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If there's only two things I've learned in life, living my dual life of semi-pro musician by night and financial businessman by day, they are the following: you can never escape death nor taxes, and image is two thirds the battle in getting any message across. It is an unfortunate truth of our society, and not by any means a new fact either, but is especially true of the music business. (after all, it's part of the entertainment industry for a reason.)

Before going any further however, I would like to clarify a few points on what I mean by "image" for the sake of my argument. First, and foremost, I do not by any stretch of the imagination mean that in order to get a message across you must be a "beautiful" person nor does this argument validate the de-humanization of female artists. (You do not need to become a singing stripper just to have your music heard) Second, in the long run image without talent is nothing more than flair without substance and you will not survive in the music industry alone. (unfortunately less true these days however artists like Lohan and Spears are less musicians than media stars with music as a filler, or film to back their careers.) Hence, if you place too much focus upon image, your actual playing will suffer in some way which will show in the end.
To prove all of the above, I can offer you a few of my own experiences, and the pitfalls that taught me the lessons that are now common practice in my world. First off, a little over a year ago my long time musical act had the stupendous opportunity of working with a "big name" manager out of the United States. She loved our music, loved our vocalist's style, and wanted to pursue bigger and better endeavours with us. Our music even happened to be easily "marketable", we all had industry experience, and our sound was different enough from everything else on the radio to stand-out amongst the crowd. However, the only drawback was that we didn't have a well defined image. We had the message but needed a more holistic means of communication. That last sentence the key message. If you take away nothing else from this article, the most important aspect of image is to use your appearance, your "brand" as a tool to get your "message", your music, out into the public in the perspective that you want it understood. We didn't think about this, not much more than choosing a band name anyhow, and once we had a defined sound we just left it at that. For the record, after arduous months

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