Research Portfolio
Being a session musician is both rewarding and demanding; it requires a great level of perseverance in an already difficult field, as well as extensive knowledge of your craft. The music industry is already quite competitive, and in order to thrive, you must be passionate about your instrument, be willing to work late nights and early mornings on repetitive compositions, and have strong networking and organisational abilities. To be a session musician typically requires you to study music at college or university. You can self-study however having a bachelor’s degree within the subject or your chosen instrument is common within the industry. To gain experience within the profession you will need to build a portfolio marketing your services and a collection of your previous work in order to secure jobs and roles for people to hire you. If you are just starting out within this field and have no previous experience volunteering is a perfect way to gain experience, then include your volunteer work in your portfolio. Finding future employment is typically simpler when you have examples and experience to offer. This can include specific grades, written credentials, prior employment and audio/video recordings of your work. Allowing your potential employer to gauge a sense of your work and graft to see whether you’d be a good fit for their position. An easy way to do this is to make a distinctive website that showcases a wide range of your work, including many musical genres and projects. Displaying a variety of examples demonstrates to prospective clients that you can work on projects in diverse musical styles. Building a network is also essential for advancing within the profession, as well as for entering the movie or commercial music industries. Building relationships in this area enables you to demonstrate your abilities as well as your dependability, timeliness, and ease of working with, which will enable your friend to refer you to a prominent artist who has ties to your band and suddenly needs a tuba player. Create a personal network, keep up a professional website, and post cards or posters at nearby studios to let others know you’re accessible.
The beauty of typically being a session player is the lack of creative pressure and ego (Cartwright 2022) “You’re literally just there to help people” says interviewee, Samuel Organ. Persuring your own artistic endeveours incredibly “exhausting”. To be a session player I think a key attribute is to be flexible and proficient within your instrument and, the more the better and you need to have a wide range of personal communication skills and you will be typically working for other people. For example, some specific skills such as, active listening, adaptability, communication, motivation, patience, memory, and learning speed. You must be able to demonstrate knowledge of various musical genres, instruments, and equipment. Technical skills include instrumental competence, pitch, reading sheet music, timing and rhythm, composition and arrangement, and singing with or without accompaniment. To establish yourself as a session player, it’s important to say yes to everything until you have something to say no to. (Hartley, K., 2017)
A typical day’s work for a session musician would include would working in the recording and broadcasting industry whether that be for an individual artist, commercial ads, film audio, jingles or music for radio. There is no predetermined schedule for how many hours you must work or when you must work them as a freelance musician (Beeching, A.M., 2010). While some musicians may prefer a more stable 9–5, non-arts job during the day, to give them some distance from music and allow them to pursue their creative passions in their free time with less pressure to succeed, many musicians, for instance, want their entire working hours to be connected to the arts and to be surrounded constantly by other musicians who share their work ethic. One of the most difficult aspects of being a freelance session musician and juggling many jobs is dealing with schedule conflicts. You need to make sure that you are on top of rehearsals and performances, especially when you are working with multiple conflicts. It is always best to look for employment that offers the most flexibility possible. The yearly salary for session musicians is roughly $54,000, although it can vary greatly and reach $100,000 based on expertise and work. It fluctuates a lot depending on your project because they work on a project-by-project basis.
While copyright is a major concern for artists in the music industry, session musicians are typically paid in full and do not need to claim royalties or defend themselves against copyright. Session musicians are also typically contracted to a label as the definition of one with be someone who plays a musical instrument or sings in a live or recording gig or session without being a featured artist. Within the history of being a session musician/performer, dating back to the Baroque period – the composers were known for being at the top of the podium financially (Rosen, S., 2012). The majority of royalties tend to go to composers rather than performers due to the complex nature of the system. However, the performers’ historical exploitation has gradually changed over the last decade, and in many cases, attempts have been made to provide the performers ‘joint authorship,’ which means that if they contributed to the writing process, they should receive a share of the copyright. This contains examples such as musical arrangements, which would not have been recognised earlier in the musical industry. Whereas presently, if a musician makes “an original contribution to the creation of an arrangement,” they are liable for copyright contribution, which permits them to collect a part of licensing money. According to (Hesmondhalgh and Meier 2018), sessions musicians often require numerous sources of income due to the occasional nature of self-employment. School-teaching, university lecturing, becoming a part of an original band, and composing musicals for documentaries/library music are just a few examples of the many professional opportunities available with the abilities you learn throughout sessions.Being a session musician and earning enough money to support yourself entirely on that income is, in my opinion, extremely uncommon. If you are passionate about music enough to pursue this career path in the first place, you are likely to want to grow your portfolio.
