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In this episode, Tai Anderson of Third Day sits down with Jason K Powers to talk about the early business lessons of a touring band, a brutal review that reshaped how he thinks about success, and the fan-first framework behind his new book, Market Like a Rockstar.
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Nobody gets into music thinking about the emergency fundraising campaign. The financial strategies, if it happens at all, comes much later and usually only after something goes wrong.
By then the options are already narrower than they should be.
The thing about a financial crisis in a music career is that it almost never announces itself in advance. It builds slowly, in the background, while everything else is moving forward. The calendar stays full. The income keeps coming in. The career keeps asking for reinvestment and you keep saying yes because that’s what building looks like. And then something unexpected lands – a medical bill, a slow stretch that runs longer than expected, a van that breaks down at the worst possible moment – and there’s nothing behind you to absorb it.
That’s the moment most musicians want to avoid. And the distance between avoiding it and not is almost entirely about what gets built during the years when nothing is wrong.
It doesn’t require a large number. It doesn’t require a complicated plan. What it requires is a decision made early enough that when something unexpected shows up, there’s something there to meet it. A reserve that sits quietly in the background, growing while you’re working, available when you need it without penalty or process. Something that turns a crisis into an inconvenience instead of a campaign.
If you want to start building that before you need it, that conversation starts here.
The active years are the window. The years when the income is there and the calendar is full and everything feels like it’s moving in the right direction. Those are the years when building is easiest and when it matters most, because they’re the years that determine what’s available later.
Every musician who has navigated this industry without a financial crisis built something during those years. Not perfectly, not always early enough, but deliberately. A percentage of every inflow that went somewhere protected. Something growing in the background while the career stayed the focus. The decision that a piece of what came in was non-negotiable, every time, regardless of what else was happening.
That decision is available at any stage of a career. Earlier is better but later still beats never. And the musician who makes it arrives at every future crossroads with more room to move than the one who didn’t.
My goal is to help as many musicians as possible build that room before they ever need it. If you want to talk through what that looks like for your specific situation, book a call with me and let’s chat.
Photo by Connor Scott McManus
There’s a conversation I find myself having more than any other with musicians who are doing well by most measures. Good career, consistent work, a name people recognize in the right circles. And somewhere in the conversation they’ll say something that gives it away – a gig they took because they couldn’t afford to say no, a deal they signed because the timing made turning it down feel impossible, a decision they’d have made differently if the pressure hadn’t been so high.
Options. The ones who have them make different decisions than the ones who don’t. And in the music industry, options are almost never talked about as something you build deliberately.
Talent gets developed. Craft gets practiced. Networks get cultivated. All of that is intentional. But the financial conditions that determine whether you have real choices at a given moment – whether you can walk away from the wrong thing, wait for the right thing, say yes to an opportunity that doesn’t pay immediately – those conditions mostly get left to chance.
The musician with three months of expenses sitting in a reserve somewhere accessible makes a fundamentally different decision when a bad offer comes in than the one who has nothing behind them. That’s because the financial pressure that would have forced the other hand isn’t there. The reserve bought the option. The option changed the outcome.
This is the connection that almost never gets made out loud: financial stability in a music career isn’t just about security. It’s about leverage. The ability to be selective, to hold out, to invest in something that doesn’t pay right away, to build on your own terms rather than whoever’s terms are available at the moment you need them.
If you want to start building that kind of optionality, that conversation starts here. It’s worth having before you’re in the middle of a decision you wish you had more room to make.
It starts smaller than most people expect. A dedicated reserve that grows consistently, even modestly, changes the psychology of every financial decision around it. The slow month stops being a crisis. The bad offer stops being tempting. The right opportunity stops being out of reach just because the timing is inconvenient.
Relationships and reputation build options too, and musicians generally understand that instinctively. What gets missed is that financial structure does the same thing and the two work together. The musician with a strong network and a financial cushion underneath them is operating in a completely different world than the one with the same network and nothing behind them.
Skills, relationships, audience, and financial stability – together they create the conditions where a music career can be built on purpose rather than just survived. Most musicians are working on the first three without ever being shown how to build the fourth alongside them.
Photo by Tuti Isnawati
Ask anyone who’s spent time in the music industry what advice they got starting out and you’ll hear a pretty consistent list. Work hard. Build your network. Own your masters. Get your name out there. Find the right team. Put in the time.
Good advice, most of it. Genuinely useful. And almost none of it about what happens to the money once it starts showing up.
That gap is bigger than most people realize. The music industry generates an enormous amount of content, conversation, and community around the craft of building a career. How to get the gig. How to get the placement. How to get the deal. The getting is covered from every angle imaginable. The keeping barely gets a mention.
Part of that is just how the culture is built. Music celebrates the hustle, the breakthrough, the moment things click. What comes after the click is less cinematic and gets a lot less airtime. But the financial decisions made in the months and years after money starts arriving are often more consequential than anything that happened before it.
If you want to make it in the music industry, you know exactly how to find guidance. If you want to keep what you make, you’re largely on your own.
