We recently connected with Alice Valkyrie and have shared our conversation below.

Alice, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you share an important lesson you learned in a prior job that’s helped you in your career afterwards?

My professional career has actually been this beautiful feedback loop of music, multimedia art, and people skills.

I decided I wanted to dedicate my life to music at 14 years old, but before then I thought I was going to be an artist, specializing in portraits and life drawing. I’d spend a lot of time alone just working on art and the soundtrack to my work was as enjoyable as the artwork itself.

The pivot came when I hit my first major roadblock, having my principal refuse to let me take the college-level courses I qualified for. I needed his consent, not just my mother’s. So at 14, I started producing my own music instead of pursuing art and dedicating all my extra time to the dream of becoming some sort of rockstar.

Over the years, I just picked up a lot of skills, Photoshop, Lighting, Web-Design, and my desire to succeed in dating women as a 5‘ 5 young man, forged me into an excellent salesman.

In my early 20s, I became good enough at graphic & web design to start freelancing. I was also DJing, Producing, and singing in the Old Town Scottsdale circuit.

Eventually, I was able to be a full-time creative & multimedia specialist in the real estate sector. This is where I learned the two most important lessons that have made a difference for me now.

First, was that wasted time is an illusion and a failure in framing. Now that I was a full-time creative, one of my favorite ways to work was to design with my headphones on; doing deep dives into music I was always curious about. As a DJ now, the little breaks I took making good playlists for myself while working were incredibly valuable. I discovered so much great music while doing design work.

I also refined my multi-media production & digital marketing workflows, from copywriting to proofing, file management, content replacement workflows, and time management. I created systems for extracting data from scattered formats and spitting it out in the exact order I need it to minimize proofing and human errors.

Now, as a one-woman recording artist / local DJ / online personality / professional hot girl, I use everything I learned from working in my freelance multi-media work, T-Mobile Sales, to GoDaddy tech, to working in Santa Monica real estate marketing. Hell, the very portraits I drew as a kid and doing graphic design for over ten years helped me refine my makeup technique when I came out as trans. Absolutely none of it was wasted time and all this learning was cumulative.

I don’t know where I’d be without everything I learned in that 9-5, retail or phone support job. If you’re out there frustrated with where you’re at because you’re not living your dream job yet, ask yourself what you might be able to use in your dream job. What skills can you refine at the job you have or the one you can secure right now? You’re not wasting your time you’re sharpening your skills for the battles ahead.

The second is a little contradictory but there is a time for both. I did learn what it’s like to not commit to what you want. I did have to lose my career and have my back put against the wall to really understand what it means to commit to your dreams like your life depends on it.

It was painful to turn 30 and realize I wasn’t gonna be a rockstar by trying to build a decent life for myself and my girlfriend at the time.

I lacked the boldness to be broke for a while and cut costs of living to live humbly. I lacked authenticity in living as a man, which limited my enthusiasm and joy for my craft as a musician.

Learning to commit, sometimes means giving up every comfort that may be holding you back from your girlfriend to a nice apartment. To do so you might have to feel the full pain of a lifetime of going the wrong way and not committing fully. The pain of failure could be a fire in your heart.

You have to make the most out of every moment, but sooner or later you are going to have to commit, or else your moment will pass you by.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My main objective as Alice Valkyrie is to be a full fledge, touring recording artist. Alternating from studio mode to touring mode. DJing has been a very effective way to create an audience for the original music I’m working on while paying my bills and doing something I love. It’s a means to an end but the means make me happy and I take pride in being a great DJ as well as a musician & recording artist.

The gigs I take usually fall into two categories, brand gigs, and money gigs. Brand gigs will be in alignment with the queer/goth/electronic music communities that I intersect in, while money gigs are often restaurants or private parties that I DJ mostly because of the pay but they also help me expand my brand.

The value to my brand gig clients is entertainment, putting heads in the door, which should translate to door sales or alcohol sales for them. The value to my money gig clients is primarily entertainment, branding, and some amount of promotion to their establishment or events.

Most DJs would do both types of gigs and build their way up to DJing at bigger clubs like I have or build the business into a more private event-focused route. But there are those of us that can produce music as well and want to scale to DJing or performing at festivals and work towards the primary objective of producing records and touring.
Financially, this does require excellent business strategies to sell merchandise and ticket sales because no one makes money off of their own music recordings directly anymore.

The music DJs/Producers like myself make doest allow us to scale to those levels, playing for tens to hundreds of thousands as opposed to just a few hundred.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

The way I built my social media presence so far has been to post regularly, and embrace the visual nature of the internet via care and attention to aesthetics & perception.

I also did the hard social media marketing work a normal small business would rarely be bold enough to do. I never missed a chance to engage with my communities and supported those communities as well as the people in them.

I showed up to other people’s gigs, filmed them with my phone, and posted about them. The tried and true back-scratch strategy. Social media is great for that sort of thing, they share the hype they very much appreciate and your accounts get shared along with them. Helping others helps you.

I also posted real things, commented on other people’s posts, and engaged with others. These app developers want you to engage with other users as a creator just as much as those users engage with you.

You want to put yourself in those developers’ shoes and do what you think they would want you to do as a user and a creator. Take advantage of whatever new features they release and build the community to keep people on their platform.

If you do that, then the individual actions will become clear.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

A lot of restaurant/bar/club owners and event promoters don’t fully understand what is required to be a full-time DJ, recording artist, creative, or performer in general. A lot of performers don’t understand what it is to be a business owner either.

From the performer’s perspective, we have to prepare for the initial launch of our shows, make our investments, and pay for overhead, marketing, and other things before the show even starts. Our compensation needs to pay for that WITH a profit margin to justify growth, re-invest in our craft, and deliver better, more entertaining, and lucrative performances over time. Our brands/careers have a trajectory in terms of growth, venue owners and promoters must be able to appraise all that performers do and do their part in promoting the success of those events.

Performers also need to understand that the business needs to be able to justify the investment in entertainers and cater to that. Both parties spent a lot of money just to open the doors and put on a show, but if a**es aren’t in seats or people aren’t spending money the concept needs to go back to the drawing board and both parties will likely share in some degree of a loss. When losses are taken, if both parties don’t bare it together, the relationship deteriorates.

A lot of business owners or promotion company owners will think that letting performers walk away with little to nothing after a loss is justified, but sometimes that means we don’t eat. Food insecurity is real, especially among queer performers. But when those business owners or event promoters “take an L” as the kids say these days, they get to ride home in their sports car to the newly remodeled house they own. Then again performers aren’t on the hook for the electric bill of a big nightclub with a Funktion-One sound system. The stakes aren’t always the same for all parties involved but it really helps to navigate with empathy toward all stakeholders.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://alicevalkyrie.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alicevalkyrie
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100053469437972
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicaaliceharper/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs0hqhBK6yozBfn-s_ons0g

Image Credits
Main Photo by Matthew James & Synesthesia