#028: The Lessons I Learned from 2020
“When you view the world through rose colored glasses, all of the red flags just look like flags” - Bojack Horseman
Everyone has now read their fair share of ‘2020 was a crazy year’ headlines and articles. This isn’t just another one of those.
For the first year within the past century, 2020 forced nearly every person on the planet to change their way of life due to COVID-19. For people in the United States, throw in the economic + political turmoil and a civil rights movement. For Californians — where I currently live — throw in a tumultuous wildfire season. Aside from the people most directly effected by each of these issues, business-owners have had to pivot and get creative like never before. It is here where I’d like to put the focus for a moment.
2020 made me realize that I am incredibly grateful to be an entrepreneur within the music industry. The entrepreneurs mindset is one built upon passion and a relentless work ethic, regardless of the business type. This also inherently comes with the lack of comfort that can only come with a gauranteed salary and the benefits of corporate life. In March 2020, many people realized overnight that their employment and the safety net that comes with it could be in jeopardy. This caused a deep dread and anxiety that crippled many people that I know. But for the real entrepreneurs of the world, the realization that you are going to have to hustle for your next dollar and that you might have to fight through some tough challenges ahead felt like just another day of the week. This is not to downplay the real challenges that many entrepreneurs are facing or the business that aren’t going to survive the pandemic. Each of those are traumatic situations for the people involved. But for those businesses who have the foundation to make it through, like my own, I have felt it much easier to take it all in stride and maintain a certain level of normalcy when it comes to work.
Aside from having the entrepreneur’s mindset, being in the music industry has been another blessing that I have embraced over the past nine months. The music industry has always had the reputation of being mostly recession-proof and we’re seeing that it has mostly been pandemic-proof as well. The live music sector has been obliterated. There is no way around that. But the rest of the business around music has been mostly unchanged and some areas are seeing booms like never before — ie livestream concerts, publishing valuations and direct fan-to-artist funding. Many business owners, regardless of how hard they work or the execution of their strategies, simply don’t have a chance to survive due to the sector that they’re in — just ask event planners, caterers or many restauranteurs. That is why I am grateful that my company (Preach) is music-focused, to allow for a real chance of continued growth during these difficult times.
Not only has Preach survived 2020, but in many ways it is thriving like never before. At the end of 2019, Preach was a music management-focused company, with two primary clients, and with a marketing wing starting to develop around Preach Sessions (a live concert series that brings elite recording artists and influencers together in a creative space). Regardless of the pandemic, the management roster grew from two artists to six artists, including breakout releases from Dylan Dunlap, BJRNCK and BEKA. In addition to this expansion, we have been working hard since March on the launch of two new sectors of the company that will be unveiled in January 2021 (hint… one is a partnership with Universal Music Group that will allow us to break even more artists on a global scale and other is a simple, yet revolutionary, technology tool to share your contact information). In addition to these two new brands to come, I started writing these articles and launched JayCohenMusic.com in 2020. And this doesn’t even factor in the return of Preach Sessions and live concerts/touring for all of our artists. Success is about more than just earnings — even though our earnings did increase from 2019 to 2020. The important growth came by using 2020 to lay the foundation for new pieces of the business that will grow massively in the years ahead.
None of this is to say that it has been an easy year. It hasn’t. I wrote this to say that with vision, keeping a macro view on your business and relentless work, it is possible to continue to expand during a difficult time. I wrote this to give assurance to those entering the music industry that they just might not be making such a terrible mistake, like what their parents are telling them. I wrote this to give hope to keep fighting for the entrepreneurs around the world, regardless of what they do. Onward and upward in 2021 and beyond…