That’s what makes the financial side of a music career so quietly difficult. It’s not that musicians don’t earn. It’s that the earnings move through their hands quickly and without much structure around them. Taxes arrive as a surprise because nobody built the habit of setting aside a percentage off the top the moment a payment lands. The good months feel like permission to spend and the slow months feel like failure, when really both are just part of a cycle that needs a system built around it. The career keeps asking for reinvestment and the ask always feels justified because it usually is.
Meanwhile nothing accumulates. Not because the musician didn’t earn enough. Because every dollar had somewhere urgent to go and the non-urgent things, the reserve, the future, the cushion, never made it onto the list.
If you want to talk through what keeping more of what you earn actually looks like for your specific situation, that conversation starts here. That’s the part of the conversation I’ve built my practice around.
There’s a version of financial success in music that has nothing to do with earning more. It’s about how much of what you already earn actually stays. Two musicians can gross the same number in a year and end up in completely different financial positions twelve months later depending on whether there was any system around the money when it arrived.
The musician with a system isn’t necessarily smarter or more disciplined. They just made a few structural decisions early, or were shown how to, that changed where the dollars went. A percentage off the top before anything else gets touched. A reserve that sits between them and the next slow period. Something growing in the background that doesn’t require their active participation to keep building.
Those aren’t complicated ideas. They’re just ideas that almost nobody in the music industry ever laid out clearly for the people who needed them.
The business advice in this industry is abundant. The financial infrastructure for the people doing the work has always been thin. Knowing that is the first step toward building something different.
If this is a conversation you’ve never had with someone who actually understands how music income works, that’s where I spend my time. Grab a call with me if you want to start there.
Photo by Zulfugar Karimov
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What does fifty years in rock and roll actually teach you about money?
Rudy Sarzo was born in Havana, spent part of his childhood in Miami and New Jersey, and has spent the better part of five decades on and around the Sunset Strip. He’s played bass with Ozzy Osbourne, Whitesnake, and Dio, and is still touring with Quiet Riot today at 75. Rudy walks through how he ran out of money in LA in the late 1970s, moved to New Jersey to earn enough to get back, and got the call from Kevin DuBrow that landed him in Quiet Riot the same day he returned. A few years later, a connection that traced back to a chance meeting with Randy Rhoads led to the audition call that put him in Ozzy Osbourne’s band.
He also gets honest about the money side most musicians never hear about. He talks about the era when the business was completely opaque, when artists never saw how the industry actually worked and had to trust a business manager on faith, and the moment his wife took over the family’s finances entirely. He explains why he sees music as a calling rather than a paycheck, and closes with the most direct piece of advice in the whole conversation: hold onto your money, because life is only going to get more expensive.
If you’re a working musician trying to figure out the money side of a career that doesn’t look anything like a normal job, this is a rare, honest look at what that looks like across five decades, from a guy who is still, by his own words, “just getting started.”
If this helped you think differently about the money side of your career, share it with another musician who needs to hear it.
If you’ve spent any time in music communities online, you’ve seen it happen. Someone posts a GoFundMe campaign. A medical bill. A broken down van on the road. An instrument stolen. Unexpected expenses that arrived at the worst possible time. And within hours, sometimes minutes, the comments fill up. People share it. Other musicians give what they can. Fans show up. The community does what music communities do – it takes care of its own.
That generosity is real. It’s one of the most genuinely beautiful things about this world. And I want to be careful here, because what I’m about to say is not about judging anyone who has ever started one of those campaigns or given to one.
Life happens.
Emergencies don’t ask permission.
And when someone is in a hard moment, the last thing they need is commentary.
What I do want to say – and I say it with full respect for everyone who has ever been in that position – is that by the time a campaign goes up, something broke down much earlier. Not the person. The foundation underneath them.
The medical bill that became a crisis didn’t have to be one. The broken van that ended a tour run didn’t have to mean financial ruin. The slow month that turned into a spiral didn’t have to go that far. These aren’t inevitable outcomes. They’re what happens when a career gets built without anything underneath it to absorb the unexpected – and in most cases, nobody ever showed the musician how to build that cushion in a way that actually fit their life.
This happens quietly. Over years. Until one moment when everything converges at once and there’s nothing left to fall back on.
The part that stays with me is that the community always shows up. Every time. And that says something extraordinary about the people in this world. But the musician who had to ask didn’t want to ask. Nobody posts a campaign because things are going well. They post it because they ran out of road.
Building that cushion looks different for everyone. There’s no single answer and no one-size approach. For some it’s a dedicated reserve they treat as untouchable. For others it’s structuring income differently so the slow months don’t hit as hard. For others still it’s putting something in place that grows quietly in the background while the career stays the focus. The specifics matter less than the decision to start. And starting earlier always beats starting later, even if earlier already passed.
This is the part of music and money that I’ve made my mission. Not the glamorous part of the conversation. The unglamorous part – the cushion, the buffer, the thing that sits between a musician and the moment they have to ask. I got into this work because I believe every musician who is building something real deserves a financial foundation underneath it, and because the gap between where most musicians are and where they could be is almost entirely an education and access problem, not a talent or discipline problem.
