What's Your Time Worth?

As an independent Christian artist, you probably don't have a lot of financial resources so you’re always looking for ways to save money and do things on a budget. However, what's more scarce is the one resource that you can never earn/get back: your time. You only have 24 hours in each day - 168 hours per week. 

If you think about it in currency, it may make it more tangible for you. Imagine I gave you $24 at the beginning of each day and whatever you didn’t spend would disappear and you were not allowed to save it, you had to spend it. What would you do with that money? Now convert that back into hours. You are given 24 hours a day and each day it resets. 

You probably sleep 6-8 hours per night and you may even work a full-time job, so about 10 hours day at work, assuming you have a commute. Plus, you need time to eat and time for family/friends. That probably leaves you with 20-30 hours a week max (about 4 hours per day) to dedicate to your music career.

Four hours a day is not much time, so you probably want every minute to count. What’s the best thing to do with that time? Spend it doing things that only YOU can do. Outsource the rest. 

Here are some examples of things that only you can do:

-Build relationships with people in the Christian music industry

-Write your music / sing your songs

-Create video content (i.e. Instagram reels, YouTube videos, TikTok videos, etc)

-Performing at shows

-Collaborating with other artists and songwriters

-Podcasting

Here are some examples of things that you can outsource to the experts:

-Accounting

-Music production

-Advertising/Marketing

-Pitching your songs to playlists

-Sending out press releases

-Collecting your royalties

Yes, these things cost money to outsource, but I would challenge you to look at them as investments into your music career. 

Let me give you an example. I own a marketing agency and a record label. Every month SOMEONE needs to handle our accounting and at the end of each year, someone needs to handle our tax returns. Accounting and taxes are not my strengths. Rather than spend hours on YouTube trying to learn how to DIY it or going to school to take courses on it, I choose to pay a professional accountant (with many years of experience) to take care of those things for me. 

That alone probably gives me back at least 15 hours a month. It may only take my accountant 1-2 hours to do the same thing because he’s an expert. I can spend those 15 hours I just got back and invest my time into doing things that only I can do, like creating strategies to grow my businesses.

I’m happy to pay my accountant a monthly retainer to handle my accounting and taxes for me. I don’t pay him for the # of hours it took him to do it. I pay him for the expertise.

Here’s how it could translate into your music career as a Christian artist:

You can hire out production to a well-respected producer instead of spending hours on YouTube trying to learn how to produce yourself (and then buying all the equipment).

You can hire out digital advertising to grow your social media following, YouTube views and Spotify streams instead of spending hours trying to learn how to do it and hope that you know what you’re doing and aren’t wasting your dollars on ads that aren’t effectively reaching your ideal audience.

You can hire Christian Music Marketing (shameless plug) to pitch your upcoming single to legit curators on Spotify because we’ve developed those relationships over the years instead of you spending hours researching and then cold-emailing or DM’ing curators, hoping they take submissions.

You can give a percentage of your royalties to a publishing administrator - hiring them to use their expertise to collect the royalties that you’ve earned - instead of trying to figure out how to do that yourself…which will cost you many hours and cost you money that you’re leaving on the table.

Here’s the BIG IDEA: focus your time and energy on things that only YOU can do and leave the rest to the experts. 

If you’re serious about your music career, you HAVE TO look at it as your business. It takes financial investment to start and grow a business. In order to make money, you have to invest money. If you really believe in your music, you need to invest in it.

To be clear, I am NOT saying you shouldn’t have a clue how the different aspects of the Christian music industry work. I think it’s important to understand those things and that’s why we’ve created courses to help you understand. I try to understand how my business accounting works and understand how to read my financial reports. That does not mean that you need to (or should be) the one doing the actual work.

Hope this was helpful. I’d love to hear from you! If you have questions or thoughts on this blog post, DM me on Instagram @WisdomMoon!