We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Victor Telleria. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Victor below.

Victor, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. It’s easy to look at a business or industry as an outsider and assume it’s super profitable – but we’ve seen over and over again in our conversation with folks that most industries have factors that make profitability a challenge. What’s biggest challenge to profitability in your industry?

The biggest challenge to profitability in the music industry are the margins music as a product makes in the digital world. Nowadays, music is streamed 90% of the time instead of actually being pressed and sold as a physical object. This makes the economic model of music much more complicated and difficult to navigate because streaming a song pays an average of .003-.005$ per stream. Yes, you read that right. This means that in order to make an average amount of money per month, your music needs to be streamed about 1,000,000 per month. This is quite a feat to accomplish since the hardest part of the music industry is building your fanbase and growing the brand in the beginning.

Once you get over that hurdle, things tend to come by easier and with more abundance due to the proof of concept, experience and time in the industry. With that being said, once you get to having your music listened around 1,000,000 times a month, you will probably be a self sustaining business. The reason for this is because if 1 streaming service is getting those numbers, this means that you are getting quite a lot of numbers on all the other streaming platforms, which will pay less but it will still add up. On top of that, you will be collecting different types of royalties on each song.

We also need to add that out of the people streaming your music, you will definitively have a core strong fan base that will need to be nourished like any other customer of a big brand. These people will help you thrive as you create different merchandise items to sell such as: clothes, vinyls, sample packs, etc. So there is a silver lining, it just takes a bit to get there, like any business.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

Of course! I am VKZ (pronounced vics – short for Victor), a recording artist, producer, musician, live performer and entrepreneur. I’ve been creating music for 5 years now and releasing it independently for about 3 years. I’ve always loved music and played guitar since I was little, but I only realized I wanted to actually be an artist once I had graduated from the University of Florida from my Bachelors and Masters degree. I got those in Business Administration and Entrepreneurship which has definitively helped and prepared me to navigate this incredibly cutthroat and sketchy industry.

I decided to create my own record label and register it here in Florida as an actual business so that it serves as my creative hub to put out the music that I like to make. The music I create is mainly under the “dance” genre but it tends to explore a lot of different nuances within sounds, styles and influences. This is because I am a multicultural person (born and raised in Nicaragua, my mother and her side of the family is from Haiti, I’ve been living in the US since 2012, my girlfriend is from Croatia). Having been exposed to all these different cultural idiosyncrasies has shaped me in a very interesting way that definitively shines on my music, and I love that. I get to create Afro-Caribbean rhythms, merge them with my love for house music, shred my guitar, write lyrics in English and Spanish, find other amazing artists to collaborate with and formulate an incredibly unique piece of music out of all this. That is just one example of how I use my influences to create music. However, there are a ton more of different ways I come up with ideas and music based on my life experiences.

I am extremely grateful to be able to share my music with people and actually have a growing fan base that can relate with it! On top of that, when performing live, I get to play my guitar and sing all while mixing my songs in real time, thus creating a super cool and unique live show that is not generally seen in the dance music scene. That is definitively one of my music’s biggest attraction and wow factor!

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

This is something very dear to me because being an independent musician means basically funding your career by yourself until getting to the point where investments start to come in. I got a job after I graduated from University which I have been working on for the past 5 years and I’ve saved all the money I can in order to grow/invest my music business. Throughout the years, I’ve been able to own/build the means of operation (basically buy the gear necessary to set up my studio wherever it is that I am living), work out distribution deals that allow me to economically release my music without breaking bank nor sharing profits, and figure out a time schedule that allows me to invest time and practice into my actual skillset of creating and performing music.

I feel blessed to be in the position I am at the moment because it’s allowed me to actually chase this music dream I have and actually position it on my mental map somewhere that’s in an attainable distance. Granted, I am still long ways from it but I take it day by day, month by month and ultimately year by year, where my only competition is me from a year ago.

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

Sure! I am still working and building my audience everyday but I’m a lot further than I was a year ago. Like I said before, my main competitor is myself and everyone starting out should know and understand this. If you go around compering yourself to others, you’ll end up in a very dark and depressed place because everyone’s journey is different and unique to their own.

The main way I grow my audience is by consistently creating and sharing my music/music content online and also advertising said content afterwards. Basically, I create the songs I love to hear and then I might film myself playing parts of it, or just reacting to it and showing the way it makes me feel. It could also be explaining the meaning behind the songs, doing breakdowns of them, etc. All these different things end up being content that I share with my current fanbase and hope the algorithms push it to other potential fans. I keep doing this to keep my current audience up to date with my music and what I am up to as an individual, while hoping new fans and people that check out my page/music like it and decide to join the movement. I also advertise that content on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook so that by paying some amount of money I can be put in front of potential fans. This was a big driver to my page 1-2 years ago but the online advertising landscape is getting very saturated and expensive at the moment so I’m trying to figure out what my next moves will be regarding that.

Contact Info:

• Website: vkzmusic.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vkzmusic
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vkzofficial
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victor-telleria
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/VKZMUSIC

Image Credits
Voice Visions Backroom Sessions Melted Color Media