If you want to talk through what that foundation could look like for your specific situation, let’s talk. No agenda. Just a real look at where things stand and what’s possible from here.
The community will always show up for you. My goal is to make sure you never have to ask.
Photo by Cosmin Gavris
Listen to this episode and subscribe on your favorite podcast channel HERE.
Most musicians have never heard how a venue actually thinks about a door split, a guarantee, or that catering line in a rider that quietly turns a $5,000 show into a $6,500 one.
Scott Happel has.
Scott is a co-owner of three of Denver’s independent live music venues: The Oriental Theater, HQ, and The Federal Theatre. He built that footprint one venue at a time, almost entirely by accident. In this episode, he pulls back the curtain on what happens on the other side of every deal a musician signs. He breaks down door splits versus guarantees, what a first email to a venue needs to include to actually get opened, and what breaks trust between an artist and a room that could otherwise have them back again and again. He gets specific about the parts of the business that rarely get explained clearly: merch splits, catering buy-ins that quietly change a deal after it’s signed, and who should really cover the cost when an artist wants to sell a VIP meet and greet. He also tells the story of bringing The Federal Theatre back to life after roughly 40 years of sitting dark, a reminder that even the venues musicians play started somewhere and took real risk to exist.
If you’re a working musician, this episode is about your side of the table too. Every choice a venue makes, from splits to load in times to catering budgets, connects directly to decisions you’re already making about your own money. Knowing what a venue is actually pricing when it makes an offer, and what earns an artist a callback, puts you in a better position to negotiate and manage your own income with more clarity.
If this helped you think differently about the money side of your career, share it with another musician who needs to hear it.
The stereotype is everywhere. You’re a musician, so you must be bad with money. It gets said so often and so casually that it has started to feel like a fact rather than what it actually is: an oversimplification that lets everyone off the hook except you.
Here’s what I actually believe after working in this space: you are not bad with money. You were handed a financial reality that nobody designed a system for, told to figure it out, and then blamed when you couldn’t. That’s not the same thing.
The financial infrastructure that exists in this country was built around a very specific kind of earner. Someone with a steady paycheck, a predictable tax situation, an employer putting money aside on their behalf, and a benefits package that covers the gaps. You live almost entirely outside that model. Irregular income, self-employment taxes, no employer contributions, no safety net built in. And yet the advice you receive, when you receive any at all, is almost always built for that other person. You can’t follow a system built for someone else’s income and then blame yourself when it doesn’t fit.
That said, I’m not here to tell you everything is fine. A lot of musicians do struggle financially. The struggle is real. But the reason behind it is almost never what gets named. It isn’t laziness. It isn’t recklessness. It isn’t some inherent creative-brain inability to handle numbers. It’s that nobody built the right framework for how your money actually moves, and you’ve been trying to navigate without one.
One of the conversations I find myself having regularly goes something like this:
“Do you pay your bills every month?”
“Yes.”
“Are you getting ahead financially?”
“No.”
“Why do you think you can pay your bills but not get ahead?”
“Because those are the things I have to pay. They’re not optional.”
That answer right there is the whole thing. Your bills get paid because they feel mandatory. Non-negotiable. The electric bill doesn’t care if it was a slow month. The rent doesn’t move. So the money gets found because it has to be found.
Getting ahead never gets treated the same way. It sits in the category of “I’ll do it when I have more” or “I’ll figure that out eventually.” It never becomes a line item. It never becomes mandatory. So it never happens.
The mindset shift I’d offer, as one basic starting point in a much bigger conversation, is this: make getting ahead a bill. Put it on the list right next to rent and utilities. Call it whatever makes sense to you – your future, your foundation, your getting-ahead money. The label doesn’t matter. What matters is that it becomes something you have to pay every month, not something you get to if there’s anything left over. You’ve already proven you can find the money when something feels non-negotiable. This is just deciding that your financial future belongs in that same category.
Where that money goes is a separate conversation, and an important one. There are options that keep it accessible, let it grow, and don’t lock it away until you’re 65. That’s worth talking through when you’re ready.
If you want to start that conversation now, book a call and let’s look at what the right structure could look like for you.
Because imagine having that reserve when you need new equipment and don’t want to go into debt for it. Imagine having it when the van breaks down at 11pm in the middle of nowhere on a tour run. Imagine having it when a slow month turns into two and the income just stops showing up on schedule. Imagine having it when a medical bill lands or a family emergency pulls you in a direction you didn’t plan for. Imagine having it when a merch opportunity or a last minute tour slot shows up and you actually have the capital to say yes. Imagine having it for the same life emergencies that hit everyone, musician or not, and never having to choose between your career and your stability because the money is just there.
That’s what building the right system actually does for you.
The narrative that musicians are bad with money has been repeated so many times that some of you have started to believe it about yourselves. That belief is the most expensive part. It keeps you from asking questions, seeking out the right help, or even thinking that a different outcome is possible.
