We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kristin Agee a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Kristin, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today. What was one of the most important lessons you learned in school? Why did that lesson stick with you?
I think one of the most important lessons I learned during my time in music school was just how diverse a profession it is. Everyone carves out their own path in this career, there is no right or wrong way to do it. There are also all sorts of income levels. A musician’s income is not always equivalent to their talent level or musical abilities.
Going to school for music doesn’t even guarantee you a career or job in music after graduation. Some of the most talented musicians I studied with at music school went on to other professions after graduation, choosing a steady income over the struggles of making a music career financially viable. Some of the most financially successful musicians don’t go to music school. There is no direct link from a degree in music to a higher income as a musician afterwards.
I had a professor in school who once said to me “What you DO is not always how you make a living.” That statement had a huge impact on me. I was going to music school because I wanted a career in music. I wanted to be able to make a good living, support a family, and all of the other benefits that someone with a college degree would expect from a job when they graduate. This professor was basically telling me that I could be a musician, and might need to find some other way to make a living.
I started to pay more attention to how the musicians I admired were making money, and how “well” they were living. I noticed that a lot of musicians with great jobs in music such as my professors and professional musicians who would visit the university, would almost always have multiple streams of income. No matter where their main income came from, they also had other income they would earn through performing, teaching, composing, recording, publishing, making instruments, etc… It was also clear that some of the most impressively talented musicians who would visit the university as guests of honor to teach and perform with us were not necessarily wealthy people. It seemed obvious to me that if I continued down my own path of having a career in music, that I wasn’t going to have one job that would be enough to live off of. I would have to find as many income streams as possible to piece together a living. And my “success” would not necessarily be solely due to my level of musicianship and musical achievements, but might have even more to do with how many income streams I could maintain at any given time.
Kristin, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I am a musician, music teacher, business owner, landlord, wife, and mother of two beautiful children. I grew up in a musical family, and decided early on in my life that music was always going to be a part of what I did. I studied music in college at Ohio University, and discovered how much I enjoyed guiding and mentoring young music students while in college teaching through the Athens Community Music School and my time as a graduate teaching assistant in the percussion department of the university. I was pursuing a performance degree, but realized that I would likely always earn part of my income through teaching music students. I really enjoyed the connection I made with my students, and watching them improve week after week in our lessons. I got excited for their accomplishments just as much as I did for my own.
After college I moved to Cincinnati, Ohio where I began looking for work performing and teaching music. I began as most musicians do, accepting every gig that came my way, regardless of pay. After a couple years in Cincinnati I was teaching in 4 different music academies and performing with local cover bands and orchestral ensembles in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and West Virginia. In 2012 I made the decision to try to consolidate my teaching work and open a teaching studio that I would manage with a partner, Jeremy Singer. I also decided to focus more on the original music I was writing and performing with the experimental rock group Us, Today.
After years of touring with Us, Today, and growing my private teaching studio, Jeremy and I partnered with a company called Musicologie in a 2021 and I shifted more of my attention to running this business and working with other music teachers to help them grow their teaching practices at Musicologie. Musicologie now offers private and group lessons on a wide variety of musical instruments, and a rock band program with two groups that rehearse weekly. I have taken a step back recently also from my role in Us, Today choosing to focus more on free-lance performing opportunities, working on a solo album of ambient vibraphone music under the stage name Hher, and getting to spend more time at home being a mom.
Running a Musicologie has given me the opportunity to build a larger community of music teachers and students. Our studio has large rooms and top of the line equipment for students to learn on. We are constantly working to provide opportunities for our students outside of music lessons, with extra free classes and workshops, and performances in local music venues. At Musicologie, we believe that music makes us human. Our mission is to create an inclusive community of music explorers and empower teachers to build sustainable careers. I am personally dedicated to this mission, and plan to continue this work indefinitely.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
I first met Jeremy Singer while we were both teaching at a music academy north of Cincinnati in a suburb called Maineville. Other teachers were coming and going, and only ever accumulating a small number of students. But Jeremy and I had both been teaching there for a while and had built up a large number of students we each taught. We started performing in a few bands together, and pooling our students together for recitals. After working together for a while and seeing our personal studios growing, we decided that we would like to be in charge of our own business and continue what we were doing in the Anderson Township area of Cincinnati. We started our first business together in 2012 called Anderson Music Workshop. We were contacted by Joseph Barker at Musicologie in 2020 and partnered with this business in 2021. Musicologie Development were trying to find partners in Cincinnati so start growing their business across Ohio. Anderson Music Workshop’s growth had been stagnant for a while, so we were open to partnering with a larger studio and adopting the business practices that they had success with. We had also recently lost a substantial amount of business due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so it seemed like the right time to rebrand and start rebuilding.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
As I mentioned in the previous answer, the COVID-19 pandemic was a factor in our decision to partner with Musicologie. The pandemic was a turning point for a lot of people who decided during this time to make some major life/career changes, and I am no different than anyone else in that regard. While I was cancelling all of my upcoming performances and pivoting to teaching all of my music students online, I was also a first time mom with an infant at home. Prior to the start of the pandemic I had been doing my best to manage my teaching/performing career as well as being a mother. But it was a struggle to keep up the amount of performing I was doing without feeling like I was abandoning my child on the weekends. And then I found myself without any performances on the calendar, and at home all day teaching my students remotely. I had a lot more time to be with my son, and I really liked it. I was available for my son a lot more than I had been before, and I realized that for my own happiness I needed to have a better balance to my work and home life. So, as life has slowly returned to normal, I have made a point to focus more on managing my teaching business and have accepted fewer performing opportunities. This was the right choice for me at the time, and now I have a daughter too and am happier than ever that I made the choice to be home more during this time in my young children’s lives.
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