Career

                                                              Career’s Inquiry Report

Introduction

The idea of doing the thing you would love to do as a future career and how to achieve that dream makes you wonder how it would be possible. Some are easier and some are extremely difficult careers to get into. There are many things you might need to consider before making a definite decision on your potential future job. This varys from skills, qualifications and qualities. The job that I would love to do more than anything else in the world is to be a Musician. Being a very ambitious career and possibly one of the hardest to get into, you need to have a very specific set of skills that you would need to acquire over a very long time and a lot of years worth of hard work. A musician is someone that composes, writes and plays their own music and sometimes covers other peoples music. There are many paths a person can take to become a musician but it's just about finding what feels right for you. For example one path you can take is starting off by learning an instrument and trying to get into a band from there. While there is that you can actually go to University and try to get a Bachelor in Music. What this means is that you gather everything you already know with music and try to advance that by learning Classical, Jazz and other types of music. Today for this Inquiry I will explain some of the things it might take to become a musician and some other things that might come as important. 

Pay 

A quote by Mick Jagger is said that ‘lose your dream and you might lose your mind. This is him saying that although your dreams might be extremely hard to reach you should never stop dreaming otherwise it will change who you are as a person. Many people ask “how much money does a musician make?" Well, while there is no set pay for a musician. It really depends on your skill and how well you play. Even still there are many ways to make money as a musician. One of the more obvious ways is streaming services, This is likely one of the best ways to release music nowadays. Although they don’t pay a lot of money straight away they do add up to a lot over time. For example if you were to have 10,000 streams on spotify then you would make around $43.70. 100,000 being $437 and 1,000,000 being $4,370. This is just an estimate based on U.S results. Another way to earn money as a musician is Touring and playing live shows. The easiest way to calculate is to half the total amount you get from playing, Example if you earn $500,000 half of that goes towards the crew, the venue you're playing at and staff of the venue. The other half goes to the songwriters and everyone in your band which is usually split up between the band.

Skills and Qualifications 

When I spoke to my expert about some of the things he thought were key to being a musician and what employers look for  he said “Some of the key skills and qualities you would need as a musician range from all sorts of things. Obviously you would need to know how to play some sort of musical instrument. This is important for highly obvious reasons. Without knowing how to play an instrument then you can’t really play any music. But something else you could do if you weren’t interested in playing an instrument is trying to sing. Many musicians never learn how to play an instrument like Ozzy Osborne. He never actually learned how to play an instrument until after he finished learning how to sing.

Another skill that is almost needed for every musician is learning how to tune an instrument. This is important because if your instrument is out of tune then you can easily re-tune it to make it sound better. Another important thing every aspiring musician must know is basic music theory. Theory is important because it allows musicians to finally know the best way to compose, write and record music”. All of that and you have all the knowledge and skills to become a musician. Now you may be asking yourself. “Doesn’t that seem too easy?” well it's not as easy as it sounds, you can make a song but in order for you to make a full living out of it you would have to at least make it a hit. Not only that but you would need to travel around if you were wanting to tour. It's all about how you write the music. Most successful musicians have a lot of feeling in their music because it's something that they deeply care about and it's not only their passion but their job as well. Now for Qualifications. As a musician some of the major qualifications that you would need to have are resilience..Every musician in the history of time itself has had some sort of difficulty that has needed to be overcome. Whether it be from death, illness or some other problem involving the music itself. For example Dave Grohl was in a band called Nirvana. When the lead singer and guitarist of that band Kurt Cobain died Dave Grohl wasn’t in a great place but he still wanted to continue writing and making music.so a few years later he formed a band called the Foo Fighters. They became a success and it wouldn’t have happened if Dave didn’t have resilience than the foo fighters might’ve not happened. Self discipline is another very important competency of a musician as without any self discipline they wouldn’t be driven to write more music and create new ideas. Many musicians that lack self discipline end up stopping as they have no ideas or anything to keep them going. The final competency that is probably the most important out of the three is Patience. Without patience then musicians wouldn’t be able to do what they do. It's one of the things that drives them to be better not only as a person but as an artist as well. If they didn’t have patience then most musicians from the past 50 years probably would have ended up quitting. The next qualification that I think is majorly important for being a musician is confidence. Confidence is Highly important when you are a musician. First off it is almost impossible to become a musician without having the confidence to not only put your music out there but also getting up on stage in front of a crowd. As a musician if you didn’t have confidence then you would not be able to become a musician. As I have said it is almost impossible to do so without it.

Competencies

Now that some of the qualities have been established we need to figure out what some of the key competencies are of someone who would want to be a musician. After talking to my expert and doing some research on what some of the main key competencies of a musician are, I have come to the conclusion that these three are the most important three competencies of a musician. Creativity is highly important as if you weren’t creative in what you were doing as a musician then I believe that it would be extremely difficult to try and write your own music. If you weren’t creative as a musician then you would find it incredibly hard to maneuver through the music scene as most musicians have highly creative minds and that is what makes them tick.

The final competency that I believe is important for being a musician is communication. This is because without communication in your band or with the people that help you create your music it would become frustrating and is the cause for most great bands breaking up. For example, The Beatles, One of the greatest bands of all time, broke up for multiple reasons but one of the biggest was due to lack of communication. If they communicated about some of their problems and things that were going on at the time, They might have been able to save their band and keep touring for a few more years. Who knows what would’ve been.

Timetable

One of the final things people need to think about is what can set them apart from other people that want to be a musician as well so to start off What can I do in Junior and Senior school to insure that I have the best possible chance of getting my dream job?. Well there are many things that I can do in and out of class to help me succeed and achieve my goal. One of these is trying to get into a band and potentially try and write my own material just to get out of my comfort zone. As I get older things are likely to become more challenging and I will keep having to push forward to try and achieve my dream. In senior school I will continue doing things in a band and try to collaborate with other musicians at different schools or at this school. Eventually I would like to have an end goal of releasing some music on streaming services like Spotify and even travel overseas to learn or go to university to ensure I have the capability to become a musician.

Conclusion

In conclusion I believe that these are all essential for being a musician.. Out of everything that I have said today I believe that the most effective thing you can do as a musician and to ensure you have a high chance of success is to be hired by an employer is to follow all of these and you will have a extremely successful opportunity at becoming a musician.