We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Andrew Southworth a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Andrew, looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?
When I was in senior year of high school I got accepted to Berklee College of Music for guitar as my main instrument with the plan to go through their music production program. This was my lifelong dream at the time and I accomplished it. Unfortunately I couldn’t actually afford to go as I didn’t get any scholarships, I didn’t have rich parents and I didn’t want to graduate with $200k in student debt with a music degree.
So instead I went to a local community college and started working at Starbucks. My plan was to go for mechanical engineering because it was another interest of mine and it paid quite well, so i’d have money for music at some point. While I was definitely sad I couldn’t go to Berklee, reaching that goal taught my that I could teach myself anything and reach any goal I wanted to achieve. In just 6 years I taught myself how to play the guitar at a high enough of a level that I got accepted to one of the best music colleges in the world.
Throughout college I worked at Starbucks the entire time. At first it was full time so I could pay for tuition, car payments, books etc, but fortunately along the way as college got more challenging my parents helped me more so I could reduce my hours. In college I learned that there were a lot of brilliant people out there in the world, people much smarter than me. I couldn’t make myself smarter than them but I could work harder than any of them. In 2016 I graduated with my bachelors degree in mechanical engineering, and got a job straight out of college. That company paid for me to get my master’s degree, and I worked full time while I went to graduate school full time at night.
By the time I finished grad school in 2018 I had 7-8 years of full-time college experience while also working a full time job through most of it. Despite the heavy workload I graduated ‘Magna cum laude’ while also taking honors classes and specialization classes. To me, this is the cornerstone of my work ethic and it’s further reinforced that you can accomplish almost anything with a bit of hard work.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
Hey everyone, my name is Andrew Southworth and i’m a former mechanical engineer turned YouTuber, music artist, music marketer and entrepreneur. My channel has over 7 million views and I have around 100k followers cross-platform online. Most people know me as the ‘music marketing guy’, and most people know me from my YouTube channel.
My YouTube journey started teaching guitar and metal screaming vocal lessons. But over the years I switched to music production, and then music marketing / music business which is what I talk about today. Since then i’ve worked with over 2k artists and record labels 1-on-1, have taught over 3k students in my courses and run thousands of ad campaigns. My music has over 10 million streams and i’ve generated over 300 million streams for my clients on Spotify alone.
I’m constantly working with artists, managers and labels to help them market their music. As a result i’m constantly seeing what problems they have and trying to find solutions to them. When I see multiple people struggling with the same thing I see it as an opportunity to either make some content or resources, turn it into a course and/or turn it into a service – usually all of the above.
My mission is to give every artist the resources they need to succeed. Newer artists or artists with no budget need free content to learn how they can do things themselves. Many prefer the organization and structure of a course, along with the perks we can provide with a paid course. Some need 1-on-1 help to reach their goals and some just want to outsource their marketing to another company.
Most of my journey i’ve focused solely on the educational / training side, but recently i’ve been putting a lot of attention on my music marketing agency services. Specifically how can we deliver a great result as much of the time as possible, while also keeping our minimum campaign sizes as approachable as possible for as many artists as possible while also running a profitable business. This has resulted in a new brand we’ve soft launched, but not officially announced to my audience yet called Southworth Media.
Southworth Media is a music marketing agency focusing on digital advertising. Bringing enterprise level ad campaigns down to a budget the indie artist can afford. We can help you promote your song on Spotify and other streaming platforms, grow a Spotify playlist, promote your music video on YouTube and more.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
1. Just start. Too many people talk about doing something instead of just doing it. Yes you will fail more times than you succeed, but this failure is what makes you better. While planning and preparation is important, there is a point where you need to just get your hands dirty and do the work and figure the rest out along the way.
2. Get good at learning. The most important thing I learned in college aside from how to work hard, was how to teach myself anything. As an entrepreneur you’re constantly going to run into problems you don’t know how to solve, so you need to be able to learn new skills and figure things out along the way.
3. Persistency is better than talent. I don’t feel that I am particularly “talented“, but what I am is consistent and persistent. I will sit down and put in the hard work on something for years if I believe in it, and I will take the time to learn the skills I need.
I’ll give you a bonus one too: Value is everything. Everything you create should provide value to the people it was designed for. Whether that means you’re teaching people to overcome a problem or writing a song that will get people through those dark moments in life. It should be obvious who your content is for and why they should consume it.
All of these things take practice and you’ll refine them over the years. But if you get good at these things i’m fairly confident you’ll be able to accomplish anything you want with enough time. Let’s do an example…
Want to be a software engineer? Just get started, go online and pull up some tutorials and start coding that day. Consume as much knowledge as possible but also put it into practice just as much. Some people are blessed with natural ability for coding but you’re probably not, so plan on working your ass off every day for the next few years to turn yourself into a competent developer. Actually set a plan, pick a schedule and work on improving every day, every week, every month, every year until you reach your goal.
Some goals may only take months, some may take 10 years.
Before we go, maybe you can tell us a bit about your parents and what you feel was the most impactful thing they did for you?
This is going to sound weird, but the most impactful thing they did for me was get divorced. My parents split up when I was about 12 years old, and I genuinely think this was one of the best things to ever happen to me. Just to clarify I want to start off by saying both of my parents are great, and I wouldn’t be who I am without them. They always provided for me, kept me safe and encouraged me to pursue my dreams. I was very fortunate in that way.
The reason the divorce was so impactful is that prior to age 12 when they split I was kind of a spoiled kid, and then after they split my teenage years were much harder. We never lived on the streets or anything, but we were often behind on bills and we’d go to furniture stores for fun because they often had free snacks and games. The electricity never got shut off but we did have our cell phones and internet get shut off a few times. We had to sell my childhood home to prevent us from losing it.
I basically went from upper middle class to lower middle class overnight. So I had a taste of what it was like to have money but then had it taken away and felt what it was like to not have money. This was a huge motivator for me in my life.
On top of that I only started playing guitar because of my parents divorce. It is very likely if they stayed together I would never have gotten into music in the first place.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://andrewsouthworth.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrew.southworth
- Twitter: https://x.com/southwortha
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@andrewsouthworth
- Other: https://southworth.media/
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