Top Tips: How To Succeed As A Musician In 1955

Life is so hard as a musician in 1955! Most of your employers now will want you to play the right notes. Follow our top tips on how to succeed:

1) Do some paid work. There’s plenty of it around!

2) Don’t worry about getting a masters degree. You probably won’t even need a bachelor degree. And a doctorate… Those are for doctors, right? Anyway, you will be too busy working to study!

3) Practise a bit. Josh Bell doesn’t exist.

4) Make a recording of some famous masterpieces. There’s a market for that!

5) Develop as a musician over a long period of time.

6) Be fine with mistakes. All the big performers make mistakes. Audiences won’t really mind. It’s not like they have free access to a vast library of perfect recordings via a magical device in their pocket, do they?

7) Have an agent. They will work very hard to promote you. (No one would seriously expect you to be learning all that music and promoting yourself at the same time, could they?)

8) Don’t compare yourself to all the great recordings- most of those old tracks sound terrible! The world needs your version, because it will have better sound.

9) Don’t get a website. What’s a website? Hahahaha- it’s 1955.

10) Try not to get caught up in competitions. There aren’t that many of them and you don’t really need them anyway. People will take a chance on you.

11) Get signed!

12) Make sure you have the type of instrument or voice that says ‘Success’, or at least, ‘I Sound Better Than The Unstimulated Mundanity Of Your Domestic Life’.

Good luck! And remember, whatever you do, don’t be a woman that isn’t Martha Argerich or Jacqueline Du Pré.