💡✍️ADN #169: The Career Audit You Can Do This Weekend

Every artist I’ve ever worked with across 2,000+ shows, label deals, sync placements, and two decades of watching careers build has said some version of the same thing:

“I feel stuck, but I don’t know where.”

That sentence highlights the problem.

Vagueness is the enemy of progress.

You can’t fix what you can’t name.

And most artists have never been asked the right questions.

Doctors don’t guess.

They run bloodwork.

They check vitals.

They ask systematic questions across every major system — cardiovascular, respiratory, neurological — before they ever recommend treatment.

No competent physician says “you seem kind of unhealthy, try exercising more.”

That’s what most music industry advice sounds like.

“Try this” without asking what is actually going on.

Below is a diagnostic framework — the same intake audit we use with every artist before we begin working together.

I’m giving it to you because even if we never work together directly, answering these questions honestly will tell you more about your career than a year of scrolling music marketing Instagram accounts.

The 13 Systems That Make or Break a Music Career

A music career isn’t one thing.

It’s thirteen interconnected systems, and a weakness in any one of them creates drag on all the others.

Most artists obsess over two or three — usually streaming numbers and social media — while ignoring the infrastructure that determines whether those numbers translate into anything sustainable.

As you read each one, ask yourself: could I answer detailed questions about this right now?

Or would I fumble?

1. Identity & Brand — Can you describe your sound in two sentences without using genre labels? Do you know who your five closest musical comparisons are — not who you wish you sounded like, but whose fans would actually enjoy your music? Is your visual identity consistent, professional, and recent?

2. Catalog & Release History — How many songs have you released? Which one performed best, and do you know why? What’s your typical timeline from idea to release? How many unreleased songs are sitting on a hard drive right now?

3. Distribution & Rights — Do you own 100% of your masters? Your publishing? Are you registered with a PRO? With SoundExchange? Do you have a publishing administrator? If you hesitated on any of those, you’re leaving money on the table. Not theoretically. Right now.

4. Social Media & Marketing — What platforms are you active on, and why those? Is any of your posting tied to a specific outcome, or are you just maintaining presence? Have you run paid advertising? Do you know your cost-per-follower? Can you tell me which of your last 20 posts moved someone closer to spending money on you? Most artists treat social media as a to-do list. It’s a customer acquisition channel. The difference between those two mindsets is the difference between busy and effective.

5. Audience & Fan Engagement — What are your actual numbers across every platform? Not the ones you remember — the ones you’d see if you logged in right now. What percentage of your audience is engaged versus passively following? Where are your listeners concentrated geographically? How do new fans actually discover you?

6. Email & Direct Communication — Do you have an email list? How many subscribers? What’s your open rate? How often do you actually email them? If the answer is “rarely” or “never,” you’ve built your audience on rented land with no way to reach them when the algorithm changes.

7. Live Performance & Touring — How many shows did you play in the last twelve months? What types — headlining, support, festivals, private events? What’s the largest crowd you’ve played for? Which markets are strongest? Do you have professional live photos and video from the last year? Do you have an EPK a booker could open and immediately understand what you offer?

8. Booking Infrastructure — Do you have a booking agent? If not, how do you book shows? What’s your typical deal — guarantee or door? Do you have relationships with promoters or venues? Are you able to tour, or are there constraints you haven’t named out loud?

9. Business Infrastructure — Do you have an LLC? A separate business bank account? An entertainment attorney? A CPA who understands music income? None of this is sexy. All of it is important.

10. Revenue Streams — Can you list your annual income from each source — streaming, live performance, merch, sync, publishing royalties, YouTube, subscriptions, teaching, brand deals? Can you tell me what percentage of your total income comes from music? Most artists can’t. You can’t easily grow what you don’t actively measure.

11. Team & Relationships — Who’s actually on your team right now? Not who you want — who’s working with you today? Are any of those relationships not working? What roles do you need most that you don’t have?

12. Goals & Timeline — Do you have specific, measurable goals for the next 90 days? 6 months? 12 months? Can you rank what actually matters most — streaming, touring, sync income, fanbase, press? Most artists say “all of it.” That’s the same as saying “none of it.”

