145. Why Pivoting in Your Music Career Doesn’t Mean You Failed

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In this episode, Bree Noble dives into the topic of pivoting in your music career and business, offering insights from her own journey to help musicians navigate these critical transitions. Bree shares how she has successfully combined the audiences of her two podcasts, The Profitable Musician Show and The Female Entrepreneur Musician Show, to streamline her efforts while maintaining connection with her legacy listeners and growing audience. She emphasizes that pivoting doesn’t mean failure—it’s often a necessary step in aligning your work with your life, passions, and goals.

For musicians looking to transition into new areas of their careers, Bree offers practical advice: test new ideas while maintaining existing income streams, consider internal adjustments before making major changes, and always keep your long-term goals and audience relationships in mind. Whether you’re transitioning to teaching, performing, or creating courses and content for other musicians, pivots can be opportunities for growth when approached with intention. This episode is a must-listen for musicians building businesses who want to embrace change, align their careers with their lives, and move forward confidently without feeling like failures.

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Hey, it’s Bree Noble, and I’m excited to be back for another solo episode. I’ve had several episodes that I needed to run that were very timely. My episode with Chris SD, my episode with Justin Moore, since his book just came out. So I haven’t had a chance to do any solo episodes. But I’ve had a lot of ideas brewing, and I wanted to make sure to get some on the schedule. So the plan going forward, just so you know, is that we’re going to be doing probably a solo episode every other week and an interview every other week. And we’ve combined the feeds between the Profitable Musician show and the Female Entrepreneur Musician show, and basically the same thing is going to be running on each show every week because I have a different set of audience members depending on, you know, that the Female Entrepreneur Musician show is quite old. It’s been around for almost 10 years.

Bree Noble 00:00:54 – 00:01:27

Started in 2015. So we have a lot of legacy listeners, and I don’t want to abandon them. So I’m. But then, of course, I’ve been building the profitable musician since 2020, and that audience is really growing and going strong. So I would just want to go ahead and keep both feeds but have them be the same. So that’s what we’re going to be doing going forward. And I wanted to talk about pivoting because I’ve seen a lot of people pivoting lately. I’ve thought about my life and how many times I’ve had to pivot in my life.

Bree Noble 00:01:28 – 00:02:46

And sometimes pivoting feels like a failure, feels like I’m abandoning something and I am doing this new thing, and everyone’s going to think that I did that because I failed. And so one of the points of this episode is I want to make sure that you know that just because you’re pivoting does not mean that you failed, especially if you’ve thought about it really hard, like the reasons that you’re pivoting. I think we can get into that mindset where we’re. We’re thinking that everybody’s watching us and that people are thinking, oh, well, she must be going in that other direction for a reason, that she didn’t do well in the first direction or something went wrong or she wasn’t getting enough traction there, or she got tired, she got burnt out, whatever it is. We think that people are making those assumptions about us because those are the assumptions that we’re making about ourselves that they’re thinking. And honestly, most of the time, people are not thinking that people are focused on their own lives. They’re not analyzing what you are doing. That being said, if you pivot too much, you might actually get a reputation of somebody who’s.

Bree Noble 00:02:46 – 00:03:39

Who can’t stick with things. And I’ve seen this in the industry, having been in the industry for over 10 years and even beyond that with women of substance. But I’ve been interviewing people on the podcast for that long for 10 years. And I’ve seen people that I interviewed even just a few years ago, and now they’re doing something completely different. Either they’re entirely out of the music industry or they’re talking about something totally other. And it’s confusing to me, especially when I see people doing that multiple times. To me, that is not putting the right kind of investment in your audience. If you’re going to make content for people and make courses and coaching and all the things that you do as a business owner to help people, you need to go deep into that.

Bree Noble 00:03:40 – 00:04:35

And if you’re switching your niche every few years, you haven’t gone deep enough. I know a big part of this podcast is to make sure that you don’t feel like you failed if you pivoted. And that is my true intent. But I did feel like I needed to say this part because sometimes people are niche hopping their business hopping, because it feels better to start a new thing than to go through the hard part that it always takes to build a business around something. It has not been smooth sailing for me for 10 years. Far from it. You know, I’ve had massive valleys within the few mountains that I’ve had. And so the problem that occurs is when people get into the hard part, when people get into what I like to call the groan zone, they think, oh, well, this must not be the right direction or business for me.

