Before we start you can get the latest post in your mailbox just by putting your email in the box up in the right corner.

Showcase festival is the new demo listening. Today the live element is so important that it’s on these showcases you find your new artists. Sending demos has almost disappeared. It was years since I found an artist that way. The past ten years it has been through live performances or tip-offs that I have found stuff.

This makes the showcase festivals more and more important and also more and more of them are held.

To build your team you have to start performing on showcases.

PERSONAL: Yesterday’s theme was around special days and missing out on things. Even though I live in the way I like I have to sacrifice things. Yesterday I sacrificed a birthday party. That is not that hard really. Still, I know people thinking it was awful that I had to do that.
To do what you really want to do, most of the time you must sacrifice much more.
I get artists crying that they can’t be on their partners birthday. The career has taken them on a journey somewhere else and now they are missing out.
If you really want to do it, tough decisions have to be made. I pushed my mother’s funeral for a showcase festival I needed to be on. Thankfully my dad got it and changed the date so I could be at the funeral in the end. Still, yes I would skip it, the festival was too important for a lot of other things. Here it was solved, not easy but solved. After that, we usually tell the artists that the only excuse for missing out is your own wedding, children’s birth or your own funeral.
It is how many bridges I’m willing to burn to be where I’m now. Yes, it would have been easy to just do the easy choice and skipped the festival. At the same time, I wouldn’t have done the things I’m so much wanted to do that the festival got me. It was doing something easy to save a conflict or get the later rewards and take the bumpy road.