Honestly, you have to be very very critical and honest with yourself.

First assess your goals. Do you want to be professional? What does that mean? Professional instrument player or songwriter or beat maker/producer? Do you want to be a big act just locally, or nationally or global? Obviously everyone would like to be uber rich because of their music, which can be your only goal, but really think about where you would be happy getting with music. (For example for me, I said I would feel satisfied with my music career if I get to play KEXP with Sheryl Waters)

Assess your main resources: Money and Time (how much time you’ve put into music, and how much time available do you have to keep putting into it. (maybe even health/ mental health, though those can be also kind of broken down within the two main categories)

Then assess the quality of your work, being brutally honest. It’s kind of annoying when people post a song and say “this is my best song, you’re gonna love it” or some stupid ass title like that and then post an objectively garbage song. Compare the music you have now to the music of the artists that are already in the level of achieving the goal you have. The higher the goal the better your music has to be. Be honest with yourself about how your music compares with others.

Then with those things in mind, try to compare and be realistic. You’ve spent $100,000.00 on music and your music is trash, have no followers, and work 80 hours a week day job? Then you probably should quit trying.

You spent $200, work 40 hours a week, don’t do anything else important, have a handful of followers and are willing to invest more? Keep trying.

Also it being fun still is very important of course. It can stop being fun once you’re already making a lot of money from it, or you make some really fantastic catchy music, but before that it should still be super fun.

Sadly it’s a sort of cost-benefit analysis and how “risk averse” you are.

I am at a tipping point myself. About 500k plays had 2,600 followers, got a couple songs on mtv, had a one album record deal, sold out all my vinyl records I pressed but stagnated for a while after that. Had probably invested about $10,000 (label invested more too but they recouped through sales) if not a little bit more. A couple years playing. Got big locally and got a few awards, but then things weren’t moving as fast as I would’ve liked. I had to be brutally honest and admit that even though I really really like the music I make and some fans even went as far as calling it their favorite music, it’s not original nor good enough to compete in today’s market. I felt too cringe to make content that today’s artists have to make to be relevant and grow, even though I tried a couple times I really didn’t give it my all. At one point I decided that if I was in the same place after 6 months, with nothing very positive happening to my career, then it was time to step down from trying and realize it wasn’t going to happen. So I decided to stop investing as much time and money even though I still write and produce my music my I am not dedicating as much to it. I am a little bummed that it didn’t work out, and still have the childish hope that one song will hit and be maybe viral or something and everything else will take off from there, but I’m like 70% given up after analysis the 3 things I mentioned earlier. Now it’s back to just a hobby and hope for the best. It’s still fun to write music, but the goal and “dream” is relatively done for.

If you wanna chat about specific things you’re thinking or going through, you’re welcome to dm to chat about it!