The Business Behind Being A
Professional Arranger
If you’ve landed on this page it’s likely because you’re either already a writer and you are looking for a bit of advice to help with your current situation, or you are thinking about becoming a professional arranger and want some help getting started. Let me tell you, it’s a hard journey. Many people, such as myself, are captured by the amazing qualities of the arts only to discover the reality of turning it into a career is considerably more challenging than expected.
For the last ten or so years I’ve been trying to pave my way through the music industry, discovering what works and what doesn’t, all while somehow keeping my head above water and making just enough money to be considered middle class. I’m still very much in the thick of it all but I have learnt a few things from relentlessly throwing myself at the world of music which you may find helpful. As a writer, I’ve experienced tremendous highs, getting to work with world famous artists and being in the position to facilitate large scale performances and recordings, however I’ve also been to the depths, faced with tens of thousands of dollars of debt, ruined friendships, and times where it felt like it was hopeless to continue pursuing music.
On this page I’ve tried to include everything I’ve learnt from these experiences in the hopes that you'll be inspired to forge your own path. While I can’t promise you’ll find any form of financial success, perhaps my stories and advice might help you find a sense of peace in a career where the only guarantee is that you’ll face a lot of uncertainty. Remember, although it may feel like you are isolated when challenges arise, you exist within an international community of people who can empathize with your situation and many of whom are happy to help you. That’s exactly why I’ve created this resource and so far in my journey I’ve met dozens of people who have shown me the same kindness and generosity that I’m trying to convey through the words I write.
There are many facets when it comes to a professional arranging lifestyle, some of which I haven’t experienced, so for the most part, this resource will be restricted to the areas that I actually have lived. There’s no point me regurgitating information that I don’t know to be true, so everything on this page you can guarantee has come from my lived experiences and not a generic music business textbook. I’ve tried to lay out all of the information in somewhat of a logical path, but due to the nature of the topics at hand, there will be some overlap between sections. I apologize in advance for what is a gargantuan amount of text with limited graphics in comparison to my other resources, but when it comes to music business most of the concepts can only really be conveyed through text or speech. Anyway that’s enough rambling about the organization of this page, let’s get into the actual information!
Making Art Doesn’t Always Equal Money
My musical journey started when I was in primary school. One day my parents had made the decision I should play the cornet because it would help me be social in the church community I grew up in. As a 6 or 7 year old, I didn’t know any better and picked it up. I fell in love instantly and although my parents originally had thought they would need to remind me to practice, the opposite happened. I played the cornet as much as possible and they often had to pull me away from the horn in order to do other things. Without realizing it, this was where my love for music began. It was the first time I could relate to music on my terms and it set in motion a series of events which has brought me to where I am today.
The reason I share my music origin story is because at no time during my life, really up until I was maybe in my late teens, did I connect music with money. My love for the arts came out of the beauty and feelings I experienced while interacting with music and not the financial value others perceived. However, when you pursue a career in music, there comes a point in time where you need to start generating some sort of income from your craft if you wish to commit to the arts full time. Unfortunately, for almost everyone, this is one of the hardest challenges we face as musicians. Especially if the music we want to create is not considered popular or valuable by the society we live in.
For me, I have always lived in a capitalistic society where you have the freedom to put out whatever sort of music you want into the world but then the world can choose whether it's worthwhile to them or not. That can work really well when the music you create follows recent trends or taps into established genres where there is an existing audience, but it also means that it can be really difficult for more unique music to find a footing and in most cases it never does. Although that is depressing if you ponder linger on the idea for it too long, it helps us understand a core concept when it comes to a career in music:
There are two values linked with creating art:
1. There is a personal or emotional value you can place on your art that brings you satisfaction purely from the action of creating, and
2. That there is a financial value associated with art that is established by the perception of the audience.
As you go into the world of professional arranging, being able to split these two types of value will help you navigate the space a little more easily, as you can allow yourself the room to feel proud of a work you created while it may not receive the same sort of recognition from the wider world. In the same way, the opposite is true too. You may hate something you’ve written for it to blow up and be a commercial success.
Refining this point a little further, it can be summarized by the notion that just because you find your art valuable, doesn’t mean others will. And you know what, that is okay. However, if you want to make a living writing music, you need to work out what you can create that others will find valuable. Not only that, but you need to find music that you want to create that others find valuable and that the audience has the financial ability to sustain your career. Otherwise you’ll find yourself in a bunch of negative situations, all of which will make you want to give up. To make it a little easier to understand, let me use a few examples from my own life.
So when I started playing music, I didn’t care about money, I just cared about playing and creating whatever I thought sounded best. As I was young, I was under my parents responsibility and I didn’t have to think about any sort of financial matters. That all changed once I left college at the age of 22. Quickly I was plunged into a world where I had to pay rent, utilities, insurance, and all of the other usual costs of life. Not only that, but the only skills I had were music related, and if you know anything about the current world we live in where streaming platforms exist and music can be accessed pretty much everywhere for free, that skillset is currently not valued as highly as maybe it once was a century ago.
After a brief stint as a cruise ship musician I found myself back in Melbourne, Australia, $8000 in debt, no income and with a few clothes and my bass guitar. I hustled like crazy and played every gig you could imagine from weddings to amateur musical theatre, hoping that one day I would have enough money to escape my situation. While doing these gigs I learnt the reality that I hated playing cover band gigs and really only enjoyed performing certain types of music. Although I was now making a small income from music, I was doing so in a way which was actually having a negative impact on my life. This is the perfect example of creating art which you don’t personally value but others do, and as you can see, it soured my life.
Using maybe a more relevant example from my arranging career, I have written a lot over the years for guest artists on cruise ships. While some of these jobs can be quite fulfilling, there are a number which fall into the same sort of experience as the wedding gigs I played all those years ago. Often I will be contacted by an avid young vocalist who has just started singing on ships and is in need of their dream setlist of charts. While it is amazing to be contacted and know that some people still value arranging, the problem is that the music I like to write is primarily jazz and big band related, and most of the time the clients want the latest Taylor Swift song. Not that there is anything against Taylor Swift’s music, it just isn’t what I find satisfying to write. After a number of years writing these types of commissions, it also had a negative effect on me where I didn’t find writing music as joyful and almost wanted to change careers entirely.
While both of these examples are great at demonstrating the problem with taking on work you don’t enjoy, they don’t explore the other possibilities such as when you write a chart that you love but no one cares, or when someone does care but they don’t have enough funds to pay you. Fortunately, I do have examples of both experiences too.
As my main writing passion has generally revolved around big band arranging, a skill that is not as relevant as what it once was back in the 1930s-50s, often I find myself writing charts that I personally love but have no way of bringing me a sustainable income. In most cases, if you want to make a living from big band writing alone, you’d have to be associated with one of the few major bands that has a budget for a full time arranger, and if you know anything about the big band world, you know that there may only be a handful of those jobs left in the world. As that type of music isn’t valued like it once was, if I were to rely purely on that form of writing I wouldn’t be able to afford to live pretty quickly, forcing me to find a new career pathway.
On top of that, running a big band is an expensive endeavour and the vast majority of big bands in the world are community led initiatives that play low paying or free shows. As a result, those bands don’t have the capital to pay for custom arrangements even if they value the music in a similar way to me, meaning that like most modern big band arrangers, I still end up without a sustainable income.
In all of these examples, you can clearly see how unless you have all three components in order, you generally are left with a net negative which will impact your life. With that said, in reality sometimes you’ll have to make compromises and write charts for the money even if you hate doing it, and sometimes you will write charts for fun, knowing that it won’t help you keep the lights on even if it satisfies your soul. Most professional arrangers actually make the majority of their income from other means and only take on the commissions they want. However, this comes at the cost of not being able to spend all day writing. Everyone goes through life a little differently, and we each have certain lifestyle expectations. I personally live on the cheaper side and try to enjoy the little things in life which allows me to spend more time writing and less time working jobs I dislike. However, a number of my colleagues maintain various teaching jobs around the world and will only write on occasion, whether that be for themselves or for others. You’ll have to decide where in the spectrum you relate to the most, but what I can tell you is that if you are comfortable with a more frugal lifestyle, it will help you out in every situation. Whereas if you have expensive taste, you may have to find a more stable income elsewhere if you can’t earn enough from writing alone.
Lifetime Learner
Now that is a pretty gloomy way to start a resource on being a professional arranger, but it is an honest and real outlook on the profession. Too many times people don’t understand what’s happening behind the scenes and get hypnotized by the glamour of working with a major artist only to realize that the lifestyle is quite difficult. In fact, pursuing a career in the arts may just be one of the hardest pathways available today. Only a very small number of people make it into a place where they can support themselves through their art, yet there are tens of thousands (if not more) of people that try and can’t make it happen every year. There is also a large amount of luck involved, but you can increase your odds dramatically too with the biggest factor being your mindset.
As you get older, it becomes much harder to learn new skills and adapt, yet for the most part, at any time in life we have the ability to control our outlook and will ourselves into a new position. This is fantastic news because it means no matter what your background, you too can become a professional arranger if you really want it to happen. What you need to do first is be able to envision your end goal and then break it up into a number of challenges. So perhaps in this case that might be, making a sustainable income from writing. In which case you would list some of the challenges such as finding clients and being able to write music. From there, if you don’t already know how to complete those challenges, you think of how you might be able to complete them and create another list. In fact you keep going until you find a challenge that is completable for your current situation.
Generally what tends to happen is that you end up at a place where the goal is to obtain knowledge. For example, you may want to learn how to write like the arranger Sammy Nestico. You have all of the prerequisite skills, understand the terminology, but have no clue how Nestico arranged for big band so the only step is to research that skillset through lessons, reading, transcriptions, or surveying the internet. In which case you are now in a position where the one step stopping you from achieving your goal is to actually put yourself in a place to learn.
For most people, the biggest hurdle you’ll face is not actually finding financially viable work in arranging, it is being happy to learn new skills. Now you might be thinking, Toshi I love learning more about music, I can’t get enough of transcription or reading theory books and I still have regular lessons. Well I’m not necessarily talking about learning those types of skills, the ones which you find enjoyable. I’m talking about the types of skills that are necessary for you to achieve your goals, many of which are uncomfortable, mind numbing, and feel so difficult that most people choose not to put themselves through the process entirely.
The reality of making money from music is that you are a business owner. You are selling a product, specifically your services as a writer or your existing arrangements, and you operate in a similar manner to all other small businesses around the world. As there are very limited employers looking to pay for you to arrange full time, you will most likely find yourself as a self-employed freelancer competing against everyone else. To achieve many of the goals you may have as a writer, well at least when it comes to making money from the arts, you are going to have to learn business skills, and not just learn them but be proficient to the point where you can analyze your decisions and correct them where necessary. And based on the dozens of musicians I know, there is a very high chance that you don’t like the idea of understanding the inner workings of business, otherwise you probably would be pursuing a career in finance or one of the other highly profitable pathways usually associated with that skillset.
On top of that, and it kind of goes without saying, you also need to be highly proficient in writing music. Both go hand in hand. You don’t need to be John Williams, but you do need to master the basics. Depending on your chosen niche of writing, make sure you know a lot about the craft and how everything works. Not only that, but also understand the topics so well that you can convey them to someone with no experience in music. You can’t have a successful arranging career if you don’t know how to write music and if you don’t know how to sell those skills to potential clients.
The takeaway here is that you need to try and be comfortable with putting yourself in difficult positions like learning new skills. It will benefit you drastically in life, even if you don’t pursue music as a career, and you’ll generally feel like things are achievable regardless of the task. With this mindset I’ve rebuilt my business now three times from the ground up, gotten myself out of tens of thousands of dollars of debt (probably the least fun), lost over 50kg (110lb), been able to write for some outstanding musicians and make a living from it, and most importantly been able to improve my outlook on life. I definitely haven’t achieved the same level of success as well known arrangers such as Quincy Jones, but I am able to be content in the hard times while still pursuing my dreams. And to me, that allows for a wonderful quality of life regardless of my financial situation. Although it is hard, try to be a lifetime learner, it will benefit you everywhere you go and if everyone had this mindset we would live in a very different world.