13. Self-Awareness & Working Style — What motivates you to take action? What causes you to procrastinate? Do you prefer detailed instructions or general direction? How do you handle deadlines? This determines whether any plan actually gets executed.

Why Most Artists Skip the Diagnosis

Because it’s uncomfortable or because you’re too busy to ask them.

Answering these questions forces you to confront the distance between where you are and where you want to be.

Easier to post another TikTok and hope the algorithm does the work.

There’s a concept in behavioral psychology called the Dunning-Kruger gap — the space between what you think you know and what you actually know.

In music, this gap is enormous because there’s no standardized feedback mechanism.

A medical student gets test scores.

An athlete gets stats.

An artist gets vibes.

Likes.

A vague sense that things should be going better.

The audit replaces “I feel stuck” with “I have no email list, my EPK is two years old, I played 8 shows last year and can’t tell you my average merch revenue per show.”

That’s not a feeling.

That’s a diagnosis.

And a diagnosis you can act on.

What Happens When You See the Whole System

Patterns emerge.

You discover that your biggest bottleneck isn’t the thing you’ve been worrying about.

The artist obsessing over playlist pitching realizes they don’t have a publishing administrator and have been losing royalties for three years.

The one who thinks they need more content realizes they’ve played 40 shows without collecting a single email address.

In systems thinking, this is called finding the constraint — the one bottleneck that, when addressed, improves the throughput of everything downstream.

Eliyahu Goldratt built an entire management theory around it.

The principle applies to music careers with brutal precision: you don’t need to fix everything.

You need to find the one thing creating the most drag and fix that first.

You can’t find the constraint without seeing the whole system.

The Confidence Gap That’s Costing You Money

Our audit asks artists to rate their confidence across 17 skill areas — release strategy, contracts, data analysis, paid advertising, building a team — on a scale of 1 to 5.

The pattern is almost universal.

Artists rate themselves a 3 or 4 on social media and content creation.

They rate themselves a 1 or 2 on sync licensing, contracts, and business fundamentals.

Which means they’re spending most of their time on the area where they feel most confident — posting content — while avoiding the areas that generate the most revenue and protection.

We gravitate toward what feels comfortable and avoid what makes us feel incompetent. That’s human nature.

Comfort doesn’t compound.

Strategy does.

The audit makes this pattern visible.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

What Changes After You Do This

Your goals get specific.

“I want to grow” becomes “I need to register with SoundExchange, update my EPK, and book 3 shows in Nashville in the next 90 days.”

Vague ambition is comforting.

Specific targets are actionable.

Your time allocation shifts.

When you see that you’re spending 15 hours a week on content and zero on booking outreach or email list building, the imbalance becomes obvious.

You stop doing more and start doing what matters.

Your conversations with industry professionals change.

When a booking agent or label rep asks about your numbers and infrastructure, you have answers.

Real ones.

Artists who speak precisely about their career get taken seriously.

Artists who fumble get passed over.

Every time.

Take the Audit

We built this as the entry point for Done With You Management — it’s the same form every DWYM artist completes before their onboarding session.

It covers all thirteen systems.

It takes one sitting.

Pour a coffee, close your laptop to everything else, and answer honestly.

Some questions will be easy.

Some will be uncomfortable.

A few will expose gaps you didn’t know existed.

Good.

Take it even if you never talk to us.

Seeing your career as a system rather than a feeling is worth more than another month of guessing.

Take the Audit → Here

I hope it’s helpful.

See you next Sunday,

Neil

What Comes Next

If you complete the audit and want help building a plan around what you find, that’s what Done With You Management exists for.

You bring your story.

We build a plan together, then you execute it with our support.

We don’t take 15% and do the work for you.

We teach you the systems, provide the frameworks, and hold you accountable.

Daily office hours.

Weekly group coaching.

A curriculum that covers every area on this list.

But the audit is yours regardless.

No strings.

Stop guessing where you’re stuck.

Find out.