Bree Noble 00:04:35 – 00:05:34

And they jump ship before they even see if they can actually put in the work and make it work. Because pretty much every direction that you go is gonna take work. There’s this myth that it’s like, oh, if it’s not easy, if it’s not coming easy to me, if it’s not feeling aligned, then it’s not the right thing. And I want to dispel that myth. Okay, now that I got that off my chest. And if that is not you, if you’re not running away, if your pivot is for a really good reason and you’ve really thought through the reasoning around it, you’ve thought through how it fits with your life situation, your calling, your talents and all of that, if you’ve thought through that and you are still saying, I feel like I need to make a pivot, then I’m all for it. Do it. Don’t keep hanging on to something that clearly does not have a future for you just because you don’t want to look flaky.

Bree Noble 00:05:34 – 00:06:15

So I thought it would be helpful for me to talk about a few times in my life that I made pivots in my music career and business and why I made them. And it might encourage you to think through your situation and know that you’re not alone in this. So. So the first major pivot that I made after I had started building my music career, I’d left my job. I was touring, I was writing, I was recording all that stuff. And my kids were little, and I was taking them on tour with me, and it was working really, really well. And then they got to the point, first of all, my second daughter, so that was even more responsibility. It made it even harder to bring kids on tour.

Bree Noble 00:06:15 – 00:06:49

But more than that, they started to get to the age where they didn’t want to go. They had things that were going on. First of all, they had to be in school, so if I took them, I would have had to homeschool them. That would have been really difficult with my focus on performing. I was doing a lot of daytime performances at churches and moms groups and things like that, and that would have made it really hard to homeschool them. And I don’t think they were good candidates for that kind of lifestyle. So I realized either I had to leave them, which I did do for a few times. I did some tours.

Bree Noble 00:06:50 – 00:07:17

My last major one was for my holiday album, and it. I was gone for, like, two weeks almost during the holiday season, because, you know, when you release an album, you gotta make hay while the sun shines. And I was gone, and I missed a lot of things. And they were sad. You know, they were like, you didn’t get to build gingerbread houses with us, and you didn’t see my gymnastics performance. And, you know, all the things that happen around. Around the holidays especially. But for kids, they.

Bree Noble 00:07:17 – 00:07:56

They need their parents there. And so I realized that I needed to slow down or stop touring at that point. I had also moved to the mountains, and it was really hard to do even, like, day performances, because everything that wasn’t in my little town was an hour away. And so it. It just. It kind of signaled to me that it was time to give up on touring for a while, and I was okay with that. I’d been doing it a While I had fulfilled a lot of the goals that I had around touring, I had created the albums that I wanted. I was ready for something new and it made sense.

Bree Noble 00:07:56 – 00:08:38

And I wasn’t doing it because I wasn’t successful or I was running away or even that I was burnt out yet. I think it was good that I. I got off of that touring and trying to do that while also raising kids before it did burn me out. So at that point, I was about early 40s, and I made the decision to get off the road to find another way. And I thought about going back to corporate. I had been a director of finance. I actually went to some interviews and I just thought, you know, this is not what I want to do anymore. And I loved working with musicians.

Bree Noble 00:08:38 – 00:09:12

And at this point, I had built my women of substance platform. And I thought, well, you know, I get a lot of questions from these people. Why don’t I find a way to help them? And that’s how the Female Musician Academy was born in 2015. And to me, that was a very smart pivot. It wasn’t easy, let me tell you. I was basically building from nothing. So just because you pivot doesn’t mean suddenly it’s going to be easy. It just means that you know why you’re doing it, you have a clear plan of your direction.

Bree Noble 00:09:12 – 00:09:33

And I did. And I started with, I think it was 18 women. And it told me, yep, you’re going in the right direction. And I built from there. And it was. It was fantastic. And I was able to be home with my kids. And there were some seasons where I actually did homeschool them because they didn’t like their teacher or there was bullies at school or whatever.

Bree Noble 00:09:34 – 00:10:01

And so I did. I was able to do that, and I was able to go to their soccer practices and their gymnastics and all the things that I wanted to do for them when they were young. So that was for life reasons. My next pivot, I would say, was for business reasons. And it really was spurred on by the Pandemic. It was. It was started because I just wanted to help more musicians in different ways. I loved teaching.

Bree Noble 00:10:01 – 00:10:33

I wanted to expand my business into not just helping women, but helping everyone. I wanted to help musicians make money because I knew that that was the thing that was keeping them from making more music. And that’s when I pivoted to the profitable musician brand. I did Summits, and then I released my Rock youk Next release course, which happened to coincide perfectly with the Pandemic. Because musicians were home. They Were writing, they wanted to release more music. That was the way they connect with. Could connect with their fans because they couldn’t be out there on the road.

Bree Noble 00:10:33 – 00:11:21

And it was perfect. And I’m so glad that I did it, because I was able to help so many musicians release their albums the right way. Feel really good about the process. And, you know, it was great for my business for those years when that was going on. But then my next pivot was really a lifestyle thing, more in the fact that I was feeling like my talents were being wasted. I was really burnt out from being online during the pandemic and just only being online. And so I decided consciously that I was going to take some of my time and devote that to doing something that was more in person. And I didn’t know what that was going to look like, but I knew I needed it.