Business Basics
So we know that a career in arranging is hard and that we need to be a life long learner to give ourselves the best odds, so the next logical step is to start looking at all of the business skills you should be aware of. Most people are aware of the music side of things as there are many conventional pathways to teach you that information. However, if you aren’t sure how to get better at music, I will address that later.
So when we look at business, the first area we need to be aware of is how to create a business so that you can actually receive money legally. This will change depending on the country you live in and when dealing with this sort of information I highly recommend that you seek counsel from some kind of financial advisor where you live. For me, I grew up in Australia where the most common approach was to create a sole tradership business.
My business journey started back in 2016 when I opened my arranging sole tradership out of Australia. I knew I wanted to try and get some writing work on the side while I was employed as a bassist with Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, so I did a quick search online and found out that in Australia all I needed was to have a Tax File Number and a permanent address and I could apply for an ABN (I’ll get to what that is soon). Once I received the email saying I had been granted an ABN, I immediately started approaching guest artists to see if I could write charts for them, and quite quickly was making money legally through my business.
In most Western countries, what you’ll likely have to do before you officially sell anything is register your business through the government which typically results in being assigned some kind of business identification number. For example in Australia that is called an ABN (Australian Business Number). Once you have this setup, the next step is to open a bank account linked with your new business so that you can separate your business transactions from your day-to-day life.
When I first got started selling my arranging services, I ran everything through my everyday bank account which was a huge mistake. All of my transactions were mixed in together and once I finally got off the ship and saw an accountant to go over that year’s tax return, it took a painstakingly long time to go through my bank statement and separate my business transactions. Throw in the fact that I had been also getting paid from a few other employers into the same account, it was hard to work out which transactions had already been taxed and which had not.
Although not opening a bank account had let me jump into making money a little quicker, it ultimately cost me a lot of money in accounting fees and a lot of time with back and forth emails going over financial documents. Trust me, opening a business account at the start of your journey will make tax time much easier and you’ll save so much time and money in the long run. Generally, once you have registered your business with the government and opened a business bank account, you are ready to start selling. However, there are two more steps you may want to be aware of before making that first sale.
Not only had I been using just one bank account for everything in my life, but I was creating invoices through Microsoft Word and trying to keep track of them in a folder on my computer. I was also tracking any expenses I thought may be tax deductible by keeping the receipts in my wallet or in my email inbox. Both of these storage methods were terrible and maybe were appropriate decades ago but when it came to tax time I had hundreds of paper documents to deal with which was very overwhelming. After taking them all to my accountant, they politely suggested I start using an accounting software, and let me tell you, this changed the game for me. Throughout the financial year I can now accurately keep tabs on everything. It keeps track of all my invoices, expenses, and a whole bunch of other things. And when you need to file your taxes, all of the information is pretty neatly organized. I personally use Quickbooks but have used other software over the years too. It doesn’t really matter which one you choose, they all do the same thing but just a bit differently
So after you set up your business bank account, look into signing up for some sort of accounting software which can help keep track of all of your invoices. This is not necessary if you are just starting out as you can manually generate invoices and keep track of them yourself (just like I did), but if you have a bit of money it is worth the cost. Once you are having a lot of sales, the accounting software helps simplify everything and at the end of the financial year it will be a godsend to help work out how much you made. You can also log expenses too, making tax time much simpler.
Moving into another domain, and maybe one which is a little less fun to discuss, is legal protection. Unfortunately, there may come a time where you find yourself, or your business being sued. I’m lucky that this has never happened to me (yet) but just in case, there are ways to separate all of your business endeavours from your personal life. In countries like Australia and the USA, if you are running a sole proprietorship and get sued, the business is linked to all of your personal assets which means that you could lose everything if things go badly. Most countries have some kind of legal company framework to avoid this, such as in the USA you can create a Limited Liability Company (LLC) or in Australia you can create a Proprietary Limited company (PTY LTD). The only issue with these legal frameworks is that they are a bit more complicated than simply setting up your initial business as described earlier, and they often have some sort of startup fee and annual fee associated with them. If you have no money or assets to begin with, then it wont really matter as you have nothing to lose. But hopefully you will eventually be making a sustainable income and start building up some sort of personal savings. Once this starts to happen, it makes a lot of sense to protect yourself from the worst case scenario and to seek out an accountant and lawyer to get further advice about the process in your country.
I’ve only ever created a PTY LTD company once, back in 2019 when I started a music education business called Jazz Melbourne. The process was rather simple but did require an out of pocket expense somewhere in the $1000-2000 range. It also came with an annual fee of a few hundred dollars and maybe increased my accounting fees a little as they took care of all of the necessary paperwork. The main upfront cost was associated with creating a legally binding document which explained the structure of your business and established its operations. For many startup businesses, you’ll go off a preexisting structure as your business won't be that unique on paper compared to anyone else. For example, an arranging business sells arrangements for money which is quite comparable to a pizza shop which sells pizza for money. Because of the similarity to many other businesses, the paperwork required to file is generally quite simple and if your business ever becomes more complicated you can always have a lawyer take a closer look at your constitution and add amendments.
Although the process may seem a bit overwhelming at first, starting a business is actually not too difficult and thousands of people go through the process worldwide every day. You aren’t reinventing the wheel and there are plenty of resources online to help you navigate how to do it. Take your time to understand what each step means and then follow through. Also please remember that I am in no way a financial advisor or legal professional, so I would highly recommend you talk with one when you start out. I personally always ask my accountant for advice before taking steps like this as they are far more aware of the risks. Plus you get the extra benefit of peace of mind when you do so.
Now that you have a formal business in the country you live in, it is also worth brushing up on what that means tax wise. Again, every country is different and you should consult a financial professional to make sure you fully understand what is applicable to your situation. For the most part, when you run a business in the music sector you can claim certain expenses as tax deductions. For example, my Sibelius subscription counts as a business expense as it is a tool I use in order to create the music I sell to clients. There are a lot of potential deductions available and it will save you a lot of money if you understand what you can and can’t claim.
Running a business also now puts you in a unique tax position that can both be good and bad depending on how you look at it. Normally if you work for an employer they will take out your income tax from your salary before it hits your bank account. As a result, when it comes to tax time you often will find that you get a refund from the government. However, when you run a business you will get access to 100% of the money upfront before it is taxed. This can be great as you can spend some of that money on necessary purchases towards your business which will help lower your taxable income. On the flip side, not all of that money goes to you and a percentage will go toward tax as well as other payments such as social security (in the USA) or superannuation (in Australia). If you’re not careful, you may find yourself in a position where you spend everything before taking into consideration the extra payments you need to make. As someone that has dealt with this before, it really sucks and I would avoid it where possible.
One possible way to avoid such a situation is to set up some kind of savings account linked with your business account. On every sale you make, you put aside a percentage of the revenue based on your expected tax bracket and don’t touch it until you file that year's tax return. From there, you make the necessary payments into the other mandatory accounts (superannuation, social security etc) and then you are left with a more accurate representation of what you can spend. I should also add, that depending on where your business is based and your average revenue from the business, there may be some type of sales tax you will need to be aware of, which again will lower the amount of total revenue you get to take home at the end of the day. Unfortunately, this side of being a professional arranger is a headache and takes a while to get used to.
Marketing
When I was coming up as an undergraduate student the buzz word for making it as a musician was marketing. Everyone seemed to say that all you needed to do was market yourself. The problem was that no one knew what that actually meant in reality. My colleagues had no experience as they were still students, and my professors made most of their income through teaching so had no real track record of marketing themselves successfully. For years I ran my own business and would just try anything I thought would work to get customers to notice me and my skills, not realizing that all of those actions were the exact definition of marketing.
For most musicians, marketing occurs quite naturally as part of the creative process. What usually happens is that artists create something cool that they want to share and then try to find others that resonate with their art. They may promote their work through interviews or performances, create some sort of website or social media account, or try countless other avenues all of which can be considered marketing. The problem is that when it comes to music, most people create first and then try to think about how they can attract an audience later. However this can backfire and leave you having spent a lot of time and resources on something that actually people have no interest in. Again, that doesn’t mean the music you create isn’t valuable to you or was a waste of time creating, it just means that you may not be able to generate money from that specific music.
After years of throwing myself at arranging my own charts I realized this lesson the hard way. In 2017, I released my debut big band album. I had spent months of energy and a considerable amount of money perfecting every part of the album. I was extremely proud of the product but once it was released I realized that almost no one else cared about it. I didn’t really receive any recognition and it quickly faded into the background. While I am still happy I produced the album, it may have been a bit more successful if I had established my own audience that liked big band jazz or tapped into existing communities before taking the leap and creating the album. For example, one of the most common ways to make money from big band writing is through school commissions. If I had thought about my charts potentially being performed by school ensembles, I could have altered a few parts to make them easier to play and then tapped into that community prior to making the album. Of course this is all speculation, but it would have at least pushed the album in some kind of marketing direction. Instead, I didn’t have any set approach to marketing the album other than a few minor social media posts, which is the equivalent of opening a storefront and expecting people to walk in. Yes some may wander past, but typically you won’t get enough attention to justify the initial investment.
These days all of my projects have some sort of marketing strategy behind them. Most are pretty simple but built on testing ideas at smaller levels before putting significant investment behind them. My last major recording project was one such example. In 2022 I was approached by a choir director with the idea to collaborate on a Duke Ellington project. I immediately said yes and decided I was happy to put up the money to make it a reality. I was confident in the idea because leading up to that point I had been running a big band that performed the music of various composers and I knew there was an established audience in Melbourne, Australia which liked Ellington and would pay to see a large scale concert. The timing was also perfect as the performance was going to be held alongside the Melbourne International Jazz Festival, which meant more of the general public would be interested in attending such a show and people were actively looking at what was going on in the city over that particular weekend. While I knew the concert would still not recoup the entire amount of money I had initially invested (as big band jazz is simply not a profitable avenue these days), I knew I would recoup enough for me to justify producing such a project. Compared to my original album which has made almost nothing in terms of sales, even though I haven’t yet released the Ellington album at the time of writing this resource, it has already made close to $20,000 through ticket sales for the original concert. Safe to say, tapping into a preexisting community and marketing to them helped make this recording project a lot more successful than the album back in 2017.
What I’ve learnt from marketing my own products is that if anyone tells you there is a guaranteed way of marketing successfully as a freelance arranger, don’t believe them. Perhaps for a small amount of time in their context, they found something that worked perfectly for them, however recreating the exact situation yourself is quite difficult to do and almost always you won’t get the same results. With that said, the process itself would be beneficial and you’d learn a lot, but you can’t expect to get the same outcome they achieved. These days the online world is filled with a lot of information on digital marketing, all promising quick solutions that will make you thousands of dollars in a short period of time. Unfortunately, after testing a number of those methods, none of them work as well as they promise and the simple reality is that a successful marketing strategy takes time to develop and act on. Think about it like learning a musical instrument, you wouldn’t expect to be performing a major concert the day after you picked up the trumpet for the first time. Marketing is the same. Just because you read a guide about marketing your business, doesn’t mean you’ll achieve amazing results immediately.