It is possible. The framework just has to actually fit.
If any of this resonates and you want to talk through what that looks like for your specific situation, that conversation starts HERE. No pitch. Just a conversation and a real look at where you are and what’s actually available to you.
Vitaly Gariev
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What does 50 years in the music industry actually teach you about money?
In this episode of Backstage Money, host Jason K. Powers sits down with Steve Lynch, co-founder and lead guitarist of Autograph, pioneer of the two-handed tapping technique, and author of Confessions of a Rock Guitarist. Steve talks about going from an eighth-grade dropout to Guitar World’s Solo of the Year, signing with RCA backstage at Madison Square Garden on the Van Halen tour, watching Aerosmith go broke in 1985, losing five promoters in one year doing 80s nostalgia touring, and why “write more songs” is the single most important piece of financial advice he never received.
This one is packed with real, hard-won lessons from someone who has seen every era of the music industry up close and lived to tell the story honestly.
There’s a version of this conversation that goes sideways fast.
Someone says musicians need to think more like business owners, and half the room nods while the other half rolls their eyes. The eye-rollers aren’t wrong. Telling a touring musician who’s barely covering expenses to “think like a CEO” isn’t advice. It’s noise. It skips over the part where someone actually teaches them what that means in the context of a music career.
That’s the real problem. Not that musicians don’t want to understand the business side. Not that they lack the capacity. But that the education was never built for them in a language that fits how their careers actually work.
Every other industry has infrastructure around this. Accountants who specialize in the sector. Financial frameworks built for how the money moves. Communities where experienced operators pass down what they learned. Music has some of that at the very top of the industry – the major label acts with full management teams and business advisors on staff. Everyone below that level largely figures it out alone, through mistakes, or not at all.
The education gap shows up in predictable places. Tax liability that arrives as a surprise because nobody explained that self-employment income doesn’t come with withholding. Irregular cash flow that creates constant low-grade financial stress because nobody taught a framework for managing income that doesn’t arrive on a schedule. Money that gets spent on the career not because it’s the wrong choice but because it’s the only category anyone ever talked about.
Here’s something worth thinking about. Most people already know how to cover their bills. Rent is due, the phone bill is due, the car payment is due – and somehow, most months, people find the money. Not because they’re financial geniuses. Because the obligation exists and feels non-negotiable.
The education shift is learning to treat your financial future the same way. Every dollar that comes in should have a job before it lands.
Taxes get their cut off the top – a percent set aside the moment a payment arrives, before anything else gets touched. Operating expenses cover what the career needs to keep running. A reserve absorbs the slow months so the valleys don’t force bad decisions. And an accumulation bucket builds something that grows independent of whether the career is having a good year or a quiet one.
Four buckets. Most musicians operate with one – the checking account – and everything competes inside it.
Change the way you think about your money.
The part that trips people up is the accumulation bucket. The word “savings” tends to conjure images of money locked away in a retirement account you can’t touch for decades. That’s not what this has to be. There are ways to build an accumulation bucket that stays liquid – accessible when you need it, growing when you don’t, and not penalizing you for using it. That’s the piece most musicians never hear about because it doesn’t get marketed to people whose income doesn’t fit a standard mold.
The real cost of the education gap isn’t just the money that slips through in the good months. It’s the stability that never gets built and the options that never exist, because nobody ever handed the average person in the music industry a framework simple enough to follow given how their income actually works.
The framework exists. The tools exist. What’s been missing is someone translating them into the reality of a music career. That’s the gap I work in, and it’s a solvable problem.
If you want to talk through what your four buckets could look like given how your income actually moves, that conversation starts HERE.
The education was late. The conversation doesn’t have to be.
“Change the way you think about your finances, and it will change your life!”
Photo by Kaboompics
Listen to this episode and subscribe on your favorite podcast channel HERE.
What does the music industry actually look like through an economist’s eyes?
In this episode of Backstage Money, host Jason K. Powers sits down with Murat Iyigun, Professor of Economics and co-founding guitarist of Red Rock Vixens. Murat spent years at the Federal Reserve under Greenspan, has decades in academia studying how markets really work, and has been building and running a band in Colorado at the same time.
Murat breaks down why musicians are still getting paid the same nominal fee they were in the 1980s, how AI is about to do to music production what Napster did to distribution, why the label system was always a venture capital game, and what Parkinson’s Law has to do with why musicians spend every dollar they make. He talks about winner-take-all economics, the Colorado music scene, managing a 7-piece band where scheduling is harder than booking, and why the sugar daddy is gone and musicians have to be their own bank now. Plus Yngwie Malmsteen going bankrupt, the Doc McGhee and Motley Crue story, and why GoFundMe pages keep popping up for musicians who should have been financially set. One of the most honest and eye-opening conversations we have had on this show.
If you’ve spent any time trying to build a career in music, you’ve been swimming in advice.
How to get your music heard. How to build an audience. How to get on playlists, pitch to blogs, land sync placements, grow your social following, book better shows, negotiate better deals. The content ecosystem around making it in music is enormous. Podcasts, courses, YouTube channels, mastermind groups, industry panels – all of it points at the same target: how to generate income from your music.
