Why every musician should collaborate: 6 Key benefits

Discover how collaborating with other musicians can transform your career and unlock new opportunities. From sparking creativity to reaching wider audiences, find out why teaming up may be the best thing for your individual success.

by Chris Robley from the Reverbnation Blog

In 2024, every artist should be involved in a musical collaboration.

Don’t believe me? Maybe you think you’re a lone-genius, self-sufficient, punk-rock, totally DIY? If so, even you can benefit from collaboration!

How?

Well, I’m sure you know what collaboration is, but a definition will remind us why it’s so powerful, especially for emerging artists.

Put simply: Collaboration is the combining of resources or talents, for the purposes of achieving more than you otherwise could as an individual.

When you collaborate with other artists, you can:

1. Increase your budget

If money is tight, working with another artist on a musical project helps boost the budget. This is true whether you’re working on a single, album, video, or social post. Because BOTH artists are literally bought in on its success.

Just keep track of who spends what!

2. Better utilize your budget

With a bigger budget and a larger “team,” you have more ways to delegate responsibilities. Meaning certain creative or promotional activities are less likely to slip through the cracks.

Also, you’ll have more brainpower and experience to draw on to shape your strategy.

3. Stretch yourself creatively

Collaboration is one of the best ways to break out of a creative rut, and to expand your own sonic palette. That’s why famous artists work with certain producers or co-writers. You can too!

Solidify your standing in a certain genre by working with someone else you respect in the same scene. Or take a chance outside your genre, and blend your sound with something radically different.

4. Achieve better musical results

We all have creative weaknesses. Maybe it’s in audio engineering, lyric writing, saxophone soloes, drum programming.

If you can identify your deficiency, and seek out someone with that exact expertise, your music will greatly improve.

5. Reach a greater audience

This is the most commonly-cited reason to collaborate. And for good reason: You potentially DOUBLE the size of your fanbase.

Depending on how you credit your collaborator in the metadata, you have the ability to appear in their discography and be recommended to their followers.

6. Boost the chances of an event’s success

When you draw on multiple audiences, improve the creative output, marshal your brainpower, pool your resources, and organize your promotion — you increase your chances of success.

And that goes for live events as well. Whether it’s a local co-bill, or a national tour, teamwork makes the dreamwork.

Conclusion

As you can see, collaboration is a way to move your music further along while expending the same (or maybe even less) effort.