014: Mella Barnes on Breaking into the Music Scene
Your First Thousand Clients with Mitch Russo
Mitch Russo
5.0 • 104 Ratings
🗓️ 28 July 2017
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mella is a session singer, songwriter and voiceover actor living in Nashville, Tennessee. Also an animal lover, she has three dogs, a rabbit, and any number of foster animals in various shapes and sizes. She is the author of Way Less Cowbell, a book on communicating with session musicians.
In this episode, Mella and I discuss:
- The start of her journey as a musician
- Why she considers herself a “studio” person
- Clients and referrals
- Self-promotion & helping other musicians
- Crushing Social Media and standing out from the noise
- Importance of having connections
- Mistakes she made early on that YOU can learn from
- More on her passion
- How she is changing the world
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to your first thousand clients with Mitch Russo. |
| 0:08.0 | How about if I brought you an amazing individual today who is actually a professional musician who has reached |
| 0:19.1 | a thousand clients. |
| 0:20.4 | Now imagine that, a professional musician having already achieved servicing a thousand |
| 0:26.9 | clients at the age of just 30 years old. Well today we're going to be talking to Miller. And Miller has done an |
| 0:36.9 | amazing job of finding her way through both corporate America and the music scene. And Mela I have to tell you I'm very |
| 0:46.4 | excited to talk to you today because you're unlike many of my guests you took a |
| 0:52.0 | talent that I believe you told me you started when you were 14 years old |
| 0:56.9 | and started monetizing it at that early age to reach where you are today. Welcome, Miller to the show. |
| 1:03.2 | Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. |
| 1:05.6 | Cool. So take us back to the beginning and explain how you got into this. |
| 1:11.5 | Sure. My cousin, and I come from a musical family, I know every musician says that, but, |
| 1:18.0 | so through my cousins, I started to know other musicians who needed singers and I couldn't drive at the time. |
| 1:24.2 | I was, like I said, I was 14 and so my grandparents would drive me around to different |
| 1:29.2 | recording studios and it was actually them who said, you you really should charge for this because I wasn't at first you know when you're 14 you just are happy to be |
| 1:39.1 | doing anything that seems like you're making it somewhere. |
| 1:44.0 | I was I don't remember how much I charge it was not a lot |
| 1:48.0 | but it was you know enough to get me some experience |
| 1:52.0 | and enough to make those connections early on. |
| 1:55.0 | Well that's that's incredible. I have to tell you my daughter is a singer and she too got her first gig at 14 and she was paid with a Amazon gift card 25 dollars. |
| 2:06.0 | You gotta start somewhere you know? |
| 2:09.0 | Yeah yeah and she was thrilled she actually did two songs for an indie movie and it was wonderful. |
... |
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