Going Viral: Marty Schwartz on How He Built a YouTube Guitar Channel (Episode 19)

Luck = preparation + opportunity.

When this episode was recorded, Marty Schwartz had 1.4 million YouTube subscribers, 302,000 Facebook followers, 144,000 on Instagram and 29,000 on Twitter. That is one of the biggest audiences in guitar instruction. In Episode 19 of The Career Musician, Nomad sits on the couch in Marty's video studio, the set of his Marty Music lessons, and asks the obvious question: how did he go viral?

Nomad's answer before the interview even starts: there is no secret sauce. Time, hard work, perseverance and discipline. Here is how Marty built a YouTube guitar channel, and why the guy who majored in music to avoid sales and marketing ended up running a business built on them.

Start with fun, add tiny things every day

Marty was no childhood prodigy. He got a guitar at 13, and the teacher went straight to the method book. No power chords, no AC/DC, no fun. It didn't stick.

His senior year of high school, his buddies were already good and he felt left out. So he bought a 20 dollar harmonica, learned a few blues licks and jammed with them. Then he asked for two chords on guitar, just to have something to play while people tuned up. Then a third. It wasn't as hard as he thought, because he was learning songs that sounded familiar right away.

That became how he teaches: tiny new things every day. It doesn't have to be an overwhelming amount of information. Baby steps.

Find your voice by serving the music

His influences are a soup: the Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Bob Marley, the Grateful Dead, Phish, Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan, whose "Little Wing" is his pick for the most epic guitar solo. The best players, he says, are the ones where you can hear their influences, but it's immediately their own. You hear one note from Jerry Garcia and you know.

So how do you find your own voice? Identify what moves you the most. Learn the fundamentals until the techniques are second nature, so your personality can come through. Be open to multiple influences, and follow them back to the source: Phish leads you to the Dead, and the Dead lead you to Muddy Waters. At 20, he was sizing up the other guy. The next step is getting past that competitive edge and serving the music, not yourself.

The career musician template

Marty went to college for film, but all he did was play guitar. The coolest people at school were in the music program. His guitar teacher there played in a professional funk band, taught at the college and made a good living. That opened his eyes. Before he graduated, Marty took over that teacher's spot in the funk cover band, making about 300 dollars a week in 1996.

He modeled his early career on that teacher: teach lessons, play in bands, take whatever other opportunities come. From about 1997 to 2005 he gigged and taught nonstop in San Diego. Then an elementary school lost its music teacher two weeks before the school year started, saw his guitar lesson ad and asked if he'd step in. That job became an amazing lead generator for private students. Work begets work.

How the YouTube channel actually started

Marty never had a moment where he decided to start a YouTube business, because that didn't exist yet. He used YouTube to send his mom videos of his baby daughter, because the files were too big to email. He also burned technique DVDs for his group lessons.

The lightbulb came on the third week in a row a teenage student said he forgot how Hendrix's "Fire" went. Marty flipped open his laptop camera, played the riff slowly, put it on YouTube and tagged it with the student's name so he could find it and Marty could see whether he watched it. Then he did it every lesson, as a way to stand out from other guitar teachers.

"There is no next level. It's like every day, you just keep adding."

Marty Schwartz, 35:05

One day, without thinking about it, he put the artist and song name first in the title instead of the student's name. The next day it had about 50 views from strangers. That was search engine optimization, and he didn't know it. Then the 2008 crash hit. He lost the teaching job, some regular gigs and some students all at once. His gut said make nonstop videos. That pushed him into online business, and his income slowly flipped from 90 percent gigs and lessons to 80 percent online. In 2016 he launched Marty Music, his own brand, run on his own.

That's Luck = preparation + opportunity. Thousands of lessons taught, a love of film and video, and a crash that forced the move. As Nomad says, there's always a plan and always preparation behind the "overnight" story.

It's all sales and marketing

Marty got a music degree partly to avoid business. Then he learned what every pro learns.

"No matter what it is, it's sales and marketing. If you're a professional guitar player, it's sales and marketing."

Marty Schwartz, 48:05

His advice: get as good as you can on your instrument while you're young, because once you support yourself there's less time to practice. For a pro, the chops are a given. Then embrace sales and marketing, which you can do authentically, with character, morals and ethics. Make Music Your Business.

The Marty Music mission statement never changed: be the most authentic version of himself, and educate. He teaches the way he wishes someone had taught him that first time, for the hobby players who make up most of his audience. He studies his analytics, keeps his lessons free, and keeps the channel "agnostic" on gear, with no exclusive deals and no trashing brands he doesn't like.

Nomad noticed that when they met at Jason Land's guitar lesson conference, Marty was down to earth, kind and easy to hang with, not someone playing a celebrity. That genuineness is part of the brand. Everything you do is an audition, including the green room.

Make every video serve a purpose

Asked what he'd tell someone who wants to do what he does, Marty told the story of a jiu-jitsu teacher who asked him the same thing after a gig.

"Your first video ever is not gonna be your best video, so you have to keep making stuff."

Marty Schwartz, 1:03:34

His real advice: make every piece of content serve an immediate purpose, whether it gets 100 views or a million. If you teach, make it for your students. If you're making something funny, make your group of friends laugh first. Then study why one video got 10 views and another got a thousand. If it fulfills a purpose, low numbers don't crush you, because it doesn't happen overnight.

The takeaway

Going viral was the result of years of teaching, gigging and showing up with a camera, not a strategy that showed up one day. Start where you are, keep adding a little every day, serve the music and your audience, and learn to love sales and marketing. If your next step is landing a gig with a band, start with the free Get the Gig guide.

Get the gig. Keep the gig. Build the career.

Watch on YouTube or find every episode on the TCM Podcast page.