In this solo talk, Mark Roberge argues that independent musicians should focus exclusively on the aspects of their career they can control—creating music, shaping their brand, messaging, and actively building and engaging a fanbase. He warns that hoping for discovery by labels, management, or viral moments is akin to buying lottery tickets: unpredictable and outside the artist’s control. Consistent content creation, genuine fan connections, and measurable metrics (e.g., fan acquisition, merch sales, show attendance) are presented as the reliable path to a sustainable, six‑figure music business. Roberge introduces the Make Our Music framework, which provides tools, systems, and teams to track these metrics, convert fans into superfans, and monetize the audience. He cites its use on projects like Prospect Hill and Lansdowne as proof of concept, and ends with a call to action for artists to reach out via direct messages for assistance.
Chapters
As an artist, the only thing you have control of in your career is obviously the creation of your music, your brand, your messaging, and your fan building, right? So you building and, and creating connections with real people and making them and turning them into fans, you have control of that, right? That's the number one thing you have control of. Your Spotify streams, your YouTube views, all that stuff is gonna be a, uh, ultimately a result of those fans, right? But having, you know, the mindset of I'm going to build my fan base, I'm going to engage with them, I'm going to nurture them, I'm going to turn them into diehard superfans, I'm going to build my, my fan army is really where the mindset needs to lie. It needs to be there because everything else is a lottery ticket, right? Hoping that you're going to get discovered by some record label or some management company or you're going to go viral, right? So those are hopeful things. You can have all those hopes and dreams, but those are things that you cannot control. They're outside of your control. Control. That's a variable beyond what you're able to actually manage yourself, right? Those things are lottery tickets. You putting out content consistently, that's great. It's going to build new audience. It's going to drive new people in that you can then connect to, right? And then by chance, maybe very small, very small chance, small percentage out there that something is actually going to blow up and turn things around for you. That it happens, yes. But typically it happens after you have a foundational fan base because they're the ones engaging enough on that content to then push it out into virality, right? So that's what I, you know, constantly telling artists and, you know, everybody I speak to, all my friends and bands and clients and bands and artists that, you know, it's, you gotta do the things that you're in control of because ultimately if you're doing this and you're doing it every day, a year from now your career looks different. 2 years from now your career looks different. And 5 years from now it's completely different where now you actually have an infrastructure and it's financially sound and you have a fan base that you're, you know, able to monetize And you know ultimately have a six-figure business around, right? And if you're building towards that, all these other things are still possible. But if you're just shooting for the lottery ticket all the time, you're not going to have that, right? You're not going to have this foundation. You're not going to have fans because you're just constantly just hoping and hoping and hoping. And you know I don't know about you guys, but I'm not all about hope. I'm about action, and I'm about real measurable metrics and saying okay, you know X amount of fans came in today. X amount of those fans purchased today. X amount of those fans. Showed up to the show, X amount of those fans purchased the merchandise bundle. Like, these are the things that you want to have conversations about. And understanding that and having a system for that is what we do here at Make Our Music. Our whole foundation is that because I personally was so sick of the whole lottery rat race of like, let's throw it at the wall and see what happens, right? And that's— it's bullshit. And you're ultimately not in control of your career. And I'm just not down with that. So, you know, anybody that's looking for help with this, this is what we do. This is our whole structure is built around this with Make our music with all of our foundational tools, our systems, our teams. It's all that. And we use it for our own projects. I use it for Prospect Hill. Sean uses it for Lansdowne. This is what we do, right? So this is why we're here. And ultimately, we're— we created the thing that we wanted to exist for ourselves, and now we're trying to help as many independent artists as possible. So hit us up, hit us in the DMs. Later, guys.
