Let me tell you a story about two musicians and how the road less traveled made all the difference.

Tyler and Pete are both awesome artists at the top of their musical game.

Tyler records alt-country from her home studio in Ohio while Pete produces electronic rock from his garage outside of London.

Unfortunately, music is only a hobby and making money from their songs is but a distant dream.

Tyler freelances as a graphic designer. She likes it "just ok" because she has a flexible schedule that allows her to work on her music in between client work, but she doesn't exactly jump out of bed in the morning.

Her growing roster of nightmare clients has inspired a small collection of angry alt-country tracks so she's grown a small following of fans online that listen to her stuff.

As inspiration, her clients are great. As clients, she hates them.

Regardless, she's been releasing her work consistently and has a hard drive full of songs to release but she's still struggling to make any money from her music.

Her fans love her songs, but streaming pays a pittance and there's only so much merch she can make in her spare time.

As a solo artist, touring feels overwhelming and she's not in a big music city so there are only so many local shows to perform before she saturates her market.

Pete's story is similar.

He writes and records all of his songs, but he needs to share any money he makes from gigs with his band so he still sees his music career as a hobby. 

He has a steady job in IT but wishes he could spend more time on his music career. although the paycheck his good, his corporate job has made him bitter and jaded towards the world.

So he takes out his aggression through his music.

He loves to perform live, and he wouldn't trade his bandmates for the world, but after expenses he's lucky if he can take his girlfriend out for a nice supper after using his vacation to tour the national circuit.

One day, they both see an ad for a program about music licensing and how it's supposed to be the "holy grail" of making money with your music.

They've been hearing about sync licensing for years, but they have no idea where to start.

They have the songs, but apart from a few rejections from small labels, they have no clue how to break into the bigger entertainment industry.

It seems like the perfect solution for both of them:

• You can make more money with one sync placement than with hundreds of thousands of streams.
• You can reach more people and grow your career much faster after having your music in a TV show than from hustling on the local gigging circuit.
• You can do it all from your home studio and don't have to live in a big "music city" to succeed.

However, their reactions to the ad are wildly different...

Pete scoffs at the ad. He leaves a comment about it "being a scam" to make himself feel better even though he knows nothing about the program or its creator.

 "How dare they charge money for something he thinks should be free," he writes, not realizing how much he would love to be paid fairly for his own musical skills.

Tyler on the other hand, gets curious.

She just got off a frustrating call with yet another nightmare client who demanded even more (unpaid) revisions so she'll try just about everything to make a change.

She does her due diligence and the program looks legit.

Someone told her once that the best way to learn something is to find someone who's done what you want to do and learn from them.

The people behind the program have the credits, the experience, and the testimonials to back up their claims so the only thing standing in the way is her willingness to invest in herself.

The price tag is a bit steep, but she figures that one sync placement will make a return on her investment.

Even if that placement takes a while, she can sacrifice herself to a couple nightmare clients in the meantime to make her dream come true.

In just a few months, she's on her way to create a recurring royalty stream with her music.

She's discovered all the nitty gritty details about the world of sync licensing, made connections with music supervisors, and is negotiating a deal for her first song to appear in a commercial.

Even her mixes are sounding better because she's learning how to compete at the top of the game to make her songs sound "sync-ready."

And Pete? Well, he's wasting his time yelling in the comments section on yet another Facebook ad. He's fast becoming the millennial version of the old man yelling at the cloud.

Now, although this story is fictional, it does represent the two types of musicians I encounter every day:

1. The musician who's hungry and willing to invest in themselves to make their lives better because they hate the status quo they're currently living in.
2. And the musician who thinks everybody is out to get them, never makes a change and keeps being a starving artist who's only happy when they blame other people for their own misfortune.

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