In order to understand effective marketing you need to understand what marketing is and how to use it to sell your arranging services. For the most part, marketing can be boiled down into two categories:
Identify & Understand Your Audience
Lead Generation
The best part about the marketing process is that all of this can be done without the creation of a single chart or product. In fact, I’d recommend going through the information below without having written anything first because you’ll see what works and what doesn’t without sinking a lot of time into arranging a piece. If you’re lucky, you’ll find someone who wants to pay for your skills and then you get to work on a chart with the knowledge that you’ll get paid instead of just hoping someone will like it. To help you understand each step, below you’ll find an in-depth breakdown of the marketing process with the two categories being broken down into multiple parts.
1. Identify & Understand Your Audience
On your road to getting a commission, what you first need to do is work out who might actually want to buy your arrangements. It may seem a bit obvious but the people who resonate with your music are the ones who will likely become your customers. The problem is that most people don’t know who you are and aren’t familiar with your arrangements. By identifying and qualifying these people, you can then start informing them of your services which then ideally leads to more sales. For the most part, it is quite easy to understand your target audience if you are asking yourself the right questions. Personally, I typically lean on four key questions:
Who is your target audience?
Where does your audience congregate?
Why does your audience value your services/product?
Does your audience have the means to pay you?
Who Is Your Target Audience?
For me, an avid lover of big band arranging, the largest audience that shares that love and are actively looking to engage in new big band charts are high school big bands. So it would make sense for that to be my target audience. Of course there are many other potential audiences too, I just went with schools as they are the most applicable for many arrangers.
By identifying a target audience it can help you in two ways: informing how you might tailor your arrangements to suit their needs, and who you can approach to possibly get a commission. Using the previous example, school students generally need simpler charts and maybe don’t enjoy certain genres of jazz. There are also well established charts that students all across the world enjoy playing which can operate as a fantastic example of styles to lean into. Each of these factors can help steer your writing in directions which may be more successful when looking for a school commission.
Additionally, by looking further into the school example, we need to ask ourselves who might have the purchasing power at the institution? I think it’s pretty safe to say that it’s definitely not the students (however marketing to them can still be useful in other ways). In most cases you’ll be dealing with a band director who has access to some kind of budget approved by the head of music/department, which is then ultimately granted by some kind of school administrator. With that in mind, the band director makes the most sense to market too, however depending on the scope of your goal (maybe you want to write an entire theatre production), you may need to look at approaching the people above if necessary.
By combining these two factors together, you can generate a lot of useful information for when you actually approach your target audience. However, I’ll get to that a bit later when we start looking at lead generation and sales.
Where Does Your Audience Congregate?
Once you’ve established who your target audience is, you need to work out where they congregate, otherwise you won’t know where to aim your attention. Often you’ll find that your target audience isn’t limited to just one place and it can be beneficial to think of numerous locations if possible. For example, in the school setting the most obvious place for band directors to congregate is at the school itself. That may include rehearsal rooms, staff rooms, classrooms, and walking the corridors. However, band directors have lives outside of school too. Many of them play in various bands, attend conferences, and may go out to see live music. All of these locations become ideal places to try and inform them about your arrangements.
Why Does Your Audience Value Your Services/Product?
Part of understanding your audience is knowing why they might value your arrangements. Although the last two questions have been fairly straight forward to answer, determining someone’s perception can be quite challenging. Everyone is bombarded with so many different opinions and thoughts daily, that even when you think you know why someone wants to commission you, they could change their mind quite quickly. However, that shouldn’t stop you from trying to work it out as it can be extremely helpful when it comes to lead generation and sales.
The key to identifying why someone values your work comes down to understanding how your arrangements solve a problem they’re facing. Continuing on with the school band example, there are many possible reasons why a band director may want to acquire more sheet music. Perhaps they have a standout student they want to feature, maybe they are new to the school and want to make a good impression on their students, or it could be competition time and the band needs a new number to work on. There are a number of problems/situations which can be solved by having a brand new arrangement and it’s up to us to identify these situations.
Unfortunately, if you have found a target audience but they don’t value your work, all you can do is try to convince them why your arrangements are valuable. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t, it really depends on how good you are at communicating and helping your audience see that your charts help solve an issue they’re facing. You may be surprised to find out that many people within your target audience actually fall into this category which is the entire reason people work on their sales skills. I’m sure you’ve been to a store with the intention of only buying one item and then somehow left with a number of things you never intended to purchase. Well, somewhere along your journey in the store you were convinced of the value of the products you bought. So rest assured, just because someone doesn’t inherently value your work in the beginning, doesn’t mean they won’t come around, it’s just about how you approach the situation. However, we’ll get to that a little later when we start talking about sales.
Does Your Audience Have The Means To Buy Your Arrangements?
So you know who your audience is, where they get together, and why they might value your arrangements, however none of this matters if they don’t have the money to actually pay for your services. Part of identifying your audience is working out whether they actually have the funds necessary for you to make the sale. This is essential as if they do not have the capital, then you won’t actually be able to sell anything.
Revisiting our school example, every school has a different financial situation. First of all, some are public and funded through the government while others are private and are primarily funded through the students. In general, public schools are the ones that will value your work highly but be unable to afford custom arrangements as many music programs have limited budgets. There can be some ways around this, but the reality is that most public school programs buy published charts which are much cheaper and they can buy them in bulk. Private schools on the other hand generally have a lot more funding and can commission arrangements more often. That doesn’t mean they actually do, but there is a lot more potential for you to get a commission through a well funded school.
Looking further afield, if you are trying to get commissions outside of the education sector, it can be pretty difficult to gauge whether someone can afford your work. Especially when they are not coming from a specific scene. In these cases, all you can do is go through the motions until you discover whether people can actually pay or not. If you find too many people can’t actually pay and you are confident that you aren’t overpricing your product, then it may be wise to change your target audience and try again.
2. Lead Generation
After identifying and understanding your target audience, the next step is to find leads for your arrangements. It’s a funny word which is used to describe anyone that has shown interest in your content. These days they are one of the most important metrics to follow as leads directly correlate to revenue of your business. I can’t speak for everyone, but in every avenue of music that I’ve been involved in, the main issue that has caused various projects to fail is lead generation. Without enough leads you have concerts with no audience, you have albums with no listeners, and you have arrangements with no bands to play them.
In order to create leads, it is essential to understand their role in marketing so that you can map them effectively. A successful marketing campaign identifies possible leads and then tracks their journey from the first impression all the way through to a sale (and perhaps even longer). When I started getting my head around business terminology I didn’t quite understand how this actually looked as all of the books I read were focused around more profitable trends than music. But once I did work it out, I realized that the process sounds far more complicated than what actually happens in real life. In almost all situations when you create music, you want to share it with others. Through this process you naturally create leads whether you’re aware of it or not.
Back when I was running a crowdfunding campaign for my first album I’d post non-stop about the project. Not really knowing anything about how to run a successful business, I’d see who responded to my posts and then message them in the hope they might commit to supporting my Kickstarter campaign. Some responded positively and eventually supported the project while others didn’t. Without realizing it, I was actually creating leads and mapping their journey.
You see, by posting content about my crowdfunding campaign I attracted people who saw my work as valuable, I created leads. Each lead signalled their interest through reacting to, commenting on, and sharing my posts and by doing so I was able to approach them differently than everyone else. These people are what we call cold leads, they may not know much about you or your services but have indicated some kind of interest.
When I messaged the cold leads individually, I was moving them through a sales funnel (more on that later) where I would tell them more about the campaign in the hopes they might commit to donating. I was giving them more specific information because they had indicated some level of interest, which in turn either pushed them away or made them more interested. Those that were pushed away remained as cold leads, whereas those who responded to my messages positively started to become warm leads. These are people who see more value in what you are offering and in this case were more likely to follow through with donating. Finally, some warm leads actually did donate, in which case they became hot leads as they didn’t need any more convincing to contribute financially. I should also add that some people who saw the initial social media posts immediately decided to donate, in which case they started out as hot leads.
When you first start out you never know how valuable someone thinks your work is until they signal their thoughts to you. In this case that was achieved through reactions to a social media post, responses to private messages, and donations to the campaign, but depending on what you are offering, these signals can be different. The key is that you understand what to look for and are able to keep track of these metrics.
Understanding the logic is one thing though, the other is actually knowing what to do to generate leads. In my case it was a social media post which helped create leads but there are plenty of other, tried and true methods that may work for your situation. The four that have proven themselves most successful in my life are:
Content/Social Media
Advertising
Word of Mouth/Recommendations
Cold Outreach
However, it really comes down to your creativity and the product you are trying to market as there are probably infinite possible ways to generate a lead. Don’t worry, I won’t leave you there to work it all out, below you’ll find how I’ve utilized the four methods mentioned above for various arranging projects.
Content/Social Media
These days almost all musicians market themselves on social media or through some sort of content generation whether they realize it or not. In the 21st century it has become the norm and I’m sure you’ve either seen hundreds, if not thousands, of posts from musicians on whichever platforms you prefer. As social media platforms are built around user retention, the algorithms work to promote the most popular material, meaning that they can help artists find leads for their work as long as the platform defines it good enough for the masses. Compared to the pre-internet era of marketing, these behemoth technology companies have made it considerably easier for individuals to share their music with the world and attract an audience for relatively cheap. That doesn’t mean your posts will actually generate any valuable leads, but it does give you access to a very helpful tool to market your services.
The principle of this method of lead generation is to create content that helps others find value in you and/or your work. That might mean sharing music you’ve created, behind the scenes band comments, pictures of a gig, or really anything that helps others be included in your world. You can also post about offering services but in general these won’t land as much as other types of comments as it is far easier to see that you are trying to sell something. Think about social media as a way to curate an audience. If you are trying to sell big band sheet music, then post more about big bands you love and really anything in that space. The people who react are showing they also like those things and may be able to be transitioned into warm leads.
If you’re a fan of YouTube, you may notice that a lot of the larger channels are now trying to sell their own products through their videos. Over time they’ve built a large audience and established a rapport with these people, allowing them to translate that relationship into sales. You don’t need to have millions of followers to find success in using social media though, you just need to be mindful of why you are posting and to be consistent with the process. For example, on my YouTube channel I post a number of my scores with an accompanying recording. There’s nothing special about the content and it’s really only targeted at people who might like jazz arranging, but by posting the videos to YouTube I’ve seen a dramatic increase in sales to the associated charts on my sheet music store.
Creating content can also be done outside of social media, and in fact, this resource that you’re reading right now is a great example of that. By creating a resource on how to be a successful arranger, I attract people such as yourself that are interested in the craft. As a result, I can use the data on how many people visit my resources to guide what sort of content people like to read. Also, if you happen to like these resources, it’s far more likely that you will sign up for email alerts when I post new resources, allowing me to reach out and see if any of my services are right for you.
Content also doesn’t have to be digital, in fact in the sector we operate in, it can often be easier to create content in other ways. In the past I’ve found hosting free information sessions, concerts, professional development opportunities, and a whole range of other types of events has helped me to tap into an audience. Often these sorts of activities aren’t really seen as content as such, but can operate in exactly the same way. For example, I’ve produced hundreds of concerts over the years and in doing so I would often attract audiences which loved big band jazz. Although most of the time the venues handled the marketing, by simply talking with the people who attended, I was able to inform them of future events and start treating them as a potential lead for my own products.
Advertising
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you most likely have come across some form of advertising. In most cases you haven’t been the target audience, in which case it’s probably led to a complaint or two. Well no surprise, advertising is another way of creating leads for your business. It works in a very similar way to creating content but the main difference is that you are paying for your content to be promoted on different platforms.
As there is money involved, the key to a successful advertising campaign is to understand where your audience congregates and what they value about your services. Then all you need to do is create content that highlights that value and is shared in the places your audience frequents. As with everything, there is a bit more nuance to it but if you follow these two principles you are more likely to find success. I’ve only just started trialling paid advertisements for my arranging course so I am by no means an expert but I can at least give you a bit more context of what the process looks like with a real scenario.
