portfolio.
