Dear Music Business Student… [Kyle Bylin]

Former Hypebot Editor Kyle Bylin returns to share his journey so far, beginning with a simple yet essential axiom: “You don’t have to know where you’re going before you start.”

by Kyle Bylin, User Researcher, Creative Writer, and Deep Thinker Exploring the Future of Technology

Dear Music Business Student,

You don’t have to know where you’re going before you start.

You just have to pick the direction to go. Even that advice might not leave enough up to chance. It suggests that you must know your true north.

You could have a terrible plan, but if you execute it well, it may be fine. You’ll still make progress toward your goal and learn things along the way.

If what you learn is that you need a new plan, it’ll be fine.

You get to keep and apply all of your previous lessons—the things you learned in the hardest possible way—they’ll be the foundation for building your dream.

You might ask: what do I know about executing terrible plans?

During the Great Recession, I worked at Target as a Sales Floor Team Member and wrote essays for a music industry blog called Hypebot.

I had zero journalism or blogging background. I just wrote about my experiences as a music fan growing up in small-town North Dakota and how the digital revolution shaped how I discovered and experienced songs.

I wrote for free – on nights and weekends.

I treated the opportunity like a job, even though I had no idea you could get paid to write blogs. It’s just an opportunity that I stumbled upon.

I pursued writing with reckless abandon.

It took nearly two years and dozens of essays, but I became the editor of Hypebot. There wasn’t a job posting. There wasn’t an interview process.

I just became the first paid employee of the blog because I kept showing up and turning in long-form essays. I had no idea that you could become a blogger or even what that was exactly. I just loved writing about the music business.

What preparation did I have for this plan?

It helped that I had a music business degree, so I knew was copyright was. But I also spent a decade trying to be a songwriter before I knew what a blogger was.

I spent most of high school writing lyrics because I wanted to become a songwriter. Now I will be the first to tell you that writing Linkin Park lyrics isn’t preparation for writing blog posts about music streaming.

But there’s a lesson to be had about executing terrible plans well, working extremely hard, and pivoting once the right opportunity comes along.

The world is changing too fast to have a perfect plan. If you have a terrible plan and execute things well, you’ll still end up somewhere interesting.

Why?

Because what most people don’t know how to do is execute their plan. They kill the project. They overthink it. They create a million Google Documents.

But they never go and do the thing. The best way to separate yourself from everyone else—the people you think are your competition—is to do the thing, do it well, and be open to the opportunities that come along the way.