In general, there are two or three main target audiences that I have for my Arranging 101 course: retired individuals who want to develop their arranging skills, emerging arrangers who may not be able to afford to acquire the skills at university, and musicians who have been trained in other areas of music and are wanting to develop their jazz arranging knowledge. While all three are unique, the core similarity they all share is that they want to know how to write for big band. They also happen to all frequent Facebook, unlike younger generations. Combining these two pieces of knowledge creates the foundation for my advertising campaign. As a result, I promote content which highlights the desire to learn how to write for big band through Facebook. I wouldn’t say the results I am having are tremendously successful but they are at least teaching me a lot about the process.
Again, like creating content, advertising doesn’t need to be digital or through social media. In the past I’ve used print media in jazz journals to create leads for courses, and you don’t need to spend too much time outside to see paid advertising all around you. If there is a potential space to advertise, you bet someone has thought of it, and if it has worked, then you’ll likely still see it around today.
Word of Mouth/Recommendations
Out of all the four methods of lead generation, word of mouth is by far the one I’ve found most effective for my arranging business. That’s because every music scene revolves around conversations and recommendations. Even though we live in the 21st century and there are so many ways to discover new people, in the music industry the method that still holds true is the recommendation from another person. In this context, what matters most is that those who interact with you come away with a fantastic experience that they want to share with others.
Back in my teenage years, when I was trying to find gigs for the first time, one of the ways my friends and I approached the issue was to ask our parents if they had any events that would need music. By putting the word out to those we knew, they spread the idea in their circles, and quite quickly we found ourselves booked for a number of different events ranging from a corporate function at a university to casual birthday parties. I wouldn’t call any of the gigs amazing, but within weeks we found ourselves actually making income from performing purely off the back of word of mouth. That’s where my music journey started but that same approach has also come in handy in other times in my life. Namely, when I graduated from university and wanted to start finding professional arranging work.
Like many aspiring musicians, directly out of college I got a job playing bass on a cruise ship. It was a quick employment solution which gave me an income and allowed me some time to get my arranging act together. However, what I didn’t realize when I started the job is that it was a perfect vehicle to find writing work. By being in the showband, I got to work with multiple fly-in artists each week who all had a unique 45 minute standalone set. Quite often these artists would have issues with their sheet music and the band would complain. This is where I would swoop in and offer my services, and after a few weeks I started to build up a small list of clients.
Although I only did a 5 month stint on cruise ships, from that contract alone I have now generated years of arranging commissions built off the back of those initial guest entertainers I worked with. Not just from repeat business but from their recommendations to other cruise ship artists. Due to the close knit community that exists on cruise lines, by following through with high quality work on my end, my name repeatedly came up when artists would ask around for arranger recommendations.
However, word of mouth only works by you putting out something in the first place. For me that was simply asking my parents whether they knew of any opportunities for my band to play at, or approaching the guest entertainer when they needed help with their sheet music. In order for me to have success via word of mouth, it required me to put myself out there, and then when an opportunity arose, the second half of the story is that I had to deliver a fantastic product that was worthy of recommendation.
Based on the various marketing books I’ve read, it seems that to get someone to recommend you to another person, the experience with your product has to be somewhere close to 10x better than their current solution. A lot of people use the comparison between taxis and uber, where uber was able to dominate the market as they were far more efficient, more affordable (at least initially), and the process was a lot more pleasant to interact with. So if you are looking to go down the word of mouth route, which I would highly recommend as it is very compatible with the music industry, make sure you are creating sheet music (or whatever music related product) that is considerably better than the competition.
As music is so subjective, often the elements we don’t think about are more important than the actual quality of our writing. It’s really just a matter of opinion whether you think one writer is “better” than another. For example, which is the better composer: Mozart or Beethoven? In reality, they both are exceptional writers and the same can be said for the majority of the professional work force today. So given that all professional arrangers generally have an equivalent set of writing skills, how do we make our own arrangements stand out enough to be recommended to others? It’s quite simple, you need to focus on the overall customer experience, not just writing an amazing chart.
What this looks like in reality is having terrific communication skills, being easy to work with, delivering on time (or early), and going the extra mile where possible. Personally, I also focus on areas like chart formatting and making sure the musicians who play my arrangements have a wonderful experience, because if the chart is clear it will lead to a better performance. And if you have better rehearsals and performances, then whoever originally commissioned the chart will be happy. There’s no one right way to approach each of these areas, but as long as you are aware of the impact they have on you receiving a recommendation, you’ll be headed in the right direction.
Cold Outreach
The final method to generate leads for your business is to approach people out of the blue. I can’t say I have used this approach all that much but there are times where it has come in handy. As lead generation boils down into the simple act of sharing information with another person, cold outreach is just doing that in the most straightforward way. I’m sure you’ve had a call from a telemarketer or had someone knock on your door soliciting their services, both of which are forms of cold outreach. In general, most people find these interactions quite obnoxious but given what we’ve discussed already on this page, these reactions are likely because the person in question did not fall into the target audience of the product being pushed. Unfortunately, as cold outreach is pretty much approaching anyone with your information, you never know who is going to be interested or not, which means you’ll get a lot of rejections. However, I wouldn’t be including it on this list if there wasn’t some validity to the method.
Back in 2018, I took a huge risk and decided to bring out a number of international artists to Australia for a couple of weeks. I was broke at the time and really had no clue what I was doing but I had just got a small amount of confirmed funding through a partnership with a local band competition. Enough to give me the confidence to try and make the idea work, so I went ahead and locked in the artists and now had to find a way to make close to $30,000 appear. It was financially quite stupid but looking back on that decision it really was one of the positive turning points for my life.
With no idea how to raise the money, and a looming deadline, I went into extreme hustle mode and pretty much talked with everyone I knew to see what might be possible. I tried everything that was recommended, with one idea being to put on a professional development workshop day. The only issue was that I didn’t know anyone who would be interested in attending. At the time I had never worked in a school setting and only knew very few educators who would pay to learn more about jazz pedagogy.
My intuition was to lean into the idea, so I did some research and realized there were a number of mailing lists available online which I could tap into. I quickly put together a rather informal email about the event, not really expecting much, and sent it off to thousands of music educators I’d never met before. As a result I ended up generating somewhere in the realm of $10,000 from a couple of emails, which knocked a substantial amount off from my overall goal. I was also able to use the same approach to reach out to school music programs to try and organize workshops with the artists. Although the majority of the people I reached out to either didn’t reply or weren’t interested, there were a few which did and they eventually led to a number of workshops being held.
To be fully transparent, I wasn’t able to raise the full $30,000 in time and supplemented a large portion of the amount through my own income. However, the most successful event I held during the artist’s visit came off the back of cold outreach, and if I hadn’t have tried it, I would have been in a much worse situation.
As most people in the world aren’t really looking for custom arrangements, cold outreach can be problematic from a writing perspective. With that said, once upon a time I had the dream to write for video games and was able to generate some work for myself by cold emailing a number of independent developers. I ultimately decided it wasn’t for me, but within a few weeks I was at least given writing opportunities off the back of cold outreach.
In both the jazz pedagogy day and video game examples, the main key to my success was refining the people I approached to those who I thought might be in my target audience. I didn’t just email everyone in the world about the pedagogy day, instead I emailed music educator mailing lists and called school music programs. When I looked for video game clients, I looked at small and often new independent developers who were also establishing themselves within the industry. If you do decide to go down the cold outreach pathway to generate leads, know that it is hard and it comes with a lot of rejection. It definitely is not for everyone and the process can hurt a lot when you care about what you are offering.
Funnels
Now there is a little bit more to lead generation than just the first point of contact. The four methods we’ve just unpacked are great at bringing people into your circle but often those initial interactions don’t really give enough information for someone to feel confident in buying a chart from you (sometimes it is enough but this is generally quite rare). As mentioned earlier, when someone interacts with you, or any part of your marketing, they become a lead. Once they have been established as a lead, you can then monitor how likely they are to purchase one of your arrangements. In general, we use words like hot, warm, and cold to describe someone's journey with a business, with those on the colder side of the spectrum being more unlikely to buy, and those on the hotter side being more likely to buy. Fortunately, there is a way to transition leads from cold to hot and that is through the use of funnels.
Just like an everyday funnel, a marketing funnel is built around the same concept. Initially you start off with a lot of cold leads and then you funnel them down into hot leads. Unlike a liquid though, leads may stop at different parts of the funnel for an undefined amount of time. Not everyone will become hot leads, and some will take much longer to transition through a marketing funnel than others. However, by establishing some kind of funnel, you increase your odds of selling products, and as professional arrangers, it is worthwhile to be aware of anything that can help us make a living from music.
To build a funnel, all you need to do is think of a couple of different stages where you can show your audience more about your product or service and then link each stage so that they lead into one another. The key is that at every stage you offer some sort of value, otherwise there is no incentive for someone to move from one part of your funnel to the next. Ultimately, by the time they arrive at the final part of the funnel, you have built up enough value that they want to purchase something. There’s a lot of psychology behind this and many books on the topic that go far more in-depth than what I’m saying here in case you want to understand the process behind why this works. However, instead of spending 200 pages unpacking the topic like them, it’s easier just to prove that it works through a few examples.
Right now I use a number of similar types of funnels in my business. Each is geared slightly differently as I’m offering different products and services, but all are built around the same concept. For example, the funnel for my sheet music store is as follows:
Step 1: YouTube video which plays through the score of an arrangement with a recording (lead generation through the title/headline, thumbnail, video)
Step 2: Link to my website where they can receive a free PDF of the score in exchange for an email address (establishes cold leads, people who are actually interested in reading arrangements)
Step 3: Email with links to sheet music that I’m selling, specifically scores + parts (transitions cold leads to those who might want to purchase)
It’s a simple funnel but effective. In step 1 I show value through establishing what the arrangement sounds like, in step 2 I show value by giving them access to a PDF of the score, and in step 3 those who go on to purchase a chart from me move into the warm/hot leads category. Depending on what you are offering and how much you are charging, you will change the complexity of your funnel. For my arrangements that I sell online, they are generally in the $50-75 region which doesn’t require an intricate funnel. In fact, even my more expensive commissioned charts have a relatively simple funnel too. As people come to me through a number of different avenues (recommendations, social media content, concerts etc), that transitions into some sort of collection of contact information (phone number, email etc) which then turns into a conversation about a commission. The only difference between my commissions and sheet music store, is that for the commissions I often talk with people 1-on-1 via email and phone due to the nature of the product.
Although terminology like “funnels” and “lead generation” makes marketing seem somewhat special or unique, they are just words which describe actions that many musicians are already engaging with. As with my crowdfunding campaign example earlier, I had no clue what a warm lead was, what lead generation was, and really no marketing knowledge whatsoever, however now that we’ve established the terminology, you can see that I executed a number of different lead generation methods and created a funnel.
Trial & Error
As you can see, marketing can be boiled down into two main components: identifying/defining your audience and lead generation. However, hopefully through the examples I’ve used, you’ve been able to see that there is no one way to approach marketing. Whether it’s working out who your audience is, how to convert them into leads, or creating a funnel, there is no guaranteed approach which will lead to success. So what do we do?
Well you’ve read the title of this section, the only real option is to just throw yourself at the problem and try different solutions. Unfortunately, marketing and sales is all about what your clients value, not about what you value. You may spend hundreds of hours creating the perfect marketing campaign only to see it fail in the first week you run it. On the flip side, you may have a throw away idea that you decide to use and it comes back as the most successful marketing campaign in your life.
The trick is to measure and analyze every sort of marketing you try. Most marketing campaigns have one or two key metrics which correlate with a successful outcome. Once you’ve worked out which metric is the most important for what you are trying to sell, then you can measure it every time and learn from the data you receive. For example, a lot of people get caught up in the amount of views or likes they get for a video/post they put on social media, however this metric may not actually correlate with sales at all. Instead it is far more important to ask the person who bought a chart from you how they heard about your charts and why they decided to purchase. If they say that they watched one of your videos on YouTube, then you have more proof that viewership of a certain video type can lead to sales.