That information matters and most of it is genuinely useful. The problem is what happens the moment the advice works.
You start making money. Real money, or at least more than you were. A tour pays out. A sync license drops. Royalties start accumulating. The hustle produces something. And at that exact moment – the moment everything you worked for starts arriving – there is almost no infrastructure, no education, no community, no mentor waiting on the other side to tell you what to do with it.
The industry spent years teaching you how to get the money. Nobody built anything to teach you how to keep it.
This isn’t an accident. The music industry’s content ecosystem is built around aspiration. Get signed. Go viral. Land the placement. Break through. The narrative stops at the breakthrough because that’s where the story gets exciting and that’s where most people’s attention lives.
What comes after the breakthrough is quieter and less glamorous. Tax liability you didn’t plan for. Income that arrived in one quarter and has to cover four. Decisions about what to do with a check larger than anything you’ve seen before. The realization that the financial advice you’ve heard your whole life – save consistently, invest early, build for the future – doesn’t translate cleanly into a life where the income is irregular, the benefits don’t exist, and nobody is automatically putting anything aside on your behalf.
Most musicians hit this moment and improvise. They do what feels right, which usually means spending on the career because that’s what they know how to do. Or they do nothing, which means the money sits until it doesn’t. Or they call someone who isn’t equipped to understand how music income actually works and get generic advice that doesn’t fit.
None of those are failures of character. They’re the predictable result of a gap that the industry created and has never filled.
If this is hitting close to home, that’s worth a conversation. Book a call and let’s look at what the right structure could look like for your situation.
Understanding what to do after the money arrives isn’t complicated in principle. It requires knowing a few things that nobody teaches in the music world: how to structure income so taxes don’t become a crisis, how to build a reserve that absorbs the slow periods without forcing bad decisions, how to invest in something that grows independent of the career, and how to think about the long arc of a music life – not just the next release cycle.
These aren’t exotic concepts. They’re the same things any business owner has to figure out. The difference is that many business owners have access to advisors, communities, and frameworks built for their situation. Musicians largely don’t. The financial infrastructure that exists for creative professionals is thin, and what does exist is usually built for people with more predictable income than most working musicians have.
That’s the gap. It’s not a talent gap or a discipline gap. It’s an infrastructure and education gap, and it costs musicians real money, real stability, and real options every single year.
Knowing it exists is the first step. The second is finding someone who actually understands how music income works and can help you build something on the other side of the breakthrough.
That’s exactly what I do. If you’ve been in the “now what” moment, or you’re approaching it and want to be ready, book a time.
The advice on how to make it is everywhere. The conversation about what to do next is rarer. Let’s have it.
Photo by Maor Attias
There’s a financial pattern almost every working musician knows but rarely names out loud. The tour pays out and suddenly everything feels fine. The gear gets upgraded, the rent gets caught up, the anxiety lifts. Then the next run is three months away and the math starts getting tight again. By week six of the quiet stretch, decisions are getting made that wouldn’t get made otherwise.
That’s not a budgeting problem. That’s what financial stress does to decision-making.
The feast and famine cycle is built into how music income works. It’s not a character flaw and it’s not bad planning in most cases. It’s the natural result of income that arrives in concentrated bursts with unpredictable gaps in between. The peaks feel like momentum. The valleys feel like failure. Neither is accurate. But the valley is where the damage happens – not to the career necessarily, but to the finances underneath it.
If the valley is where you are right now, or if you’ve been through enough of them to know the pattern, that’s exactly the conversation I have with musicians. Book a time and let’s look at what a real buffer system could look like for your specific income pattern.
When money gets tight, musicians take gigs they wouldn’t otherwise take. They say yes to deals with bad terms because the timing makes saying no feel impossible. They dip into whatever savings exist. They make decisions from a position of scarcity that they’d make very differently from a position of stability. And then the next check arrives, the pressure lifts, and the cycle resets. The decisions made in the valley rarely get revisited.
This is the part of the music industry’s financial reality that almost never gets talked about directly. Not the income size. Not the tax complexity. The psychological weight of not knowing when the next check is coming and what that uncertainty does to every financial decision in the meantime.
Financial stress doesn’t just feel bad. It narrows thinking. Research on scarcity consistently shows that people operating under financial pressure make worse decisions – not because they’re less capable, but because the mental load of managing uncertainty consumes capacity that would otherwise go toward long-term thinking. You can’t plan for five years from now when you’re trying to figure out how to cover next month.
Musicians live in this state more than almost any other working professional. And the standard financial advice they receive – save consistently, invest early, build an emergency fund – is delivered without any acknowledgment of the cognitive load that the feast and famine cycle creates. It assumes a baseline of stability that most musicians don’t have.
The fix isn’t discipline. It’s removing the pressure. A liquid reserve that sits between you and the next valley – accessible, growing, and large enough that a three-month quiet stretch doesn’t force bad decisions – changes what’s possible. Not just financially. Psychologically. The decisions you make when you know the next slow period is covered are categorically different from the decisions you make when you’re in it.
