QUITTING YOUR DAY JOB – it’s the amateur musician’s dream. One day, your band gets out of the basement and on to the radio. Then, suddenly, you’re a rock star, and it can be all about the music.

Not quite.

Bland as it may sound, the reality is that the music business is still a business – and musicians are essentially small-business owners who need to think about contracts, taxes, marketing and building a brand.

“They’re in the arts, but when they’re playing professionally, they’re in a business,” says Frank Dusek, an accountant with the Chicago firm Weiss, Sugar, Dvorak & Dusek, Ltd., whose clients include musicians. “It’s about supporting yourself, making a living, making your house payments.”

The American Federation of Musicians, an international union, has about 90,000 members in the U.S. and Canada, about 85% of whom are self-employed, independent contractors, according to Paul Sharpe, the union’s director of freelance services and membership development. And whether they consider themselves business people or sing about the downfall of the financial industry, many of these independent artists have had to develop some of the same skills and mom-and-pop store owners in order to survive.

See 8 lessons rock bands can teach you

“Historically, musicians have always been small entrepreneurs,” Sharpe says. But with CD sales slipping thanks to widely available free music online, the industry’s business model is changing. “The old model was: band goes in the basement, rehearses like heck, writes some songs, tries to get a demo heard by a record label,” Sharpe says. As major labels have grown less comfortable taking risks on unproven acts, more bands have become their own producers, a role that requires a deeper understanding of marketing and other business concerns, Sharpe says.

Of course, even a band working with a major record label could suffer from a lack of business savvy. Many well-known musicians may have been swindled “because they were only thinking creatively and they were just kind of signing anything,” says Wesley Verhoeve, who runs Family Records, an independent artist management firm. Verhoeve says that changes in the music business haven’t made business skills more important, but they have made more people aware of the need for artists to pay careful attention to business matters.

From big-picture concerns like building a brand to nitty-gritty details like deducting the cost of a home office on a tax return, rock bands face many of the same challenges confronted by other small-business owners. Here are eight things small-business owners could learn from rock bands.