You Are Competing With Famous People's Kids (And That's Fine)
By Written by Peter McVeigh
Let's get this out of the way immediately, because I think we all know it but nobody wants to say it out loud. Some of the people you're competing with for attention, for playlist spots, for press coverage, for the ears of casual listeners - some of those people had a very different starting line to you. Not better. Not worse in terms of character or worth. Just different. Significantly, structurally, undeniably different. Miley Cyrus grew up with Billy Ray Cyrus. Lily Allen grew up with Keith Allen. Jaden and Willow Smith grew up with Will Smith. Enrique Iglesias grew up with Julio Iglesias. Brooklyn Beckham had a crack at music with David and Victoria Beckham behind him. Chet Hanks released rap music and people listened largely because of whose son he was. Kelly Osbourne released music on the back of Ozzy. Julian Lennon and Sean Lennon carry one of the most famous surnames in the history of recorded sound. Dhani Harrison is George Harrison's son. James McCartney is Paul's. Ziggy Marley grew up as the son of Bob. Paris Jackson makes music. Alabama and Landon Barker have built careers before most people their age have figured out how to play a C chord. Pixie Geldof has a music career. Norah Jones is the daughter of Ravi Shankar. I'm not listing these people to be bitter about them. What I'm listing them to say is: the playing field isn't level, it never was, and pretending otherwise is a waste of your energy. Here is the more useful question: so what are you going to do about it?
Why Chasing Fame Is the Wrong Game Entirely
Here is the trap a lot of musicians fall into. They see the nepobabies getting coverage, getting playlist placements, getting interviews, getting management meetings, and they think: I need to compete for that. I need to be famous. I need to be known. I need to go viral.
And then they spend the next three years grinding away at social media, chasing the algorithm, refreshing their Spotify monthly listener count, and slowly losing their mind - and their love for music in the process.
Fame is a by-product. It'sn't a strategy. It'sn't even a goal, if you think about it clearly. What you actually want - what most musicians actually want - is a sustainable career. The ability to make music, perform it, have it heard, and earn enough money from the whole enterprise to keep doing it. Fame might help with that. It also might not. Most famously famous musicians earn less than you'd assume, and most people who have built sustainable music careers have done it without any meaningful fame at all.
The nepobabies have a head start in the fame race. Fine. That race was always going to be brutal, and it was always going to favour people with connections. Let them have it. You're playing a different, longer, more interesting game.
Being Better Is Only Half the Battle
I want to say something that I know is true but that musicians rarely want to hear: being good isn't enough.
I've met extraordinarily talented musicians who can't fill a room. I've met musicians who are, frankly, average by technical standards, who somehow pack out venues every time they play and have built a fanbase that would follow them anywhere. The difference is almost never talent. It's almost always something else - stage presence, story, personality, connection, the intangible quality of being genuinely interesting to be around.
Your nepobaby competition has one significant advantage: people are already interested in them before they play a note, because of who their parents are. You don't have that. What you've instead is the opportunity to build something more durable. Because interest that comes from "I wonder what Will Smith's son sounds like" evaporates quickly if the music doesn't deliver. Interest that comes from "I saw this person at a tiny venue on a rainy Wednesday and I've never forgotten it" is the kind that lasts.
The question isn't "am I better than them?" The question is: "am I interesting enough that people will come back?"
Stage Performance: The Thing That Can't Be Nepotised
Here is the beautiful thing about a live performance. Nobody can hand it to you. Nobody's parents can arrange it. Nobody's management team can manufacture it. You either have it or you're working on having it.
I've seen artists with record deals, full production budgets, and industry support walk out onto a stage and immediately make everyone in the room feel slightly uncomfortable. And I've seen artists with nothing behind them - no label, no deal, a CD-R and a van - walk out and command a room from the first note.
Stage performance is learnable. People act like it's some mystical quality you're either born with or not, and that'sn't true. It's a craft. Like all crafts, it takes time, repetition, and honest feedback.
Know where you're in the room. Not just physically - emotionally. Is the crowd warm or cold? Are they listening or chatting? Adjust. A great set is a conversation. You'ren't performing at people. You're performing with them, even if they're just watching.
Silence isn't your enemy. New performers rush to fill every gap. They talk too much between songs, they apologise for technical issues, they explain things that didn't need explaining. The artists who command rooms are often the ones comfortable enough to just stand there for a moment. Silence, if you own it, reads as confidence.
Look at them. Actually look. Not at the lights, not at the back wall, not at your shoes. Find a face, hold it for a second, move to another. People feel seen when a performer looks at them. It changes the entire temperature of a room.
Tell them something real. A moment of genuine honesty from a stage - a real story, a real admission, something that costs you a little to say - is worth more than any production value. I've seen audiences completely shift because an artist said something true and unguarded between songs.
Your body is an instrument. How you stand. How you move. How you hold the microphone. These things are communicating something even before you open your mouth. Work out what you want them to say.
Delivery: The Bit Inside the Song
This is the one people most often neglect because they're too busy worrying about songwriting or production.
Delivery is how you sing the song, not just whether you sing the right notes. It's the pause before the word that matters. It's the crack in the voice on the line that deserves a crack. It's the moment where the production drops away and you're just saying something to another person. It's the thing that separates a technically correct performance from one that stays with someone for twenty years.
