The Art of Getting Discovered

Welcome to iCadenza! We are thrilled to welcome you to our new home on the web, which will be growing immensely over the next few months to support all facets of your life as a musician. The goal of our work is to empower you to be more successful at what you do. Part of this journey will be identifying and clarifying your personal definition of success. This is a crucial step because it allows you to make you goals more specific and concrete.

Our tagline is “The Art of Getting Discovered.” I just want to explain it briefly because that phrase can be read multiple ways. By “getting discovered” we refer in part to the various types of external validation artists seek in their careers – whether it is landed a job or role, getting a Metropolitan Opera contract, being accepted at a prestigious conservatory, summer festival or Young Artist Program, winning competitions, etc.

But there’s a lot more here.

First of all, we believe that one is best positioned to “get discovered” if they’ve already done the work to discover themselves. That means asking and answering the difficult questions of “what do I want?”,  “what is most important to me?”, “what do I stand for?”, and so on.

This may sound hokey and pointless. How are these silly questions related to going for the proverbial gold?

There are many answers to that question, and here is one of the big ones:

Branding

Long gone are the days when artists didn’t have to think about how their work and image would make it out to the public. A powerful manager or recording label would “discover” you and POOF suddenly you’re a star!

On the down side, this makes the job of the aspiring musician significant larger and more challenging. On the up side, the artist has much greater opportunity to craft for his or herself the career that he or she truly desires.

As musicians, it is easy to decide that our music “speaks for itself”, and for us. We don’t need to “say” anything verbally or in written form about what we do because the music will say it. Not so, my friends.

Promotion begins with the word. What do you do? What can you say about yourself as a person, and as an artist? What kind of feeling should this photograph communicate?

To promote from an authentic and powerful place means to know who you are on a deep level, and to find the words to speak to it.