Wouldn’t it be nice if the mantra in that well-known Kevin Costner movie—“build it and they will come”—applied to your classical singing career? If only you could just focus on building your vocal technique, repertoire, and artistry, and be sure that the jobs and audiences would come.
The reality is that most singers need to take control of their careers by arming themselves with knowledge about the business side of the music industry, too. Creating performance opportunities, managing money, and promotion are also your responsibility if you want to get gigs. The Professional Series at the 2007 Classical Singer Convention in San Francisco will feature three marketing gurus—Angela Myles Beeching, Mark Stoddard and Jo Isom—to help you get your feet wet.
Angela Myles Beeching is the director of career services at the New England Conservatory of Music. At NEC, she advises both students and alumni, and oversees a career workshop series. She provides specialized career information for students on topics that span grant writing, performance anxiety, website design, bios, and how to teach a masterclass.
Beeching herself is an accomplished cellist who studied at Tanglewood, Banff, and the Bach Aria Institute. While in graduate school at SUNY Stony Brook, Beeching realized that the university career center didn’t offer the specialized resources musicians needed. Beeching drafted a proposal and the university offered her an assistantship to start and run a career center geared toward musicians. After earning her doctoral degree and teaching in California and in New York for a time, Beeching ended up in Boston working full-time at music career counseling. She is invited frequently to speak at conservatories and music association meetings, and is an avid writer.
At the A.M. Business Series, Beeching will discuss the ABCs of headshots and résumés. “Photos are so important because we live in a visual culture. . . . If your photo doesn’t communicate a distinct musical personality and if you don’t come across as someone who’d be interesting to talk with, then it’s not doing what it should,” she says.
Beeching will describe how musicians can write a compelling résumé that presents what they’ve done so far.
“I think of it as a match-making game instead of a zero-sum game,” she says. “We’re looking for opportunities (or creating them) that will make the best use of our talents. The good news is that there are lots of ways for musicians to create niches for themselves and to contribute their music and ingenuity to the world.”
Mark Stoddard is a marketing and advertising consultant who has owned several businesses and created diverse marketing campaigns for everything from real estate, to politics, to the arts. He’s also written several books including The Marketing Power of 117. Stoddard began advising singers in 1990 when he owned a cruise ship company. He would hire Russian singers and instrumentalists to perform nightly classical concerts for the passengers aboard. Soon he realized that these talented singers didn’t have a clue about how to promote themselves effectively. Stoddard set out to instruct the artists on how to develop a program and find more work.
Just what does marketing entail? Stoddard puts it plainly. “Marketing is getting what you want by developing a program to achieve it.”
Stoddard will host a two-hour session at the convention in which he teaches singers how to create a step-by-step program to find and build an audience as well as how to use immediate response advertising. He says that singers can generate a “perpetual job machine” by first keeping a list of every person they meet. And of course, singers must perform at every opportunity, getting constant exposure and experience.
Are you curious about how to get your own website up and running? Jo Isom is the co-creator of the personal websites available at www.classicalsinger.com and will address questions at the convention about content, Web design, and Web hosting. Session participants need only bring their website address and Isom will offer suggestions and answers to any questions they may have.
Isom says that the beauty of having a singer website is that it makes you available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And usability—how easy it is to access information or maneuver—is a prime factor in the effectiveness of your site. Singer websites should be straightforward and simple so that a busy conductor or manager can navigate through it easily and find the information they’re looking for quickly.
Isom encourages singers to define their goals before designing a website. If your goal is to get work singing soubrette roles, be sure to illustrate that on the site, visually and aurally. A successful site includes a headshot, a great bio, a résumé, and both audio and video clips.
The A.M. Marketing Series at the ‘07 Classical Singer Convention ProSeries promises to be both informative and inspirational, giving you the tools to get to the next level. Don’t miss it!
