Networking: It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Actually Are
By Written by Peter McVeigh
Networking in music isn't about collecting contacts or working a room - it's about being a decent person in your community. The most durable careers are built on genuine relationships, not strategy.
Let's Reframe What 'Networking' Actually Means
The word 'networking' carries a lot of baggage. It conjures images of conference rooms, business cards, forced small talk, and people who look over your shoulder while talking to you because someone more useful might have just walked in.
That version of networking - the performative, transactional, strategic version - is largely a waste of time in the music industry. People can feel it. And the music industry, despite its global scale, is a surprisingly small world. Reputations travel fast.
So let's replace the word entirely. What we're really talking about is community. Your community of fellow musicians, producers, engineers, promoters, bookers, journalists, managers, and music lovers - locally, nationally, and internationally. People who are on a similar journey, at various stages of it, with different skills and different experiences.
The question worth asking isn't 'who can help me?' It's 'who do I actually want to know?'
The Most Important Rule: Don't Be a Dick
It sounds obvious. It isn't.
Over many years working in and around the music industry, one pattern repeats itself with remarkable consistency: genuinely good people, who are also talented, tend to build sustainable careers. Not always the fastest. Not always the flashiest. But careers with depth, longevity, and the kind of collaborative momentum that only comes from people genuinely wanting to work with you again.
Conversely, some of the most technically gifted musicians I've encountered have gone nowhere - not because of a lack of talent, but because of a lack of basic decency. They were difficult to be around. They were dismissive of others. They made people feel small. And people remembered.
There's also a harder truth worth acknowledging: money insulates some people from the consequences of being awful. There are people from privileged backgrounds who have achieved significant success despite being, by all accounts, not particularly pleasant human beings. The music industry has always had its share of those. But that's not a model - that's an exception propped up by resources most of us don't have access to. Don't benchmark yourself against it.
For the rest of us, the way we treat people - especially people who can do nothing for us right now - is the single most important career tool we have.
Relationships First, Career Second
The best working relationships in music almost never start as working relationships. They start as friendships. As shared experiences. As two people who played on the same bill and ended up talking for three hours after the show. As a chance conversation at a rehearsal studio. As someone who left a thoughtful comment on your track online.
The professional relationship that follows - if it follows - is built on a foundation of actually knowing and liking each other. That foundation makes everything easier: communication is more honest, creative disagreements are less personal, trust is already there.
This is why the 'networking as strategy' approach so often fails. People who approach every interaction as a potential transaction end up with a lot of contacts and very few relationships. And in music, relationships are the currency.
Go to gigs. Go to open mics. Go to industry events - not to work the room, but because you're genuinely interested in what's happening in your scene. Engage with people online because you actually have something to say, not because you've calculated that it might get you noticed. Be present. Be curious. Be interested in other people's work, not just your own.
The connections that come from that approach are real. And real connections are the ones that actually open doors.
Think Local Before You Think Global
There's a tendency among musicians - especially early in a career - to look immediately outward. London. Los Angeles. Nashville. The labels. The big studios. The industry tastemakers.
But the most underrated networking you can do is in your own community. Your city. Your scene. Your local promoters, venues, and fellow artists.
Local scenes are where careers actually start. They're where you develop your craft in front of real audiences, build your live reputation, find bandmates, meet collaborators, and encounter the first wave of people who genuinely believe in your work. They're also where you find out very quickly what your reputation is - because word spreads fast in a small pond.
Being a well-regarded, reliable, professional, and decent musician in your local scene is not a consolation prize. It's the foundation. The regional becomes national, the national becomes international - and the people who helped you at every stage come with you, or at least speak well of you to the people you meet next.
International relationships matter too, especially as the industry becomes more global. But they grow more naturally from a solid local base than from cold outreach into markets you have no foothold in yet.
What You Can Offer Matters as Much as What You Can Get
A transactional mindset asks: what can this person do for me? A community mindset asks: what can this person and I do together, and what can I bring to that?
This isn't just idealistic - it's practical. People are drawn to those who add something. The musician who always shows up early and helps with sound check. The artist who genuinely promotes the other acts on a bill, not just their own set. The songwriter who offers to co-write without expecting anything back. The manager who shares contacts freely because they understand that generosity builds trust.
Think about what you're actually good at beyond your primary craft. Are you good at social media? At design? At organisation? At talking to people? At understanding music law? At booking? Every skill you have is something you can offer to someone else in your community who needs it. And that generosity tends to come back around.
Networking, reframed this way, is simply about finding people whose journey intersects meaningfully with yours - people you can genuinely support, and who can genuinely support you - and then investing in those relationships without keeping score.
You Cannot Do This Alone
This is perhaps the most important thing to understand about making it in music, and it runs completely counter to the myth of the lone genius.
The artist standing alone at the microphone, the songwriter in their bedroom with an acoustic guitar, the producer hunched over their laptop at 3am - these images are real. But they are moments in a much larger story that always involves other people.
Behind every successful musician there is a team. Not necessarily a formal team with contracts and job titles - though that comes eventually - but a team nonetheless. Engineers who believed in the sound. Promoters who took a chance on an early booking. Fellow musicians who covered a gap when someone dropped out. Managers who worked without a fee because they saw something. Journalists who wrote the first proper review. Fans who showed up before there were very many of them.
Career-building in music is fundamentally collaborative. It is not possible to do it entirely alone - and the sooner that's accepted, the sooner you can stop trying to be everything yourself and start investing in the people around you.
The most durable careers are team efforts. The team may shift and evolve over the years, but it is always a team. And teams are built on relationships. Which brings us back to where we started.
Be genuine. Be generous. Be present in your community. Treat people well - especially when there's nothing obvious in it for you.
The rest tends to follow.