The kicker with that example though is that someone has actually purchased something from you. If you are in a situation where you haven’t made a single sale then you have to look at all of the elements that you are presenting and test each one. Perhaps the product isn’t good, perhaps it’s aimed at the wrong market, perhaps there is something wrong with the marketing, perhaps the funnel isn’t working. You won’t know what exactly is the problem until you test each component individually and see if it impacts the overall result. Sometimes this can take a long time to test as it may require you to develop new skills, whereas other times it is a simple fix that can be done in an instant. If you are really stuck, look for advice from others who have been in the same place as you.
Unfortunately these days social media is rife with people telling you how easy it is to make a lot of money online, but if it really was that easy everyone would be rich. The truth is it takes a lot of consistency and most of the journey is coming up with ideas, testing them, analyzing the data, and changing direction when you aren’t getting the outcome you want. Some people discover solutions that yield financial success quickly, while others spend decades before they find some form of financial success. The whole process actually is very similar to arranging a chart for someone. You come up with an idea, you write it out, and then you show it to your client only to receive feedback that you need to go back and edit parts. My only suggestion with all of this is to test often and usually only on small areas. Yes it will take longer than changing large chunks at a time, but over time you will get a more accurate idea of how your marketing system works which will then inform better decisions in the future.
Sales
Well that was a whole lot of information about marketing! But there’s actually another major component to making money as a professional arranger and that is sales. Any time you are talking with someone with the intention of making money from that person, that is actually a form of sales. Generally speaking, sales specifically refers to the final conversation or interaction that you have with a lead which ideally results in an exchange of money for your product or service. So if you are hoping to make money as an arranger, you will be dealing with sales one way or another, it may just not look as conventional as other jobs.
There are a billion and one ways to go about the sales process, everyone has an opinion about what you should do and what you shouldn’t but it really depends on the sort of person you are. Regardless of how you go about the conversation there are two characteristics that I’ve seen lead to the most positive interactions: awareness of how your product/service is solving the other person's problem, and authenticity in what you are offering.
Too often people try to manipulate others in the sales process (not necessarily in a deceptive way) and when this happens it doesn’t really feel like you are presenting an authentic version of yourself. We as humans are pretty good at sniffing out crap and if something doesn’t feel right it’s probably because it is. Eventually this will actually sour your target audience and will detract from your business, even if at the start it may have led to a quick buck or two.
If you have found a genuine issue that your work helps solve, such as a school band needing a chart to feature their star tenor player, and you know that what you are offering can solve that problem, then no manipulation is necessary. All you have to do is present the facts honestly. In fact the whole transaction will feel quite logical from both sides and there should be very little resistance. Sometimes there may be further issues that come up such as your client may not have enough money at the moment, but there are always solutions that can be found. The best advice is to make sure you fully understand the person you are trying to sell to and that they feel understood. If that is the case then it will be a positive interaction regardless of the end result. Be the type of salesperson you’d like to deal with. On the other side of all of these conversations is a real person and they should be treated with respect.
There are countless books on the art of selling, all with dozens upon dozens of techniques and things to think about. However, I started my sales journey well before I read a single word on the topic and now that I’ve spent a few years familiarizing myself with the “formal” process described in these books, I can tell you that none of it is really needed in our industry. If you are being authentic and solving a real problem, everything else will line up. If not, then it will feel pretty difficult to sell and it’s most likely not worth having the interaction. Any time I’ve tried to force a sale it never has worked out, even when money has been exchanged there has been too many issues on the back end that it was never worthwhile in the first place. If you are feeling a lot of resistance with the product or service you are selling, then you may be aiming at the wrong audience or something needs to be tweaked somewhere along the line. However, this should not be confused with the uneasy feeling you might get when trying to sell your services.
For many it feels weird or awkward asking for money. Most of us grow up in an environment where we are paid for our labor through a standard 9-5 job, with only a few actually being in charge of sales interactions. The only way to get more comfortable with the sales process is simply by doing it a lot. Selling is not a bad thing even though it often is looked down upon. In fact, it is necessary in order for freelance musicians to make a living. Accept that at first you are going to make mistakes, but over time these mistakes will help shape your process and give you confidence. Just like learning an instrument, you won’t be perfect to begin with but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
Remember, you are trying to solve a problem for the other person. If they have gotten in contact with you and you aren’t too sure what they are looking for, just ask them questions until you feel like you have enough information. This could be things like what sort of ensemble will be playing the chart, the strengths and weaknesses of the band, any creative ideas they want incorporated into the chart, deadlines etc. Once you’ve established exactly what they are looking for, repeat it back to them to make sure you didn’t miss anything. Over time you’ll work out exactly what to ask and if you’re on the same page then you move on to discussing money.
At this point in the conversation the client has helped you understand their side of the interaction and now it is time for you to help them understand your side. What this really means is that they understand why you are quoting the price you’ve chosen and hopefully they see the logic behind it. As commissioned arrangements are not set to a specific price point, this part of the conversation is critical and often what people fear the most. There is no right way of going about the conversation and if you aren’t sure about what to quote, simply be transparent. People like honesty and when you’re just starting out you can tell your potential clients that you haven’t dealt with these sorts of conversations before. You’d be surprised how tolerant and supportive they’ll be.
Once you’ve quoted a price, they may follow through or may not. Most sales books will say that you should try and turn every one of these situations into a sale but I disagree. If it isn’t right for someone else, yes it means you lose out on some money, but you can maintain your dignity and know that you’ve treated the other person with respect. People remember those interactions and it may lead to another sale down the road. I should also add that yes, this might mean your bank account isn’t as big as it could be, but do you really want to have earned your wealth through pressuring others into sales they didn’t feel comfortable with? That’s an ethical question each of us has to ask ourselves and at the end of the day you have to live with the decisions you make even if you do have a few extra 0’s at the end of your bank balance.
How Much To Charge
One question I get asked all the time is how much is the correct amount to charge a client. The problem is in the music industry, specifically in the jazz arranging sector, there are no specific rates set by any governing body. Once upon a time the unions established set rates for their members, but these days the power of the music unions around the world are pretty much non-existent outside of LA. Instead the only way to correctly gauge how much you should charge is by how much your audience can afford.
In business there are two types of sales transactions: business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B). The first of which is when you are selling to the general public, the latter being when you sell to other establishments. As arrangers we generally deal with both. For example, a school commission is a B2B interaction where you are gauging your quote based on the financial capacity of the school. Similarly, if you were to write a score for a film or game studio, you’d be dealing with a business more so than the bank account of a single person. However, it is still just as likely to be approached by individuals such as the case with my cruise ship clients.
In general, B2B interactions yield higher sales amounts as there is more money in the system that can be budgeted to your services. There is also the added benefit that whoever you are interacting with during a sales conversation is usually not personally attached to the business’s funds compared to B2C transactions. Ultimately what this results in is charging higher for B2B transactions than B2C. But how do you actually work out a certain figure to charge?
There are a number of factors which help determine how much you need to charge at a minimum to survive. That doesn’t mean you should charge that amount, but if you are trying to be solely a professional arranger with no other income source you have to make sure you can pay your monthly expenses and save a little otherwise the occupation isn’t sustainable. Near the top of this page I mentioned how we all have different lifestyles, some like luxury while others are happy with only a little. Whatever your lifestyle is, you need to be aware of how much it costs you. Next you need to make sure you factor in a percentage for both tax and savings. After that, you simply divide that total amount by 30 (the average number of days in a month) and that is the bare minimum you need to be making per day to support your lifestyle. You can also divide that by however many hours you want to spend per day working to calculate a minimum hourly rate.
With your cost of living established, you can now look at the time factor for any commissions you receive. If you estimate a chart will take you 16 hours, you can think of that as two 8 hour work days and quote accordingly. However there is one big issue with this, it’s built off a model where there is enough work to fill up your schedule continually which is pretty unrealistic. So to counter that, you generally need to charge higher in order to be financially sustainable. To help you out, here is a fake scenario using easily roundtable numbers.
Currently I need to make about $3000 a month to cover all of my expected expenses. That means per day I would generally need to be making $100 to break even. However, I typically only receive one commission per month. So regardless of how big that commission is, I would need to charge $3000 if it was my only source of income.
You can quickly see how this can be problematic. You’ll likely receive both large and small commissions as a professional arranger and it can be pretty hard to justify charging a really large amount for something you can finish in an hour. It is very plausible that some months you won’t make enough to cover your living expenses and almost all professional musicians I know have another form of income to buffer those months where work is dry. Unfortunately when you are just getting started it can be pretty hard to estimate how much work you’ll receive and even once you are established, there is always the possibility that you get less commissions than expected. That is just the reality of working as a freelancer and what we have to live with when we choose this career.
Rotating back to how much we should specifically charge, when you are just starting out there’s no real science to the figure you charge. Some people think just because they graduated from a university they should be entitled to $150 per hour, while others see themselves as not worthy of any money because it is their first commission. Whatever you decide upon, the crucial step is to monitor the reactions of your potential clients. If they accept immediately, then they likely expected you to charge more, and if they say it is out of their budget, then you know you may have asked for too much. As you do this dance, you will start to familiarize yourself with how much certain businesses and people value your work and have data that can be analyzed.
When I first received commissions I would severely undercharge because I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. I asked for $100 per chart and I did this for maybe 2 years. Although it meant it was quite the struggle and I couldn’t rely on arranging for my primary income, what I did get was a lot of clients and data. I’m not suggesting this is the model everyone should take and the financial stress associated with that time in my life is not something I would wish on anyone else. Once I realized that no one was ever going to offer me more money unless I asked for it, I started increasing what I charged.
When you increase the cost of your product or services, you increase the chances that someone will not be able to afford it. As outlined considerably earlier in this resource, a key factor to your success as an arranger is that your audience has the capacity to pay you. When you lower your prices, you can attract a lot of people, but many of them actually don’t have the capacity to pay a higher price so they drop off as soon as you increase the cost. There is also a secondary issue where people start associating your services with a certain price bracket and feel entitled to that amount.
As I had charged $100 per chart for those first few years, particularly with my cruise ship clients, I dug myself in a hole where they started to think custom arrangements should only be $100. As I began increasing my prices I found out pretty quickly that in the cruise industry, almost nobody values arranging to the degree needed to maintain sustainable life. Sure those types of charts might be good for some quick cash flow, but investing too much time with an audience that doesn’t see the value of your work and when many clients can’t afford higher than dirt cheap rates, it is a sign that you should move on.
On the flip side of things, sometime in 2018 I started receiving school commissions. Similarly to my cruise ship experience, I initially priced myself quite low but had the exceptional fortune that my first major commission was from a good friend of mine. Not only did my friend give me the commission, but when I sent him the invoice he rejected it and told me to double the amount. In my decade or so of professional arranging, this is the only time someone has come back and offered me more money for my services. Instead of the initial amount I charged, which was probably around $800, he got the school to pay me $1600. Knowing what I know now, I may have been able to get considerably more than $1600 with my arranging ability in those years, but I wouldn’t be here today without learning from that experience.
With a $1600 school commission under my belt, it helped me realize that most schools I worked with had more sizable budgets than my cruise ship clients (especially private schools) and that I shouldn’t be afraid of charging more. Knowing that one school was happy to pay me $1600 set a benchmark for my rates for other schools.
