Starting a band and finding success in 2023 sounds like one of the hardest things to do in music. Thanks to the proliferation of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, people have almost too much music to choose from thanks to the hundreds of thousands of new songs uploaded every day.
So how does someone break through and stand out? You listen to ex-The Dillinger Escape Plan guitarist Ben Weinman‘s course on Soundfly and you learn how to “find your tribe” as an uncompromising artist.
His course, titled The Business Of Uncompromising Art aims to give budding musicians looking to carve a piece out of their respective genre a perspective into how remaining genuine can yield big results in the end. Considering how he found success despite making “music that sounds like garbage cans falling down stairs to most people,” he probably knows a thing or two.
In the clip below, Weinman explains how finding early adopters to your art and building on that initial fan base can snowball into a cult following. By staying true to yourself and keeping those early adopters in mind can pay dividends over time.
“Early adopters…are people that like to get involved with something on the forefront — in the beginning. They want to find out about the things nobody else knows about and what they love doing more than anything is spreading that knowledge and showing people what they’ve learned.
“If you’re creating something that special, that unique, you need to speak to those early adopters because they’re going to wave your flag higher than anybody in the world. They’re the ones who gave me a career. For Dillinger and even the band I play in now, Suicidal Tendencies, it was these early adopters that really created an opportunity for us to do what we do and do it all over the world.”
Weinman goes on to talk about early Dillinger Escape Plan shows and how they eventually grew from barely anyone showing up to huge shows over time, thanks in large part due to those early adopters and word of mouth.
We’ve been huge fans of Weinman’s work here at MetalSucks for a long time now, so we were more than happy to share an exclusive chapter of his Soundfly course to our readers for free. If you want to learn more from Ben or any of the other artists with courses on the service, be sure to check out Soundfly.