That’s what building the right financial structure actually does. It doesn’t just protect the money. It protects the thinking that determines what happens to the money.
If you’re tired of the cycle running your financial life, that’s worth a conversation. Book a time HERE.
Photo by Amirhossein Hasani
There’s a version of success in the music industry that looks exactly like financial failure from the outside looking in.
You reinvested in the gear. You funded the recording yourself to keep ownership. You put money back into the live show, the branding, the team. You said yes to the opportunities that cost money upfront because the career demanded it. And every single one of those decisions was right. That’s not the problem.
The problem is that the music industry is very good at teaching you to invest in the career. Nobody teaches you to invest in yourself alongside it. So the discipline, the sacrifice, the reinvestment instinct that builds careers – it all goes one direction. Into the work. And nothing accumulates underneath the person doing the work.
This isn’t carelessness. It’s the natural result of an industry culture that celebrates the pour-it-all-back-in mentality and never once asks the harder question: when the work slows down, what did you build for yourself?
A career is not a financial asset. It’s a vehicle. For most musicians it runs on active output – shows, sessions, releases, presence. The moment that output slows, so does the income. The exception is when the work generates residual income that outlasts the activity behind it – streaming catalogs, publishing royalties, licensing deals that keep paying long after the work is done. Those are worth building deliberately. But they’re the exception, not the default. Most musicians never get there because nobody framed it as a goal worth building toward.
It’s not a financial strategy. It’s a mindset shift.
The timing matters less than the decision. A musician who commits to setting aside a fixed amount or percentage every month – and treats it like any other bill they have to cover – will find a way to make it happen at 25 the same way they would at 45. That’s not a financial strategy. It’s a mindset shift. The people who build real stability in this industry aren’t the ones who waited for the right income level or the right moment. They’re the ones who decided the bill existed and paid it.
The music industry is full of people who gave everything to the work and have nothing to show for it financially. Not because they failed. Because they were never taught that the work and the wealth-building are two separate systems – and that both need to be fed. You can change that today regardless of where you are in your career.
If you want to talk about what building that second system looks like for your specific situation, I’m easy to reach. Book a time.
Photo by Inga Seliverstova
Look, nobody likes to say it out loud. But it’s true.
Every music career – even the most successful ones – has a window. Not because talent disappears. Not because the work stops mattering. But because the industry changes, bodies age, markets shift, and the version of the career that generates the most income is almost always time-limited in ways that are hard to see clearly from the inside. The musicians who end up financially stable aren’t the ones who earned the most during their peak years. They’re the ones who built something underneath the career while it was still producing – something that kept working when the career inevitably quieted.
The end of a music career’s peak earning phase almost never looks like a clean retirement. More often it shows up as a shift nobody saw coming on their own timeline. A band breaks up. A label changes direction or drops the artist. The creative well runs dry for a stretch and nothing new is landing. An injury or health issue changes what’s physically possible. The industry itself shifts underneath you, royalty structures change, a genre cycle moves on, and opportunities that existed five years ago quietly disappear. Or it’s simply burnout, the pace finally catching up after years of grinding. The specific trigger is different for every musician, but the pattern is the same. Something shifts, income drops, and there’s rarely a cushion underneath when it happens. None of this is a failure. It’s predictable in general terms even if the specific trigger isn’t. And almost none of the musicians I talk to have planned for it in any form.
When I say ‘build something underneath,’ I’m not talking about a second career or a backup plan. I’m talking about financial assets that generate or preserve value independent of your continued activity as a performer or music professional. Real estate that produces rental income. A cash value life insurance policy that’s been growing for fifteen years and can be accessed without tax consequence. A retirement account consistently funded through the earning years. A royalty catalog positioned correctly for long-term passive income. The specific vehicles matter less than the principle: something has to be accumulating value during the years when the career is generating income, so that when the career inevitably changes, you’re not starting from zero.
The musicians I know who navigated the transition out of peak earning years without financial crisis almost universally did one thing during the good years: they treated a percentage of every significant inflow as non-negotiable. It went somewhere. It grew. It waited. They weren’t richer than their peers at 30. They were significantly more stable at 50.
This is the part worth sitting with: the time when building is easiest – when you have income, capacity, and time on your side – is exactly when it’s hardest to prioritize. Because the career is alive and demanding and there’s always something that feels more urgent. But the math is unforgiving. The musician who starts building at 28 with modest consistency will almost always outpace the one who tries to catch up at 45. Not because the 45-year-old is less capable – but because compound growth is deeply dependent on time, and time spent in the active years not building is time you cannot recover. The window is open right now for most of the people reading this. It won’t stay that wide forever.
I’m not going to tell you what the right plan looks like without knowing your situation. What I will say is that this conversation – about what you’re building underneath the career, not just inside it – is the one most music professionals never have with an advisor who actually understands their world. That’s the gap I work in. If you’ve been putting this off, consider this the nudge. Book a time. The career you’re building deserves a foundation that outlasts it.