Now all of these examples are all well and good but there is one key situation that crops up a lot that hasn’t been mentioned, and that is when a friend asks you to write charts for them. This can be the trickiest situation to navigate and no interaction is ever the same. I generally like to help people out and if they are a good friend of mine, I’ll work with their situation. Sometimes that might mean doing some charts for nothing, while other times it might mean a minimal budget. I believe in putting out the same energy and attitude that I’d like to receive, and over my musical journey so many people have helped me get to where I am today without any exchange of money. I’ve been burned a lot by helping people and I understand if others want to avoid the toll it can take. I’ve also had amazing situations come from friend’s projects too. Nothing is guaranteed. You know yourself better than anyone else, so in these situations you have to make the call that is right for you.
So where does that leave us with what to charge? Well as you can see, it is a complex dance with no one right answer. These days I charge much higher than I once did with most big band commissions being a minimum of $1500. Most people don’t want to pay that but I also have a significant track record with a lot of credibility which helps others see the value in my work. I definitely am not getting consistent commissions, but I’m also not looking for them as much as I was in previous years. The best part about my current situation is that every commission that does go through is a great one that I love working on and am receiving enough money that it justifies my time commitment. I choose to supplement my income from other areas in music, such as performing and teaching, which gives me a sustainable lifestyle that I enjoy.
When you’re trying to work out how much to charge, at first it doesn’t really matter, you just need to build up enough sales to the point where you have a better idea about your audience’s capacity to pay you and what they value. But once you’ve got some sort of idea about that, then you can change your prices accordingly. In business terms this is called product market fit and is something everyone goes through. And in general, if I were to leave you on any particular point it would be to generally ask for 10-20% more than you feel comfortable because almost always you’ll find that your clients can pay it.
Publishing Charts
While navigating commissions can be quite tricky, there are other avenues to make money as a freelance arranger. The most common is through selling your existing catalog of arrangements either through a publisher or by yourself. In many cases this is a great avenue for making additional income from commissions, as long as you maintain the permission to sell the chart. The real question is whether you should go through an established publishing house or self-publish. As both options provide the chance to make additional income, they both come with advantages and disadvantages. There is no wrong choice as both are ultimately beneficial, but one may suit your situation better.
Traditionally, the route for all arrangers was always to go with an established publisher. They generally come with widespread distribution and their sole purpose is to promote the sheet music they sell. In exchange, they usually take an enormous cut from any sales (about 90%) and it can be highly competitive to secure a spot with larger publishers. On the flip side, if you self-publish then you are entirely responsible for everything but keep 100% of the profit.
These days the game has changed significantly. With the power of social media and the internet, arrangers are able to have much larger audiences than previous decades. It is much easier to market yourself and reach potential customers all over the world, and the best part is that there are many viable marketing options that are completely free. With there being far more tools at our finger tips, the question you have to ask yourself is whether you want to spend time on marketing and sales. If not, then a traditional publisher might be a good option for you and their large cut is justified as it saves you time.
Another benefit that most publishers offer is that they will handle copyright. As arrangers, this is an area that can get quite complicated very quickly. Personally, I find it the worst part of the job and because the definition of an arrangement is literally to alter an existing work, every time you arrange you have a high chance of running into copyright issues. Not all publishers will deal with copyright and many of the smaller businesses only publish original compositions. Similarly to the marketing and sales aspect, the real question is one of time and hassle. If you don’t want to spend your time dealing with copyright, then a publisher might be a good avenue to pursue.
Personally I sell some charts through publishers and others by myself. I hate dealing with copyright and through ArrangeMe (a branch of Hal Leonard), I publish all of the arrangements I write that require copyright permission to sell. For any original compositions or arrangements which do not require copyright permission, I choose to sell them myself. I enjoy the business side of being an arranger so am happy to spend time working out distribution and marketing for everything that doesn’t require copyright permission.
I don’t really have any experience with major publishers like Alfred, but after talking with some of my colleagues who have a few charts featured with larger publishing companies, it seems as though they can be quite selective. In most cases the process of being featured by such a publisher came out of mutual connections or networking at conferences more so than submitting a work, and almost always the arranger had some kind of reputation in the industry. Personally I don’t really see too much of a reason to pursue this path with my career but it may be advantageous for others.
Miscellaneous Business Lessons
We’ve now covered a lot of the basics when it comes to running your own business but there are a few other topics worthy of discussion that fall outside of the realm of marketing and sales. For the most part these are areas which you’ll face somewhere along the way if you choose this career path but aren’t necessarily as fundamental as the topics we’ve just discussed. Specifically what I’m talking about are topics like cash flow management, handling competition, and work life balance. Each of which can cause significant issues if not addressed correctly, but maybe not directly to your ability to make money from writing music.
Cash Flow Management
For the majority of my working life cash flow has never really been something on my mind. When things are working, it’s not something you really think about. However, two times in my career I’ve been faced with significant cash flow issues which showed me just how important it is to get a handle on your finances. In case you are unaware, cash flow is a term used to describe the timing of your revenue (money in) and expenses (money out). If you have good cash flow it means that the revenue for your business is arriving quick enough to pay off your expenses. However, if you have bad cash flow it means that your expenses are owed before your revenue arrives. In some cases this can be caused by simply not having enough paid work which means not enough cash is coming into the system. Whereas other times you may have completed the work but are waiting for invoices to be paid. Either way, having bad cash flow can be incredibly stressful.
2020 was the first time I dealt with cash flow issues. At the time I was running Jazz Melbourne, a company I had cofounded a year earlier with the primary focus of expanding the reach of jazz education in Australia. Through the business, my business partner and I ran a successful youth big band program and were slowly expanding the company to feature a professional ensemble in the hopes to mirror what Jazz at Lincoln Center had done in New York City. We decided that at the beginning of 2020 would be the perfect time to launch the ensemble with our first concert. After looking through the expected profit and loss for the upcoming year, we came to the conclusion that running a large-scale concert wouldn’t be too risky and that the business could make up any losses through the planned activities later in the year. However, based on the timing I think you probably know where this is going.
We committed to paying about $30-35k for the concert, depleting the entire Jazz Melbourne bank account. Everything went pretty well but as I’ve now found out through both experience and conversations, large scale big band concerts very rarely turn a profit. I think we made back a little bit from ticket sales, but it would definitely have been under $10k. All was okay though as we had expected to take a big financial hit and the planned events for the rest of the year would cover the loss. Unfortunately, a few weeks after the concert the entire world closed down because of the COVID pandemic. Not only had we just spent everything from the business account, but all of the events for the year were cancelled, and the money we had spent came from students in the youth program who now needed to be refunded. Literally the worst case scenario.
In cash flow terms, we now owed close to $30k to the students in the program, had no possible means of making money as all of the traditional avenues like concerts, rehearsals, and workshops couldn’t go ahead, and then we also had to still cover our own personal expenses. At the time my business partner and I disagreed about the refunds. I wanted to give back the cash because we couldn’t deliver the services we promised but he said that due to the global situation the students and parents would understand that we wouldn’t be able to offer refunds. As a result, I pushed him out of the business for the rest of 2020 and then was forced to find a solution by myself because I felt it was the ethically correct thing to do. Being in a global pandemic was stressful enough but having such a cash flow burden really amplified the entire situation.
The good news is, I worked it out. It took about 10 months but I dug in and found solutions. I spent every week delivering free educational content to the youth program and I was transparent with the students and parents which gave me some time to find the money. Somehow after everything that happened in 2020, the majority of the students didn’t accept the refunds and donated it back to Jazz Melbourne, something I never anticipated and even thinking about it now makes me feel quite emotional.
You’d think after going through such a mess that I wouldn’t repeat it right? Well in 2022 I ran another large scale concert. This time though it wasn’t payrolled by a youth program and instead came directly out of my pocket. Without going into the nitty gritty, after the concert was finished I had to come up with around $20k. None of which was owed immediately but I also knew that I couldn’t guarantee on when the revenue from my arranging work was going to come in. Like 2020, I did everything I could and pulled favors where possible and by the middle of 2023 it had been paid off. However, the financial stress still hit me the day after the concert when I realized I had to somehow generate $20k from thin air and that I was running against multiple invoice deadlines.
After going through both situations, I’ve now realized how important it is to be on top of cash flow. Specifically, I make sure that I get paid before I deliver anything and where possible try to delay expenses. By doing so, I give myself the maximum amount of time to make financial decisions and avoid a lot of stressful situations. In an industry where it is so common to invoice after you complete work, you’re very likely to come up against cash flow issues as you’re at the mercy of whoever is paying you. Everyone has their own way of dealing with this, but where possible try and get paid before you complete the work, or at least partially.
Handling Competition
One of the most difficult parts of being an arranger is that everyone is competing for the same sort of work. On top of that, baked within so many music programs is comparison and often students come out of institutions plagued with judgement of their colleagues. Unfortunately all of this leads to a pretty toxic mindset which only hinders those who give in to it. It leaves people questioning themselves about why others get certain opportunities and whether they are good enough. So how do we navigate a world where competition is guaranteed to exist and not see it as a negative? As the answer to this question is tied deeply to how one views themself, it’s not for me to comment on how you should go about living your life. Instead, I can only talk more generally and show you what has worked for me.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that for many, comparison often is a source of pain. Personally, it has led me to view others negatively. Other times I’ve felt like I’m a failure even when everything is going well in my life. Although both outcomes are different, they have often taken away the joy that comes from pursuing my dreams.
I came through a university program where unless you were a fantastic improviser you often were considered a terrible musician. Through regular auditions and performance based testing, it shaped this feeling among the students where someone’s worth was somehow only attached to their skill on an instrument. After being in such a program for years, it was hard to detach myself from that mentality. It breeds a cut throat work ethic that in some ways is necessary to handle the constant battles faced in a freelance career. However, it comes at the expense of your mental health and robs you of the ability to celebrate other’s accomplishments.
Near the end of my degree I almost dropped out. I was pretty much a straight A student and while everything on paper looked good, the pressure of comparison was really getting to me. I was on track to graduate and do everything just fine, but I felt like I was at rock bottom. If it were not for my girlfriend’s insistence, I wouldn’t have made it through that last semester.
These days what I realize is that everyone has struggles and nothing really is as good as it may seem. I try my best not to get sucked into the world of comparison and instead use it as a sign that I should be focusing more on my own work than others. When you realize that everyone is having a hard time making it as a musician, then it is far easier to celebrate each other’s victories because you know just how difficult they are to achieve. With this mindset it makes competition easier to bear, and you see it more as a game than something personal. Everyone has a right to pursue their dreams and if you’re reading this, it’s likely we have a lot of similar aspirations. That doesn’t mean we should hate each other or feel bad when one of us succeeds. Instead we should learn from what we see and try to implement those lessons into our own lives/businesses.
So as you go on and develop your arranging business, try not to compare yourself with others who you are directly competing with. Instead learn from them and focus on what is within your control. If you find yourself being emotionally impacted by other’s achievements, it might be a sign that you need to remove yourself from the situation and perhaps refocus. At the end of the day, all you can do is keep trying to work towards your goals and the only person in charge of that is yourself.
Work Life Balance
As you can tell, we are getting into the heavier topics right now and no resource on becoming a professional arranger would be considered complete without a section on work life balance. In the age we live in, so many people preach an idealized life where you work 8 hours, rest 8 hours, and sleep 8 hours a day with a completely free weekend. Unfortunately, for many musicians this is simply just not true, or at least not achievable for the first couple of decades of your life. In order to achieve great work life balance, there needs to be an abundance of available work and it needs to be able to comfortably cover your lifestyle. As you’re likely aware, in the world of jazz arranging, both of those prerequisites are quite difficult to come by. Furthermore, as a freelancer/entrepreneur you’re specifically paving your own path and what has taken other businesses decades to accomplish may not be the best benchmark for the initial steps in your career.