The nepobabies, for all their advantages, often struggle with this one. Because delivery comes from experience, from having something to actually say, from having felt the thing you're singing about. A twenty-two year old whose every career move has been smoothed by industry connections and parental networks often hasn't accumulated the material that makes for great delivery. You might have.
Listen back to your recordings with delivery as the only question. Not "did I hit the notes?" Not "is the mix right?" Just: "do I believe myself?" If the answer is no, that's where the work is.
Gig Where It Is Interesting, Not Just Where It Is Available
Here is a piece of practical advice that changed the way I think about building an audience: the venue is part of the story.
When someone tells a friend about a gig they went to, the first thing they usually say is where it was. "I saw them at the Barrowlands." "I saw them at this tiny chapel in the middle of nowhere." "I saw them in someone's kitchen." The venue is the frame for the experience, and the more interesting the frame, the more vivid the memory.
Most artists approach gigging backwards. They play wherever they can get booked, stack up any support slot going, gig at venues that are available rather than interesting, and wonder why they'ren't building a following. The gig circuit exists and you should use it, but think strategically about what the venue is saying about you.
A deliberately chosen interesting venue - a gallery, a rooftop, a walled garden, an old industrial space, a record shop, a church - does several things at once. It signals to potential audiences that this isn't a routine gig night. It gives people something to talk about. It tends to attract better photography and better coverage. It makes people feel like they've been let in on something rather than attending an event.
Some of the best gigs I've been to in the last decade weren't at venues at all. They were in living rooms, back gardens, warehouses, converted railway arches, village halls. The setting made the music feel special in a way that a standard gig couldn't replicate, regardless of how good the music was.
House Gigs and Concert Series: The Underused Weapon
The house concert - a ticketed, intimate performance in someone's home for a small audience - has been around for decades, but it's had a proper resurgence in 2026. And for good reason. When you strip away the PA system, the bar noise, the venue cut, the distance between stage and audience, what you're left with is music being played in a room to people who are paying attention. Properly paying attention. Not checking their phones, not talking over you, not at the back of a venue on a night out that happens to have live music.
The economics are interesting too. A house concert with forty people paying twenty-five pounds each is a thousand pounds in a room. Split reasonably with your host, that's a meaningful night's earnings. More importantly, the forty people who were in that room will tell twenty people each that they need to see you. The conversion rate from "person who attended a house concert" to "lifelong fan" is extraordinary.
Here is how to start. Find one person who is enthusiastic about your music and has a suitable space. It doesn't need to be large. A living room with forty chairs works. Offer them a straightforward deal - they host, you play, tickets go through a simple system, you split the door. Give it a proper name and identity. Make it feel like an event.
The logistics sort themselves out after the first one. What you're looking for is the start of a network. Each house concert host knows other people who host. Your audience at each gig contains people who would love to host one. The network grows if you actively tend it.
Apply the same thinking to other intimate settings. Record shops. Libraries. Arts centres. Village halls. Breweries. Any space that can hold fifty people and has an owner or manager who might be interested in something a bit different.
Building Cool Where You Are, Not Where You Wish You Were
There is a thing that happens to musicians from smaller cities or rural areas where they spend all their energy trying to get to London, or Manchester, or Glasgow - wherever the industry feels like it lives - and in doing so they entirely overlook the fact that they've a home city or town that's hungry for interesting live music and doesn't have nearly enough of it.
The local scene is underrated in every direction. Local press will cover you because you're local, which national press won't do until you're already established. Local audiences will follow you because you're theirs, which broader audiences won't do until you're already known. Local venues will take a chance on you because they know you'ren't going to disappear after one gig.
Build something where you're. Make your town or city feel like a place that has a genuine music thing happening. Bring other artists to play with you. Build a regular event, even if it's quarterly, that people mark in their calendars. Collaborate with local photographers, designers, writers. Make the whole thing look and feel considered.
The artists who build sustainable careers from nothing almost always build them locally first. They become the name everyone in their area knows before they become anyone outside it. That foundation is real. You can tour off it. You can build off it. You can't build a national or international fanbase out of nothing; you build it out of a solid local one.
What the Nepobabies Can't Buy
There is a version of a music career that you can purchase. You can buy production, marketing, PR, a playlisting campaign, a publicist, a stylist, a social media manager. If your parents are famous and connected, some of those things come as part of the package. The industry opens doors because it wants access to the relationship. That's real, and pretending it'sn't would be dishonest.
But there are things you genuinely can't buy. You can't buy the relationship between a performer and an audience that has been built show by show over years. You can't buy the moment where fifty people in a living room feel like they're witnessing something they're going to tell people about for the rest of their lives. You can't buy a reputation for turning up, playing well, being good to work with, being interesting, being the act that people feel something at.
Those things are earned. And the earning of them - the actual work of building a career rather than launching a profile - is something that, frankly, the structural advantages of being a famous person's child don't particularly help with. Some of the most connected musicians I've ever encountered have been curiously bad at the actual business of building a following, because they never had to develop the instincts that come from doing it the hard way.
The hard way builds something. It just takes longer.
You'ren't competing with Miley Cyrus. You'ren't in the same race as Brooklyn Beckham. You're building something that, if you do it right and keep doing it, will be yours in a way that nothing that was handed to you ever quite can be.
That's actually the better deal.
Get back to work.
Peter McVeigh is the founder of Music Manager Resource.