Photo by Craig Adderley
Listen to this episode and subscribe on your favorite podcast channel HERE.
What does it really take to build a band from scratch, keep it alive through financial hardship, and land a record deal on your own terms?
In this episode of Backstage Money, host Jason K. Powers sits down with Jennifer Benson, founder and lead singer of Ignescent, a female-fronted hard rock band out of Chicago signed to Frontiers Music. Jennifer shares the raw story of building the band herself with no manager, no budget, and no roadmap, getting rejected by Frontiers the first time, nearly shutting the whole thing down, and then getting the email that changed everything. She also talks co-writing with Clint Lowery of Sevendust and Sameer of Flyleaf, the real economics of merch and touring, and what she would tell any young musician just starting out.
If you have a dream and you are not sure how to make it real, this episode is for you.
Topics include:
It’s not the size of the checks. It’s when they arrive.
I’ve talked to musicians who grossed six figures last year and still found themselves scrambling to cover expenses in February. Not because they overspent. Not because they mismanaged anything obvious. But because the income arrived in concentrated bursts – a touring run in the fall, a licensing sync in the spring, a royalty payout once a quarter – and the bills didn’t care about any of that. Bills are monthly. Music income isn’t.
That gap – between when money comes in and when obligations come due – is one of the most overlooked financial problems in the creative economy. And for most musicians, it never gets solved because nobody’s framing it as a structural problem. It just looks like cash is perpetually tight, which gets chalked up to the music industry being unpredictable. The industry is unpredictable. But this particular problem is actually solvable.
Think about how income actually flows for a working musician. A touring run generates significant income over a short window, but that income has to carry the months before the next run while expenses keep accumulating. Royalties arrive on a publishing or distribution schedule that has nothing to do with when you spent money on the recording. Sync licenses can be transformative windfalls that are completely impossible to predict. The result is a cash flow pattern that looks like peaks and valleys – sometimes extreme ones. The peaks feel like abundance. The valleys feel like failure. Neither is accurate. It’s just the rhythm of how money moves in this industry. The problem is that most musicians manage it reactively – spending when the money is there, scrambling when it isn’t. There’s no reservoir. Nothing that absorbs the surplus in good periods and releases it steadily through the quiet ones.
This isn’t a problem unique to music. Any business with cyclical or unpredictable revenue faces the same structural challenge, and the solution in the business world isn’t willpower or better budgeting. It’s liquidity management – keeping a deliberate reserve of accessible capital that the business draws on when inflows are slow and replenishes when they’re strong. Most businesses maintain operating reserves specifically for this reason. It’s not savings in the traditional sense. It’s a buffer that smooths the cash flow cycle and protects operations from getting disrupted by timing.
Musicians need the same thing. Not a savings account that locks up your money or a retirement vehicle you can’t touch. A liquid reserve, positioned correctly, that you can pull from in February and replenish when the tour run pays out in October. When you have that, the valleys stop being crises. They become planned-for gaps.
Here’s the part most people miss: when you build a cash reserve correctly – not just in a standard savings account – the money doesn’t sit idle while you’re not using it. It can grow. The right vehicle for a musician’s liquidity reserve is something that accumulates value quietly in the background, stays accessible when you need it, and doesn’t penalize you for using it. That’s not a standard financial product, but it exists. And it changes the math significantly – you’re not just protecting yourself from cash flow gaps, you’re building something that grows the entire time, even when you’re drawing on it.
If your next two months of income disappeared – not because of anything you did wrong, just because the timing didn’t work out – what happens? If the answer is anything other than ‘I have a reserve for exactly this,’ that’s the gap worth addressing. Book a time. The peaks and valleys don’t have to run your financial life. They just need a system designed for them.
Photo by Jonnathan Gonzalez
Listen to this episode and subscribe on your favorite podcast channel HERE.
What happens after the show is over?
For most musicians, the reality of a music career isn’t private jets, sold-out arenas, or million-dollar record deals. It’s long drives, inconsistent income, side gigs, creative fulfillment, and the constant challenge of making a living while pursuing a craft they love.
In this episode of Backstage Money, host Jason K. Powers sits down with Franz Nicolay — musician, writer, educator, current member of The Hold Steady, and author of the acclaimed book Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music.
Named one of Rolling Stone’s best music books of 2024, Band People explores the lives of the working musicians who make up the backbone of the music industry. Franz shares lessons from decades on the road, stories gathered from musicians across the industry, and his work advocating for artists through organizations such as the Future of Music Coalition, including bringing the concerns of working musicians to Congress.
This conversation dives into the realities of building a sustainable music career and why musicians need to think beyond the stage if they want longevity.
Topics Include:
If you’re trying to build a career in music, this episode offers a rare look at the people who make the industry work, even when nobody sees their names on the marquee.
If you’ve spent any time as a working musician or creative professional, there’s a decent chance you’ve said it – maybe as a joke, maybe completely seriously: “I’m just bad with money.”