Personally I lived a very unbalanced life for a number of years. For the entirety of 2019 I worked 16-20 hour days with no more than 4 hours of sleep each night (I know it sounds like an exaggeration but I can promise you that it is in fact true and there are dozens of people who can attest to it). As a result of that work, I was able to achieve a lot and so far no other year in my life is comparable in terms of overall growth. However, it came at the expense of my health, my relationship, and probably a lot of other things that I won’t realize for a number of years.
I love working but hard work doesn’t necessarily equal results. In 2019, everything I did was for a reason and based on positive signals I had seen in previous years. As a result, by working hard in areas I knew would be successful, I was able to achieve results more quickly. There is no point pushing yourself in the wrong direction because all you’ll do is burn yourself out and have nothing to show for it. Did I need to achieve them all in that year? Probably not. In fact, because I overworked myself to such a crazy extent it actually created so many issues in my life that I had to step away for two years from the arts entirely.
So what can we learn from this experience? Well you are going to have to work hard to create anything in life. If you want to have work life balance all it means is that it will take you longer to accomplish the goals you have set for yourself. But the more rest you give yourself the better longevity you will have. Today I don’t work as many hours as I used to and make sure to not compromise on specific things like getting 8 hours of sleep every night, maintaining a healthy lifestyle with regular exercise, and allowing time to spend with others. However, every now and then I will do a “sprint” when needed. I now would rather be able to work for decades on my dream instead of just one intense year.
It is healthy to push your limits and see what you are capable of but that doesn’t mean you need to do it every day. Set goals, follow through with them, and with time you’ll find out what works for your lifestyle. Maybe a 10 hour work day feels good or maybe you’d prefer more flexibility. There is no correct answer. Just realize that a freelance lifestyle does come with hard work that can’t be avoided, so as long as you are prepared then you’ll be able to work out some sort of balance in your life. And if you can’t, it might be a good indicator to look at alternative career paths which offer greater work life balance.
Four Steps To Making Money As An Arranger
Congratulations, you’ve just read through an enormous amount of information mainly from a business perspective, all of which is important to know, but let’s be honest, doesn’t provide a blueprint for how to actually be successful as an arranger. Everything that was mentioned had specific music related examples but the knowledge covered can be applied to any business. So in this section we are going to shift away from the business basics and now look at everything from a jazz arranging perspective. You’ll notice some crossovers but this time it will give you a better idea of what you can do to hopefully find success as an arranger.
1. Acquire Skills
If your dream is to write music for a living then the first place to start is to acquire the skills needed to write music. Depending on which sector of the music industry you want to go into this could look completely different. For me, I always wanted to write music for big band which meant that I had to learn a number of different techniques that included things like voicings, harmony, and understanding the timbres of a number of instruments. If you’re just starting out and don’t know exactly what sort of music you want to write, have a listen to a lot of different styles and then pick the ones that you are drawn to.
Once you’ve established the specific type of music you want to write, you then have to look at how you can learn the relevant skills that make that music sound unique. I’m sure there are more options than the ones I’m about to mention, but traditionally there are three major paths: learning from a teacher, transcribing recordings, and analyzing the music/scores. Essentially, whichever path you choose the goal is to come away with an understanding of how to replicate the sounds you hear. Looking at big band music once again, I’ve utilized each of these options to develop my own skills. Teachers have often revealed techniques I had never heard of such as various voicing shapes and demonstrated how they could be used, while transcribing and analyzing demonstrated how these techniques were utilized by a number of my favorite arrangers in a variety of ways.
At this point you’ll likely be quite aware of the type of music you want to write and have seen how others have used it but the one missing link is personally applying it in your own writing. To really acquire a skill you have to put it through its paces. In arranging that might mean using the technique over a number of different charts until you feel like you could use it with your eyes closed. Eventually you’ll get to a point where you no longer have to think about a given technique and it just comes naturally to you. At this stage you’ve reached mastery and can move on to other skills.
2. Network
You’ve got the required skills to be a professional writer but now you need to find some work. As you already know from the marketing section of this resource, this is the time where you start thinking about lead generation. There are many places to find potential clients as an arranger/composer but the key is that you have to go to where they congregate. In my life I’ve navigated a few different music scenes and each time was rewarded with a different type of arranging work. Initially, my first paid arranging jobs were for cruise ship artists and I received them by networking with fly-in vocalists while playing on a cruise ship. Later on I started working as a high school teacher, and shortly after started receiving commissions from schools. Each time I put myself into a new scene, I started to receive work from the people who needed arrangements in that sector of the music industry.
Here are a few examples of places you could look for arranging work and ways to start engaging with them:
Schools/Universities: Befriend school music teachers, attend music education conferences, partner with school band competitions, reach out to private music instructors
Video Games: Approach independent game developers, attend game conventions and conferences, be present in online game development forums, take part in a game jam
Movies/TV: This may require moving to places where the producers of said industries live such as Los Angeles, approach studio musicians who play on soundtracks, reach out to existing composers and offer to be their assistant, work at a copyist company, approach independent directors
Theatre: Reach out to local musical theatre and/or dance companies, potentially relocate to areas such as the West End or New York which have larger theatre scenes, approach university/school theatre/drama programs
Military: In most cases this will require either knowing someone in a military band that you’d like to write for already or involve you enlisting as a musician and becoming aware of the relevant band leaders
Cruise Ships: Do a short contract on a ship, reach out to guest entertainers and vocalists associated with a variety of cruise lines, work out who in the upper management of each cruise line is responsible for the music across an entire fleet
Wedding/Cover Bands: Approach agencies which book corporate functions, talk with musicians who play corporate gigs
Religious Institutions: Be a member of a congregation, know people who play or work in religious places, go to religious seminars and conferences
The world is a big place and most people are more interested in their own life than yours. Never expect that someone knows who you are regardless of your accomplishments and always be respectful of their time. When you try and network it really isn’t about finding work immediately, it’s purely about learning who people are and engaging with them. Try to find out what they are interested in and how they go about their work. Definitely don’t try to force your work upon them. If they need something it will be pretty clear and you can then use that as a way to find work.
I used to book a lot of shows and I would often have people message me about wanting a gig. For the most part, I didn’t know who these people were and I definitely wasn’t going to give them paid work if I hadn’t heard them play before. The only time I might give someone an opportunity was when someone dropped out at the last moment and I needed a particular instrument to be covered. One particular time there was a bass trombonist who had come to a number of my shows and chatted with me afterward each time. As he had been consistently showing up he was fresh on my mind and when there was an opening for a bass trombone for a gig my mind immediately went to the person. He never asked for a gig, he just showed up and was happy to chat about music. I got to know him over those conversations, enough where I felt comfortable booking him when the time was right.
Asking for writing works in a similar way and in most cases directly asking for paid work will just annoy people. You can however offer them work for free or ask to collaborate as a way to get your foot in the door. Some people say never offer your services for free but when you’re just starting out it is a great way of establishing clients and often you can leverage those experiences to get paid work later on.
3. Create
Somewhere down the line you’ll actually need to start putting your writing out for the world to see. Not only will this help you network but has the additional benefit of helping attract like minded people to you. Before jumping into creating something, think about how you can broadcast your work to the world. That may mean creating a website, any number of social media accounts, writing a blog, or more traditional methods such as creating business cards or physical media like CDs.
Personally I broadcast my work in a mixture of places such as this website where I house my newsletter and all of my educational resources, on YouTube where I post videos of my music, on Facebook and Instagram where I talk about upcoming projects, and on streaming platforms where all of my albums are able to be listened to.
There are a number of ways to create when it comes to arranging, all of which can be boiled down to writing some form of music and then documenting it. You can work alone, collaborate, create music you’re passionate about, display work you’ve written for clients, put on performances, record albums and EPs, create a media portfolio, there really are a lot of ways to put your skills to use.
Depending on the situation I’ve done a bit of everything. When I don’t have any paid work I’ll come up with a fun project I want to work on or approach a friend to collaborate with. These projects sometimes just lead to a rough rehearsal recording but sometimes blow up into performances and studio recordings. It really depends on the time and money available but no matter what the situation is there is room to be creative. Remember, it’s pretty hard to put yourself out there and get paid work if you have no track record, so why wait? Start creating now!
4. Analyze & Adjust
Once you’ve got the skills, networked and found a client or two, and have written a bit of music, you can start to look at what’s working and what’s not. It’s never a bad time to reflect on what you are doing, just make sure you are looking at the correct indicators otherwise your efforts may go to waste. Personally, I try to set project based deadlines with specific outcomes I’m trying to achieve. Once a project comes to an end, I look back and see which outcomes panned out and which didn’t. I can then work backwards and look at which approaches should stay the same and then which should be changed and try it all again with the next project. In this resource so far you’ve seen a number of my personal stories where things didn’t quite work out but I learnt something from the experience. This is exactly what I’m talking about when it comes to analyzing and adjusting. In most cases I was able to see that something went wrong and have since adjusted my approach.
Copyright Basics
One area you will need to be aware of if you plan on creating arrangements is copyright. Although I mentioned it earlier, I didn’t go into any detail of how it impacts arrangers and the work we do. Similar to what I stated at the start of this resource, please remember that I am not a legal professional and that when engaging with copyright related matters it would be wise to check with someone who is very familiar with not only the copyright laws in the country you reside in but also in the country where the original composition you are arranging was created. Most western countries have organizations which directly handle copyright and they often release straightforward guides that can help you navigate the systems in place. Better yet is that they often have consultants you can talk with directly free of charge.
As an arranger, there are two sides to understanding copyright: the first being how to secure ownership of your original work, and the second being how to create an arrangement of another person’s work lawfully. Depending on which country you live in, securing ownership is generally a lot more simple. In my home country of Australia, there is a law (The Australian Copyright Act of 1968) which states that nobody else can use your work unless they have secured permission to do so. This is an amazing situation as the Australian government has made it so that you automatically own all work that you create. Of course the situation can be a lot more complex when it comes down to contractual work for others as well as when more than one person contributes to a project, but in a very simple sense the copyright act gives a lovely level of security to Australian music makers. I’m less aware of the situation elsewhere in the world but from my limited understanding I believe something similar exists in the United States.
Once you’ve secured ownership, the next step is to register it with some sort of agency which keeps track of copyright claims (the same place you might look for help with copyright related questions). In Australia, that’s APRA AMCOS but in other places like the United States you can use ASCAP or BMI. The role of these agencies is to keep track of any time your work has been used and pay out any royalties to you, so it is quite beneficial to register your work with them. After that you’re all set and your works will be protected under copyright.
Unfortunately, the other half of navigating copyright is considerably more confusing. As arrangements are built off other people's compositions, every time you want to arrange a piece you will most likely have to engage with some kind of copyright. There are many ways this can play out depending on the situation and they all have different terms and permissions. To keep it simple for a moment, it’s best just to expect that you’ll have to request permission for any arrangement you write. How this plays out in reality is that the system is streamlined through licensing which helps streamline the entire process.
Before unpacking how to go about receiving permission to arrange a work, there are two specific exceptions to be aware of. In most cases where there is no money being exchanged for an arrangement, then no royalties can be paid. What this means is that if you write an arrangement but have no plans to perform, record, or sell it, then it’s likely you won’t need to seek permission to create it. This is the case for many students and hobbyists who are just trying to apply their arranging skills and improve their skills with no desire to actually do anything with the final product. However, as soon as you are wanting to use it in any capacity you would then have to go through acquiring permission.
The second exception is in the case of public domain works. These are works that have aged out of copyright (generally 95 years after the original publication or 70 years after the author’s death) and are free to be used by anyone. However, not all compositions go into the public domain due to various complications. A simple search on the internet will help you discover what songs are in the public domain and which ones might be available in coming years. At the time of writing this resource, many works by Gershwin are now entering the public domain which is wonderful for us arrangers as it signals a period where a lot of the Great American Songbook will soon be free to use.
