By Arthur Cross
I. OWN EVERYTHINGOwn your masters. Own your publishing. Own your touring strategy.The system wants to separate you from your rights the second you create something. They dress up extraction as partnership—you make it, they own it, then they let you participate in your own success.They'll tell you ownership is too complex, too risky.Ownership isn't greed—it's making sure the person who creates is the person who benefits.II. SPLIT EVENLYArt doesn't work like corporate equity. Nobody knows what makes a song connect. The bassline? The harmony you almost cut? That throwaway lyric? The magic is never where you think it'll be.Uneven splits create resentment. Not today, but eventually. The person with less starts noticing their work is valued differently. The person with more starts treating it like property instead of collaboration. What starts as "being practical" turns into working for someone instead of with them.Even splits fix this. Everyone's equally necessary, equally valued, equally invested. This isn't naive idealism—it's structural protection against what kills bands from the inside.You're designing for longevity, not conquest. The question isn't "who contributed more?" It's "do we want to keep making things together?"III. SELL OUT EVERY SHOWMost artists chase size when they should chase density. A half-empty room isn't neutral—it's expensive. The performer feels it. The audience feels it. What could've been intimate becomes hollow. Why would anyone regret missing your next show if this one wasn't worth selling out?Start small. Too small. If you can fill 50 seats reliably, play to 40. Not because you lack ambition—because scarcity is the only marketing that actually works.A sold-out show creates three things: proof of demand, regret in those who missed it, hunger for the next one. The person who didn't get in tells someone. The person who got in feels they saw something exclusive.Scarcity isn't a trick. It's how desire works. People want what they can't easily have. When your show is always available, it's ignorable. The room should always feel too small. That's when you know you're the right size.IV. NEVER TAKE AN ADVANCEEveryone misspends advance money. Not maliciously—inevitably. You buy gear you don't need. Studio time runs long because someone else is paying. You make decisions you'd never make with your own money.V. MAKE IT CHEAPExpensive production is impressive until you learn it was expensive—then it's just expected. When something sounds good and cost nothing? That's alchemy.Expensive work looks like a luxury hobby. When the production gleams, the gear is visible, the studio gets credited, people start wondering who paid for this. A cheap record that connects feels like it had to exist.Making it cheap keeps you nimble. It’s a safe guard against analysis-paralysis. Cheap forces closure. You finish because you can't afford not to.VI. REJECT TRADITIONAL TOURINGThe touring model wasn't designed by artists—it was designed by people who take percentage of gross. Agents, managers—they all make more when the tour costs more. Bigger production, tour buses, per diems that scale with status. The artist funds rock and roll mythology while everyone else profits from it.Eventually, you stop making music and start staffing a traveling business that happens to involve music.Strip it down instead. Fly economy. Pack light. Play what's there. The backline gear works. Hire local openers with gear. When you play what's there, you adapt. Adaptation keeps you sharp.Don't mythologize comfort. The bus is for people trying to feel like rock stars. You're trying to be sustainable.Traditional touring romanticizes exhaustion, mistaking it for dedication. Tour when it makes sense—financially, creatively, personally. Not because "that's what artists do."VII. NO INVENTORYWith anything physical, sell it, then make it.This isn't dropshipping. It's testing demand before committing capital. Announce the thing. Take orders. Produce what sold. No risk, no storage, no boxes of shirts in your closet.The traditional model: spend money making product, then convince people to buy it. The sovereign model: let demand reveal itself, then fulfill it.Scarcity creates urgency—buy or regret. And it prevents your merch from becoming wallpaper.VIII. REJECT THE MOMENTUM TRAPOnce you catch any heat, agents start speaking in warnings: "This is your moment." "It won't last." "Don't you want the next level?"This isn't advice. It's fear packaging.They're implying momentum is fragile and must be capitalized immediately or it vanishes forever. A lie designed to make you overcommit—book the tour you're not ready for, take the festival slot that doesn't fit, say yes to the opportunity that feels like validation but deforms the work.The "next level" isn't a place. It's a treadmill. There's always another level, another benchmark, another thing to prove you belong. The people invoking it aren't thinking about your longevity. They're thinking about their percentage.They benefit when you move fast, book big, maximize short-term revenue. You benefit when you move deliberately, build trust, become a long-term act.Striking while the iron is hot—people feel it. Not the heat of the work, but the fear driving it. Desperation reads. The artist who tours too much, releases too fast, chases every opportunity is signaling they don't believe they'll get another chance. The audience knows. Trust that if the work is good, the audience will stay with you.IX. NEVER PAY FOR PRESSPaying for PR is a tax on not being interesting enough organically. Publicity you buy is borrowed attention—gone the second you stop paying.When you stop paying for PR, two things happen: you get your time back, and mystery becomes free. Nobody knows what you're doing until you show them. No coordinated rollout. The thing just appears. People either care or they don't.X. NEVER LOSE MONEYThere's this myth that you lose money at the start. That "paying dues" means funding your career at a loss, waiting for it to tip profitable. It benefits everyone who takes percentage of your gross—they risked nothing while you risked everything.If the show doesn't make money, don't do it. If the tour doesn't make money, don't tour. This isn't cowardice. It's information.Money is a signal. Not the only one, but crucial. If people won't pay for it, they're not wrong. The work isn't connecting yet, or you're offering it wrong, or the audience isn't there.Losing money doesn't prove you're serious. When economics don't work, adjust: smaller room, cheaper recording, different city, new approach. Don't push through loss as a rite of passage."Easy to say when you have money." Fair. Here's the reality: keep your day job. Play weddings. Teach. Don't corrupt your sovereign artist path. The money that keeps you alive should be boring, reliable, and separate. The second you need your art to pay rent, you'll start making decisions based on rent, not art.XII. SOVEREIGN, NOT DIYYou're not smelting your own vinyl or replacing UPS. You'll hire people. Use infrastructure. Delegate. The difference: you keep decision-making authority. You don't trade ownership for services.The live business is still very corrupt. Self-promote a few shows without an agent or promoter—just to see where the money actually goes. Learn the mechanics.You're not trying to do it alone. You're trying to own your work while using existing tools. Using infrastructure isn't selling out. Signing away ownership is.XIII. SOCIAL MEDIA AS UTILITY, NOT IDENTITYYou're not a content creator. You're an artist who uses platforms when useful and ignores them otherwise.The platforms want you trapped in their logic, posting on their schedule, shaped by their incentives. Use it on your terms: post when there's something to say. Silence is strategy. Mystery compounds when you're not always visible.Platforms will change. The unsexy winner is still the email list—the only channel you actually own. Treat social media like FedEx. Useful for sending things, irrelevant to what those things are.AND FINALLY, WHAT YOU GIVE UPYou won't win Grammys. Won't chart on Billboard. Won't become mega-wealthy. Once you reject traditional infrastructure, you reject its validation systems. Make peace with this. You're free.The institutions will probably get more powerful, not less. Streaming monopolies will tighten. Labels will consolidate. This isn't about pretending they're irrelevant. It's about opting out of needing their approval.You can still play the biggest venues. Live off your music. You won't be validated by institutions, but you'll feel good about the journey. And you'll preserve the joy of making art.