It’s one of the most common things I hear from musicians when we first talk. And almost every time, it’s wrong. Not because they’ve been making great financial decisions – but because the standard financial framework they were handed was never designed for them. And they’ve been blaming themselves for not fitting inside a system that was never meant to include them.
Most personal finance advice assumes a very specific person: paid twice a month, roughly the same amount each time, with an employer who withholds taxes and possibly matches retirement contributions. The entire infrastructure – budgeting apps, retirement calculators, advisor training programs – is built around that model. Now describe the financial life of a working musician. Income arrives irregularly, sometimes in large unexpected bursts, sometimes in months-long dry spells. Multiple income streams exist simultaneously and none are predictable on their own. Tax liability is complicated and entirely self-managed. There’s no employer, no matching, no benefits package. These are not the same problem. But every musician who tries to use the standard tools and fails tends to conclude the same thing: there must be something wrong with me. There isn’t. The map is just wrong for the terrain.
The most common financial advice for musicians – budget carefully, save consistently, don’t overspend in the good months – is correct in spirit and completely impractical without the right structure underneath it. You can’t save consistently when you don’t earn consistently. You can’t budget around a fixed monthly number when that number changes by thousands of dollars month to month. Standard advice doesn’t account for the reality that your biggest paycheck of the year might arrive in October and need to cover six quiet months in every direction.
What actually works for musicians isn’t discipline. It’s architecture. A system designed to absorb large irregular inflows, hold them accessibly, and release them strategically over time. A structure that handles taxes before you can spend the money. A savings mechanism that doesn’t require a steady monthly contribution to be effective. These things exist. They just aren’t what gets packaged and marketed to people in your income bracket, because the financial industry assumes you have a W-2.
Here’s the part that matters most practically: when musicians decide they’re bad with money, they stop asking for help. The shame of the belief becomes a reason to avoid the conversation. So they don’t set up the right structures. They file taxes incorrectly for years. They leave money on the table because they don’t know what tools are actually available to self-employed people. The gap between where they are and where they could be quietly grows. The musicians I work with who’ve broken this pattern didn’t do it because they suddenly became more disciplined. They did it because someone built something that actually fit how their money moves. That’s the only thing that was ever missing.
The next time the thought crosses your mind that you’re bad with money, replace it with a more accurate question: have I ever had a financial system built for the way my income actually works? For most musicians, the honest answer is no. And that’s a much more solvable problem. If you want to talk through what that looks like for your specific situation, book a time. The map can be fixed. The terrain isn’t the problem.
Photo by Keith Wako
There’s a version of the music career that looks like success from the outside – consistent gigs, a catalog growing, a name people recognize – where the person living it has almost nothing saved. Not because they were reckless. Not because they spent it on the wrong things (usually). But because every dollar that came in went right back into the machine that generated it.
This is the reinvestment trap. And it catches some of the most disciplined, hardworking people in the industry.
Think about what musicians are told to do – and what the industry actually rewards. Upgrade the gear when you can. Fund the recording yourself so you keep ownership. Invest in your live show, your brand, your team. Say yes to the opportunities that cost money upfront because they could pay off later. These aren’t bad decisions. Most of them are genuinely correct. The problem is that when every available dollar flows back into the business, the business becomes the only asset you have. And a career – unlike a stock or a building – doesn’t appreciate while you sleep. It requires your continued presence, your health, your ability to show up and perform. The day you can’t do that anymore, the asset stops producing.
Most musicians never draw a hard line between business capital and personal wealth. Money comes in, money goes out – toward whatever the career needs next. There’s no separate bucket labeled ‘this is building something that survives the career.’ In the business world, this separation is understood as a basic operating principle. You don’t fund your retirement account out of the same pool you use for payroll. Musicians need the same discipline, but almost nobody teaches it in the context of how music money actually moves.
The tour income, the royalty check, the sync license payout – those are operating events. They should have a path: some percentage goes to operations, some to taxes, and some goes somewhere that compounds quietly in the background regardless of what the career is doing. The moment you build that third category and protect it from the pull of reinvestment, you’ve broken the trap.
The reinvestment pull doesn’t feel like a mistake when you’re in it. It feels like momentum. And there’s always a legitimate reason to put the money back in. The next record. The next tour. The next hire. None of those reasons are wrong. But if they consume 100% of every dollar indefinitely, you’ve built a career and nothing else. The musicians who escape this aren’t the ones who stop investing in their careers. They’re the ones who decide – usually at one specific, conscious moment – that a percentage of every significant inflow is going somewhere untouchable. Not for the next opportunity. Not for the next record. To sit and grow.
Look at the last 12 months of income from your music career. Then ask: what percentage of that went somewhere building value independent of your continued activity? If the honest answer is close to zero, you’re in the trap. Not because you failed – but because nobody sat down with you and helped you build the second system alongside the first. That’s a fixable problem. I work specifically with musicians and music professionals on exactly this. If it landed close to home, book a time.
(c) Jonathan Borba
~ Let no man seek the good of his own, but that of his neighbor. 1 Corinthians 10:24 ~
