It's hard to read exactly what a poster means when he posts a question like this. To me he means making it to a higher level than simply playing local gigs or being a music teacher which can both be described as having a career in music.

Some years ago I decided to check out some big websites that allowed people to create their own music promotion websites, host their songs and stuff like that. I wound up spending a whole Saturday doing that. Frankly it was simply amazing how good the production quality, songwriting quality and the performance quality was. I must have listened to a hundred songs in all genres and most were excellent.

A lot of them were produced by university music students using the schools full blown, fully professional recording studio. I had not even thought of that angle before this. Here we are on this forum talking about home studios, spending maybe a thousand dollars more or less on this stuff while there are literally thousands of music schools and universities all over the world with their own recording studios not with merely a few computers and software like we would have, oh no, they have hundreds of thousands of dollars of state of the art recording equipment including a TV studio with HD camera's and all that kind of thing.

At that time a few years ago I read it's something like 100,000 music and production school graduates with 4 year degrees come out looking for work every year. Just around me in the SoCal area there is the UCLA School of Music, the Grove School, USC, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, Pepperdine, Loyola, more than I can think of right now and probably 100 community colleges and every one of them have music school and music production departments all with access to pro level recording studios. And this is just in one area of the world. Multiply that by New York, Chicago, Toronto, Mexico City, all the other big cities, then start to go world wide. All the European schools, all the Asian schools and it's just an enormous amount of people. EVERY YEAR. And every one of these graduates has the same goal, to "make it" in the music biz.

One final point to wrap this up. All these schools don't simply accept anybody. No, you have to audition for them. You have to show you already have some pretty awesome performance skills, songwriting skills, sight reading skills, vocal skills. IOW, you're damn good already to even get in much less actually graduate. Here's one vid I just found talking about the audition process at Berkleee in Boston. Songwriting comes up on this forum all the time. Here she mentions how the songwriting department at Berklee has been expanding by a lot. Here's the vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGoKbQIxfew

This girl is more of a songwriter/singer, here's a guy doing his guitar audition:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMPlKvqdYkY

Watch the whole thing, the kids pretty good.

Multiply that by all the worldwide schools and then apply that to where you're at now and be honest with yourself.

The sheer numbers, talent level and ability of these grads are so heavily against you it's beyond ridiculous.

Bob



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