TEM120: Rob Knopper Quotes (TEM Short)

The Entrepreneurial Musician with Andrew Hitz

TEM120: Rob Knopper Quotes (TEM Short)

Rob Knopper is a percussionist with the Metropolitan Opera and the founder of Auditionhacker and Percussionhacker.

Quotes:

• "Going to the Yes and King Crimson concerts, it's really interesting to see the type of thing that hooks in fans. I think about that when I do my website stuff. You look around the audience and everyone's wearing a black T-shirt and they all have an album cover on the front. There's all these little inside jokes among the fans, just different little aspects of things that happen in the music that people wanna talk about. It's interesting to think about what hooks people in when they start to become a fan of something, whether it's music or business or anything. I think about that when I'm making my stuff."
• "I just kind of gave myself permission to go explore all the various things I had put to the side for so long."
• "At the time, I was experimenting. I would do something on my site to see if it would work on my personal site. And then, if it didn't work, I would throw it away. If it did work, I would go to the orchestra committee and say, ‘Hey! Let's do this.’”
• "I had an idea. I could (lead an individual student through his audition method), but I could literally change the lives of hundreds, or thousands of people, by offering them solutions or a resource that could help them directly improve their own life as they struggle through the process of becoming a percussionist."
• "When you read entrepreneurial books, and blogs, and listen to podcasts and stuff, you hear people say that you have to understand your audience and you have to survey them and call them…..They say come up with an avatar or choose somebody in your audience who you're writing for."
• "Everybody listening can think about what their specialty is. They still may feel like a student, or they still may feel like a freelancer, but you have a specialty. Everybody has an area of passion, or interest, that is a blue ocean. Until that starts getting filled in, it's wide open for most things."

Show notes for all episodes of TEM including topics discussed, links to all books and websites referenced can be found at:

http://www.andrewhitz.com/shownotes

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2. Thanks to everyone who helped me get to my goal of 50 ratings on iTunes! I appreciate it very much!

And finally, a huge thank you to Parker Mouthpieces for providing the hosting for TEM.

Produced by Andrew Hitz