I went to Music Biz this year with a specific goal for Eleven: I wanted to hear directly from the industry, from the people actually building and operating inside it, what the real trajectory of this business looks like right now.
Not from a local vantage point.
Not from whatever opinion happened to be trending on the internet that week.
If I’m going to coach and educate artists through Eleven, I want that guidance grounded in something more solid than a hot take.
No single moment, just a pattern worth trusting
I didn’t walk away with one big “aha” conversation. What I got instead was something arguably more useful: the same handful of themes surfacing again and again, across dozens of conversations with people in very different roles, publishers, producers, composers, founding band members, entrepreneurs, coaches, managers, and more.
A few of those themes are ones I’m bringing straight back into how I coach artists:
AI’s place in music is still genuinely unsettled. Nobody I talked to had a fully confident, settled opinion on where this goes, and honestly, that was reassuring. It’s not just artists and independent educators who are still figuring this out. The people building the infrastructure are working through it too.
Staying independent is still, more often than not, the smarter move than chasing a label deal. That’s not a new idea for me. It’s core to how I already coach artists at Eleven. But hearing it echoed across so many different corners of the industry, not just from independent artists themselves, but from people who work inside the traditional label and publishing system, gave it real weight. This isn’t just an independent-artist talking point. It’s a broader industry read.
Music is still fundamentally a networking industry. Who you know can outweigh talent, looks, and money. I’ve believed this for a long time from the artist side, having spent 30-plus years as a musician myself. Seeing it confirmed from the business and admin side too, by people who sit on the other end of those relationships, was clarifying. It’s a hard truth, but it’s one I want to teach artists directly rather than let them discover the hard way.
Why this matters for how I coach and educate
The value of this trip for Eleven wasn’t a single insight I can put in a headline.
It was accumulation: the same signal arriving from enough different directions that I couldn’t dismiss it as anecdote anymore.
When a theme shows up in a conversation with a producer, then again with a founding band member, then again with someone in artist management, that’s no longer just one person’s opinion. That’s a real read on where this industry is headed.
That’s the kind of grounding I wanted before bringing anything back into Eleven’s coaching and content.
Artists trust what I teach them, and I take that seriously.
Music Biz gave me a more accurate, more current picture of the industry to teach from, built on conversations with the people actually living and working inside it, not on secondhand opinion.
Eleven Music Career Center is built by a musician, for musicians. Everything here is designed to give independent artists the business education the music industry never offered.
Many aspiring musicians still dream about the traditional route of getting the attention of a record label and getting signed.
Sadly, this dream is rooted in the fantasy the industry has created to hide the nightmare of being a signed artist.
- The debt that is incurred.
- The music ownership that is given up.
- The control that is lost over your own career.
This guide dives even deeper into 12 things that every aspiring artist and parent should know and protect themselves against before choosing the traditional route.