A really good way to market and promote yourself as an established session player is compiling all of your necessary skills and experience into a portfolio. Living in such a digital age, this has never been easier with the use of social marketing your image and brand can be completely free and a really effective way to do so. Despite the pros and cons of social media it really is the best, cost-effective way to promote yourself to the world. You can do this as easily as posting a performance to social media to gain traction and possible work. Nowadays, you can also utilise paid social media advertising to spread the word if your videos/page isn’t gaining the traction you want. You can promote yourself by publishing images and videos of your live performances; but, some people believe that posting more personal content is more effective in making the viewer feel more connected to you as an artist, which in turn creates more engagement and helps to develop a deeper relationship with you. Following the development of an emotional bond, there is a chance for both brand advocacy and brand loyalty (George, S.,2017) Another, less cost-effective way to promote your business if you have an enticing portfolio website, you can promote it through paid internet advertising on search engines. For example, if a potential client types session musician near me into a search engine, the results may include your advertisement.The most important thing is learning that ultimately you are responsible for marketing yourself and your brand and you must be incredibly self driven (Borg, B., 2024). When it comes to self-marketing, one of the most crucial factors is your mindset. People naturally enjoy their own music, but they also tend to be the harshest critics of it. It’s crucial to strike a balance between being too hard on yourself to succeed and not being too easy on yourself.
Music is a highly subjective and opinionated career in today’s society. As a result, being a performer and putting your dedicated abilities on the line is a highly personal and unusual experience; the concept of self-failure is extremely prevalent in the performing industry and can often be difficult to navigate in a social setting with so many environmental influences influencing your performance. Since session music is primarily studio work, where you would hope to receive the music beforehand or rely on your sight-reading skills, it tends to relieve the strain of performing in front of an audience. But returning to the notion of needing several revenue streams, many session musicians work with bands or orchestras in musicals/operas and live group work. This takes away the more laid-back studio work a session musician may be accustomed to and forces the attention back into performing live in front of an audience, imposing the new environmental pressure of doing it right the first time and consistently. Practising is a key competent to developing and refining your skill, for most it is a solitary and isolating task (Monson, I. 2009). How any musician practises their instrument is a very personal and individual process, playing a piece over and over until perfection which, as a strategy, ranges from beneficial for some and completely profit less for other.
As explained earlier exploring the extensive option of your career being a session musician range from recording project, live ensemble work, commission studio work or even teaching. Your career as a musician will development over the years moving from one project to another, developing new commection and joining new communities along the way and, as you establish a brand and a name for yourself along the way the importance of those should improve as you consistently climb the ladder. However, as a musician, being inherently freelance, it’s not as simple as other professions constantly working upward toward a goal. Often there will be set backs and years where revenue is better than others. Working month-to month on projects (as that’s most typical), it can often feel like there’s no direct career path or direction within these projects. However, once you recognise that the project’s interest and skills are what keep it going, you can maintain the enthusiasm for the potential toil that comes with being a freelance musician. Overall, I believe that being a session musician as someone with a strong passion for music and their instrument is an extremely rewarding and social job, one that will never be replaced with the unprecedented growth of technology, and is worthy of the potential instability that comes with being a freelance musician.
Bibliography:
Cartwright, J. (2022). Stuff they don’t tell you: session musicians. WeTransfer. Available at: https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/stories/stuff-they-dont-tell-you-session-musicians [Accessed 2 January 2025].
Hartley, K. (2022). Musician’s survival guide: the life of a session musician and songwriter. Leeds Conservatoire. Available at: https://www.leedsconservatoire.ac.uk/about-us/news/musicians-survival-guide-the-life-of-a-session-musician-and-songwriter/ [Accessed 2 January 2025].
Beeching, A.M., 2010. Beyond talent: Creating a successful career in music. Oxford University Press. Available at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=wm0SDAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR13&dq=career+development+is+available+being+a+session+musician&ots=IpzxcwaS7m&sig=OWbNnLuQ8eT-mvKpLKrnCmUK3Kk&redir_esc=y
Rosen, S. (2012). The economics of the recording industry: A study of its structure and the behavior of its players. SSRN. Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2034899 [Accessed 3 January 2025].
Hesmondhalgh, D. and Meier, L. M. (2018). Popular music, the media and the production of meaning. IASPM Journal, 8(2). Available at: https://iaspmjournal.net/index.php/IASPM_Journal/article/view/886 [Accessed 3 January 2025].
George, S., 2017. Viral marketing in the music industry: How independent musicians utilise online peer-to-peer communications. https://chesterrep.openrepository.com/handle/10034/620824
Borg, B., 2024. Music marketing for the DIY musician: Creating and executing a plan of attack on a low budget. Rowman & Littlefield. Available at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=qLwFEQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR21&dq=how+to+market+yourself+as+a+session+musician&ots=wqvDaEt7Pw&sig=XIuszClR-5utB2q1bBFcx18td2c&redir_esc=y
Monson, I. (2009). The nature of improvisation in music. In The Cambridge Companion to Jazz (pp. 85-102). Cambridge University Press. Available at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=5vvY2BDWZjEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA85&dq=personal+challenges+being+a+session+musician&ots=pxfYSnkftd&sig=OSbCEP6CQxzQfVMnoQ8ZUba89AQ&redir_esc=y [Accessed 8 January 2025].
