Entrepreneurship resources and training for 21st-century music professionals.
Awesome musicians from the University of Oregon MIC
Photo by Athena Delene
A lot of professional musicians don’t know what to do when it comes to turning their talent into income. So I developed the Creative Arts Entrepreneur’s Path, a system that teaches you the strategies, concepts, and techniques you need to finally have a career that is both artistically fulfilling and financially sustainable.
The Path
Know Your Artistic Values
Take your music career from scattered to coherent by discovering the core artistic values that will lead to an artistically fulfilling career.
Create Massive Value for Others
Learn how to communicate your value in a way that will be heard.
Grow Your Career
Learn the entrepreneurship skills and music industry knowledge to finally build your dream career as an artist.
Resources for You
Free Resources
Posts, articles, videos, and other resources are on my blog, and exclusive resources are sent to members of my email list.
Online Courses
A few times a year, I offer affordable online courses for music entrepreneurs, such as the Creative Arts Entrepreneurship Bootcamp. Registration is currently closed. Sign up for my email list to be notified when registration opens again.
In-Person
I regularly offer arts entrepreneurship workshops at universities. In rare circumstances, I do one-on-one consultations with a performer or group. To inquire about workshops or consultation, send me an email.
The first step: Take the one-hour brand challenge.
What would happen if you took one hour to organize your personal brand? I'm talking about setting up some simple systems that will make all of the various work you do more consistent and coherent. The process may sound daunting, but in my free pdf workbook, 6 Ways to Jumpstart Your Brand in Under an Hour: For Musicians, I break the process down into a simple, step-by-step process that you can complete in the next hour.
Full Biography
Scholar
Mark C. Samples teaches courses in music history and musicology at Central Washington University. He received his PhD in musicology, with a secondary area in ethnomusicology, from the University of Oregon. Interested in how musicians think about and utilize branding in practice, his research results in academic and general interest articles, talks, and workshops on the topic. For updates on his work, check out his blog or follow on Twitter. See his faculty bio on CWU’s website here.
Teacher
Mark teaches music history and ethnomusicology at Central Washington University, and has taught on a broad range of topics—from medieval notation to musical minimalism, the Romantics to Ravi Shankar, film music to countercultural music in the 1960s. Check out the resources page for educational resources he’s created, including the collection of free-to-use composer slides he designed.
Speaker
Mark has given his workshop, “Branding for Musicians: Know Yourself, Tell Your Story,” for student and professional musicians at Southern Methodist University Meadows School for the Arts, the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance, the Music Teachers National Association annual meeting, among other venues. To bring him to your institution, please contact him through the connect page.
What's next? Read one of my featured posts to learn more.
In a brand new academic article published by Musical Quarterly, I tell the story of how P. T. Barnum used strategies of branding to create the most successful music tour of the 19th century. The singer he brought to America was Jenny Lind. Lind was already a star in Europe, but was relatively unknown in America before signing a contract with Barnum.
Barnum did something unprecedented: