The shame of making mistakes in the music industry

Why do music industry professionals always feel the pressure to both never make a mistakes, and always put up a front that all their projects are killing it? 

This only makes failure feel impossible to deal with. It’s not only OK to fail, it’s critical to our successes both as individuals and as an industry. 

The most successful entrepreneurs in the world have fucked up many times before and after their fortunes. If you don’t fuck up, you aren’t being brave enough.

In almost all disruptive, young, innovative industries “I fucked up”, “I had a crack and it failed” are worn as a badge of honour – in the music industry if we can’t completely hide our failures we sugar coat them as much as we can. No wonder it’s taking the music industry so long to innovate, change and grow.

Yes it’s finally happening now, the music industry has started innovating and we’re seeing revenues at an all time high. But most of the growth and change is being caused by foreign Tech companies like Spotify and Apple – not from our legacy music companies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaF9rZV3Uu4

It’s time we as a music industry stopped hiding behind our fuck ups and started sharing them with pride, otherwise we will continue to discourage bravery within our community.

We want our peers (and competitors) to feel like that they can start a new business, announce their ambitions, have a crack… And if it doesn’t come off that’s okay and they wont be judged.

They shouldn’t be judged, they should be praised. Innovation comes from mistakes and failures (just ask the inventor of Post-It Notes), not cautious slow growth.

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.