My Biggest Music Career Regret: Waiting Too Long to Release
By Written by Peter McVeigh
Perfectionism kills more music careers than bad songs ever will. If you're sitting on finished tracks waiting for the right moment, read this first.
People ask me about regrets and I sometimes say I don't have any.
That'sn't entirely true.
I've learned from everything that happened in my career. I'dn't change most of it. But there are moments, specific ones, where I look back and know clearly that I made the wrong call. And the one that cost me most wasn't a bad deal, a bad show, or a bad split. It was patience. The wrong kind of patience.
The Managers Who Told Me to Wait
At various points in my career I worked with managers who were, on paper, exactly the kind of people you want in your corner. They'd serious artists on their books. Big names. Real careers. They knew the industry, they knew the rooms, they knew the people.
Every time I sent them tracks they told me the same thing. Yes, great, keep writing. Craft the sound. Not yet. Keep going.
At the time I took that as encouragement. In hindsight I understand it for what it was. I was being kept on a holding pattern. The logic, as best as I can reconstruct it, was this: if one of their bigger artists fell away or needed a support act or a gap needed filling, I'd be ready and waiting. Polished. Useful. Available.
I wasn't being developed. I was being preserved.
The Pattern That Repeated
I moved across a few managers over those years and the same dynamic arrived each time, dressed slightly differently.
Hold off. Craft it. Not quite yet. Nearly there. Write more.
I was writing constantly. I was getting better. But nothing was going out into the world, and nothing going out into the world meant nothing was happening. No feedback, no momentum, no audience being built. Just a hard drive filling up with music that nobody was hearing.
The honest thing I've to say about that period is this: I let it happen. I wasn't naive enough to miss what was going on. But I also wanted to believe that the right person knowing about me was enough.
The Day I Stopped Waiting
One day I decided to just put an EP out.
No manager sign-off. No industry approval. No waiting for the perfect moment or the perfect sound. I recorded it, I finished it, I put it out.
And everything changed.
People were interested. Radio was interested. Festivals were interested. I could sell tickets. I was entering competitions and winning them. I was getting trips to the USA to play. I could book support slots. All of that, just from recording my own music and releasing it.
None of it required permission from anyone. It just required me to stop asking for it.
What I Understand Now That I Didn't Understand Then
The managers weren't wrong about wanting quality. They were wrong about what quality requires.
Quality doesn't require silence. You don't become a better artist by waiting in a room. You become a better artist by releasing music, hearing how people respond to it, understanding what lands and what doesn't, and then making the next thing better because of all of that.
The idea that you need to reach some finished, polished, industry-approved standard before you're allowed to release music is one of the most damaging myths in the development of any artist. It keeps people waiting for a signal that's never coming, from people who may not have your best interests as their first priority.
Your first release doesn't need to be your best work. It needs to exist.
People Love Being Part of Your Journey
Here's what years of music industry experience has taught me about audiences: they don't want a finished product delivered to them from a distance. They want to be part of something.
When you release music early, when you let people hear you finding your sound, when your recordings improve across releases and people can trace that arc, they feel involved. They feel like they were there from the beginning. That connection is worth more than any amount of polish.
The fans who discovered you on your first rough EP and followed you through every release after it aren't the same as the fans who discovered you on your fifth, carefully managed, industry-approved record. The early ones have a different investment. They feel ownership of your story.
On Managers and Gatekeepers
I want to be careful here because I'm not saying don't work with managers. A good manager, at the right time, can be transformative. The relationships I've had with the right people at the right moments have been genuinely valuable.
What I'm saying is this: be honest with yourself about what the relationship is doing for you.
Is your manager actively working to create opportunities? Are things moving? Is music going out, are conversations happening, are doors opening?
Or are you being held? Kept comfortable enough that you stay, but not actually progressing. Getting encouraging feedback that never leads anywhere. Always nearly ready but never quite there.
If the answer is the second one, trust your instincts. The cost of waiting for the right manager to give you permission to release your music is time. And you don't get that back.
Learn From My Mistake
Don't hold off waiting for something to be finished.
Get it out. Let your sound develop in public. Let your recording quality improve across releases. Let people watch you get better. That process, done honestly and consistently, builds a more durable career than anything a holding pattern ever produced.
The right people will find you when you're out there. The radio plugger, the festival booker, the support slot promoter, the competition judge. None of them can find music that doesn't exist yet.
I spent years being told I was nearly ready. The day I decided to act as though I already was, everything changed.
You don't need permission. You need a release date.