Outside of those two exceptions, there are specific processes in place to deal with different forms of copyright. I’ll try my best to unpack each one, but I’ve only ever dealt with those that are relevant to my projects and your situation may fall outside of the information on this page. What you need to be aware of is that if you plan on selling an arrangement, selling a recording of an arrangement, performing the arrangement, video recording an arrangement, and selling a video recording of an arrangement, each has a different process to handle copyright and they are all different.
Selling An Arrangement
It doesn’t matter whether you’ve been commissioned or just wanting to self-publish one of your arrangements, in order to make money legally from a sale you need to have permission from the copyright holder to do so. Depending on the terms of obtaining permission that might require you to pay out a royalty too. This is by far the biggest roadblock in arranging and stops a lot of people from selling their arrangements. If you get approached by a client who wants a certain arrangement, technically either you or your client needs to secure permission ahead of time before you begin work. If not, you are in breach of copyright.
These days it can be difficult to know who owns the publishing rights for a certain song and oftentimes it isn’t the original composer. To work this out you have to reach out to your copyright agency and they will find out who you need to request permission from. Currently, a lot of publishing rights are owned by Hal Leonard (they have quite the monopoly), and in most cases they reject a lot of permission requests as you’d be directly competing with their sheet music business. In recent years to make life a bit easier, they have created ArrangeMe which allows people to sell arrangements of works Hal Leonard has the publishing rights for with the condition that the arrangement has to be sold through Hal Leonard’s store and the arranger will only receive 10% of overall sales in exchange for the service. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than not being able to sell a chart.
As you are choosing to arrange someone else’s work, they are more than welcome to refuse permission to you. Unfortunately there is absolutely nothing you can do about it and it is just part of being an arranger.
Selling A Recording Of An Arrangement
For some reason, when it comes to producing a recorded version of your arrangement it is actually a lot simpler than selling the sheet music. Unlike the previous process, this time you don’t actually have to get permission, instead all you have to do is purchase a mechanical licence. This licence establishes a royalty amount that you have to pay per sale or stream of the specific track. Generally how this plays out is that for the first couple of thousand sales/streams, you pay up front based on an estimate of how many people you think will purchase/listen to the recording. If you’re lucky and your arrangement is popular, then you can report your data quarterly and pay accordingly.
Depending on where you live, you will purchase mechanical licences through different sources. For example, in the USA you can acquire them through the Harry Fox agency whereas in Australia you can purchase them from APRA AMCOS (the same agency you register your music at). I’m not too sure of the going royalty rates but they are generally something like $0.01 per sale, so nothing too extravagant. There is also the option to go through a distributor when you release recordings and typically part of their services will cover handling mechanical royalties. Personally I usually opt for this method even though it is more expensive as it is far simpler than chasing up the mechanical licences for every track and monitoring all of the sales across dozens of platforms.
Performing An Arrangement
One area which often gets overlooked is the fact that publishing rights also extend to performances. Fortunately, due to the high number of people that want to play covers, most countries have legislation that helps artists play arrangements live. For example, in Australia these licences are often handled by the venue, where they pay an annual fee which allows covers and arrangements to be performed in their establishments. I’ve never really dealt with this side of the business as I’ve never owned a venue, however I do know that some larger venues (particularly larger halls) require artists to acquire the performance licence. Personally, I’ve only ever done this once for a concert back in 2020 which required a bit of back and forth with APRA AMCOS and resulted in paying a fixed amount based on the specific arrangements we were going to perform. I imagine the same process exists in countries like the United States too. The takeaway is to know that just because you write an arrangement doesn’t mean you can perform it for free. Make sure you are aware of who owns the licences and whether you are responsible for paying or not.
Releasing Video Footage Of An Arrangement
The last avenue to be aware of is if you plan on filming a performance of your arrangement. There are two sides to this, one where you release it for free and one where you sell the footage. Releasing footage for free generally is acceptable and allowed under the Fair Use Act, a piece of legislation that allows usage of copyrighted material as long as it meets a number of certain principles. Both Australia and the United States have similar acts, and it is how platforms like YouTube can operate. You’ll have to look up the Act yourself to understand the finer points but generally releasing a video of an arrangement for free fall under its conditions.
However this all changes as soon as you want to sell that footage. In which case the process mirrors exactly what we discussed when selling an arrangement. You have to get permission in order to release the footage, and in exchange for that permission you’ll likely have to pay some sort of fee and/or royalty. The copyright owner also has the right to refuse permission too.
Copyright Takeaway
Copyright is one of the trickiest aspects to being an arranger but it is absolutely necessary in order to guarantee artists are treated fairly. If you create something of value and others use it for financial gain, then you should be entitled to a percentage because you were the original creator. The only way of upholding that is through copyright protection and although it can be frustrating when you are the one creating an arrangement of another person's work, it is much better than living in a world where people freely steal others' work and no one gets compensated.
If dealing with copyright feels overwhelming, don’t worry, everyone feels that way. Fortunately there are a lot of people that are willing to help you navigate it and based on my experiences in Australia, the advice came free of charge. Even after all of that you decide you don’t want to deal with copyright, well then the best option for you is to only arrange public domain works and compose originals. Many people only do this and it is still definitely a viable option.
What To Do When You Have No Money
So much of creating music revolves around having money and there really is no way of avoiding it. If you want to professionally record or put on larger scale projects you often need some kind of finance behind you to make it work. If you’re like me and often find yourself with not much money in the bank to spend on projects, then that may be problematic. Ideally, everything we create would pay itself off and then leave a little profit for us to enjoy, but realistically that often never happens with jazz related projects. Instead the pay offs either come over significant amounts of time and/or are not in a monetary form. So how do we make money? Or maybe more accurately, how do we create without money? As someone that has often put on large projects without any money to start with, the key is to understand what you have at your disposal.
Most people have more free resources at their fingertips than they realize, and these resources can be leveraged to make money and create music more affordably. That might look like working with friends who are happy to do something for free, calling your entire phone book and seeing if anyone will donate to your cause or attend a concert, or talking with an old band director to see if you can help out at your alma mater. You probably also know people who have a larger network than you that you can tap into such as a friend or teacher that has played a gig at a venue you want to play a show at. If you are someone that doesn’t have any network, go online and talk with random people. It may seem weird at first but there are literally thousands of people you can reach through social media and forums which are looking to collaborate. There are almost infinite possibilities. When you don’t have money you need to look at what you do have and usually that is quite a lot.
Once you’ve established at least some kind of awareness of what you might be able to use without paying, then start seeing how it can be used to make money. The most common example of this is writing some music for a friend's band, recording their rehearsal or show on your phone, posting the recording online and then using that to sell charts. Even better would be if you also played in the band and could use the recording to get a paid gig. Quite quickly you’ll find that these free resources can lead to some sort of minimal income which you can then invest into necessary expenses.
When you’re starting out you don’t need the best gear and often it might be years before gear actually makes a difference. Use whatever you can create for free to build your audience and then come up with ways they might be able to buy things from you. Maybe it’s a little EP you created on a free DAW with free samples, maybe it’s educational content, it doesn’t really matter.
As you get more comfortable with the process of using what’s around you, you’ll start getting more ambitious and taking bigger risks. Often these risks will lead to a bigger pay off which will then give you more money to invest into the next risk. When I started out I asked a few friends if they wanted to play in a jazz quintet together. We then approached our friends and family about gigging, got a small amount of money from those shows and then used it to record a few professional tracks when we eventually were approached by clients for demo tracks. That led to slightly better paid gigs which gave us confidence to approach more reputable venues which in turn led to higher pay. Eventually, this path got me to the point where I feel comfortable taking much larger risks such as the two large big band concerts I mentioned earlier. I never started out with any cash to achieve these goals and they came purely out of utilizing my network.
Alternatively, if that path feels a bit too risky or difficult, you can also look at alternative income streams such as having a job on the side. This is by far the most common way of funding a career in music and the majority of professional musicians actually supplement their income through other professions such as teaching. It’s also worth mentioning that there is a third option which is seeking funding through grants and philanthropy, however this is a highly competitive process which often only results in a one time payout, and I’ve found you can make considerably more by channeling the same energy elsewhere. Choose what suits you best, because at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter how you make the money, all that matters is that you can when you need it.
The Role of Luck
When it comes to being successful as an arranger most of it comes down to luck. You never know what is around the corner and for the most part you can’t control who approaches you or who doesn’t. If you look at the stories of a lot of the world’s greatest musicians, they often had a pivotal moment in their life which allowed them to break into the upper echelon of the music industry. If you look at someone like Quincy Jones, yes we now know him as someone that was highly successful but at first he was writing low paid big band charts in New York and only just getting by. He chose to take a risk and went into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt running his big band and touring Europe. Out of that he was lucky for a record label to front him the money in exchange for work, which eventually led to him down a line of interactions which helped him become a well known record producer. If one person at the label decided it was too much of a risk to front Quincy the cash, he probably wouldn’t have gone on to have the success we now associate with his name. Alternatively, if big band jazz wasn’t seen as a viable option for record labels in the 1950s and 60s, he may never have got off the ground to begin with.
Although luck does play a major role in the trajectory of a career, there is one element within our control and that is to be prepared for any opportunity. If your dream is to write music for incredible artists, you need to know how to write music. Additionally, the more you put yourself out there the higher the chance someone will see you. Yes you will attract negative attention, that just comes with the territory, but you need to push through the opinions of others if you want to truly give yourself the best chance of success. What I’m saying is that it is very unlikely anyone will simply drop your dream gig on your lap, you need to go out there, get the skills, and flaunt them to the world. Be as consistent as possible and if you keep showing up, you give yourself the best chance for one of those lucky moments to happen.
Although I’m by no means a majorly successful artist, I’ve still had a number of dream gigs. Once I got to play and write for Yo-Yo Ma thanks to a friend of mine who was playing at the event. I only knew him because I had been running a regular big band and one month I needed a sub. He was recommended by a good friend of mine, Niels, who I only knew because I attended the University of North Texas. If I had decided to follow what my music teachers in high school had suggested and not push myself to travel and study overseas, I wouldn’t have met Niels. If I hadn’t taken the initiative to start the house band at the local jazz club, Niels never would have recommended this trombonist. And then when inevitably this trombonist was told that the orchestra for Yo-Yo Ma needed a few arrangements, he wouldn’t have thought of me. Yes it was completely luck that the gig with Yo-Yo Ma came up in the first place, but I had given myself the best chance to be called upon if an opportunity arose, and in this case it did.
Never doubt yourself. We as humans are capable of amazing feats and the only thing that is stopping you from your goals is throwing yourself at them. Yes luck will play a role, but no matter whether you achieve great success or not, you’ll learn so much from the journey and be a better person because of it. I recently heard a quote somewhere which I think perfectly sums up this sentiment. I can’t remember the specific wording but it went something like this: “Following your passion leads you into immense difficulties but by facing those difficulties you gain empathy for those around you.” And I think these days, if everyone was a bit more empathetic it would help make the world a better place.
The Takeaway
Congratulations for making it through this gigantic resource. I didn’t quite intend for it to be this big but here we are. Being a professional arranger can be a tough job and in today's climate it really means juggling a lot of different hats. I hope that this page has been able to provide some level of clarification to what it takes and gives an accurate representation of the skills you may need to acquire to increase your chances of success. As I stated near the start of the page, I’m still learning all of this myself and by no means consider myself that successful, so if there’s something you disagree with that’s completely okay. All this resource is meant to do is give you a truthful insight into what I’ve experienced over my decade plus of being an arranger and hopefully might help you save some time and avoid a few pitfalls along the way. There are no rules to becoming a pro arranger though, so if you carve your own path that looks differently to mine, let me know and I’d love to learn from your experiences. If I could leave you with anything it is to try and be okay with discomfort, because a career in the arts is filled with unknowns but being uncomfortable is guaranteed.