Bree Noble 00:11:21 – 00:11:49

And once I set that intention, things happened. They just fell into place. I went to my new pastor at my new church, and I said, hey, you know, I see that you guys are struggling in the music department here. I have these skills. I’d be happy to volunteer. And that was all I had in mind. And guess what? He said to me, we are really struggling. And I looked you up online, and you have the perfect skills we need.

Bree Noble 00:11:49 – 00:12:27

Would you be willing to come on as our worship director? And that was just totally out of left field for me. But I thought about it, and I knew that I was wanting to make a pivot. I didn’t know it was gonna be so extreme and so sudden and that it was gonna basically having me take a left turn for a while. But I said yes, because I knew that it was time to pivot, and I knew why I was pivoting. I also didn’t abandon what I was doing online. I think that was important. I thought about it. I thought I was so burnt out from.

Bree Noble 00:12:27 – 00:13:08

From the pandemic era of being online. I did think about saying, I’m just not going to do this anymore, and I only want to be in person. But I’m glad I didn’t do that, because we have seasons, and you don’t want to abandon what actually is a good thing or could be turned into a good thing again just because of the way you’re feeling at the moment. So that’s something I want to. I want to put in your mind regarding a pivot. Like, if you’re just feeling like, I want to burn everything down, I get that. I’ve been there. But what you might want to do is test the waters, keep that other thing going.

Bree Noble 00:13:08 – 00:14:17

Let’s just say, for example, that you are teaching students full time and it’s taking all of your time. You’ve got voice lessons packed in and you’re just so tired of that. I recommend what you do instead of just completely closing that part of your business. You say, either I’m going to pick the students that I work with and raise the price on the other students that are a pain, or just fire those students if you’re tired of working with them, or create some group programs for the people that are a little bit more beginner and they could benefit from a group program. But don’t just burn it all down until you’ve tested out the new thing. And also, you know, trying away in the business that you have that’s different to see if you actually still really like this business. You’re just needing to change how you do the business so there could be an internal pivot like that. And we should be really doing that all the time because we should always be optimizing and making it better for the way we want to work and live.

Bree Noble 00:14:18 – 00:15:08

But if you’re going to, let’s just say you were teaching all the time and you really want to perform again and you don’t have any time to do it, then find a way to optimize what you’re doing on the teaching side, or just do only the parts that you really love to make the time for the performing. Don’t just go only into performing and give up the teaching because, number one, you might miss it. You might not realize it until you’ve done it and now you can’t go back or you’re going to miss that income that’s going to help you ramp up on the other side. So I say all this because I’m really glad that I did that. I did pull way back in my business and I started working even more at the church and I was very busy. I was basically working there four days a week. And it was really hard to keep up my business. Thank goodness that I have wonderful employees that work for me.

Bree Noble 00:15:09 – 00:15:38

And I still loved working with musicians. I just needed to work with them in a way that made sense with my life and didn’t make me feel crowded and oppressed. And I was able to do that. And I did that for two years. And now that I’m on the other side of it, I’m so glad I didn’t burn that all down. First of all, I’ve been doing it for 10 years. Like that would be sad. And all the relationships that I have with everybody that I work with, I would not want to give those up.

Bree Noble 00:15:38 – 00:16:38

But now I feel this renewed sense of excitement around it and I am pulling back a little bit on the church side for multiple reasons. I still love working there. I just, I realized that I missed what I do online more than I thought I would and I gave myself the time and space to do that. So again, I’m pivoting in a way. Pivoting to I’m going all in on my business, all in on profitable musician, all in on the female Musician Academy, all in on my musicians profit path framework that I help musicians build their career. I’m excited about all of that again, and I’m so glad that I didn’t pivot so far away from it that I couldn’t go back. And so I think you can see that none of these pivots that I made are failures. They are strategic, they are fully thought through.

Bree Noble 00:16:39 – 00:17:38

0:00 – 17:38

Maybe sometimes they didn’t turn out the way I wanted or I didn’t execute them in quite the right way, but I still thought about them. I didn’t just jump into it and I didn’t do it because I felt like I was failing. I looked at it and said this isn’t feeling good and why I didn’t look at as a failure. So I hope you can see and take to heart everything that I said in this episode around pivoting and if you’ve really done the work to know if pivoting is what you need to do, then I’m all for it. Congratulations. Go for it and make a plan. Be strategic and don’t feel like you’re a failure and don’t feel like anyone’s going to look at you in that way. Move full speed ahead in what you love and what you feel is your calling.

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