Week 4 is brutal. In fact, I’ve been working on week 4 for 4 weeks. The book, “Music Success in Nine Weeks” is theoretically structured in a way that you “could” follow it week to week and complete the 9 main chapters giving each a week to accomplish, but realistically, it’s more complicated than that. Depending on the kind of free time, technical know-how, and desire you have, you may or may not be able to follow this letter for letter.
Chapter 4 is all about social networking. In my case, I have a number of the things that the book suggests already in place; i.e., a mailing list, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace accounts. At a bird’s eye view, it doesn’t take long to create an account on each of these sites, but grokking how to use them does take a while. Establishing a presence that is consistent visually can be a large time sync, and really getting MySpace and Facebook off the ground can take a very long time.
I’ve had my MySpace account for ages and it’s barely attracted any friends mainly because I don’t like to use it. I find it more tedious than enjoyable, and frankly, I have enough things in my life that I “have” to do. The problem is that much of the music industry still judges you on your outreach to fans and number of friends you have on MySpace and for good reason: The last statistic I heard about MySpace was that even tho it’s fallen behind Facebook in unique visitors, it’s still at about 50M. That’s a LOT of people. Also, if you want to get gigs, it’s a great way to find out about venues in cities you haven’t played before. Just find a musical artist or group that sounds like you in a particular locale and see where they play, that simple.
For me, striking a balance between the have-tos and the want-tos is critical. Managing Facebook and Twitter has much more appeal for me than MySpace because Twitter is just plain easy and Facebook keeps me connected to my actual friends. I’m able to have a personal page and an artist page and even tho the two are barely connected thru the Facebook interface, they’re easy to manage and stay connected to people, not just about what you’re doing but seeing where they’re doing. So, all in all, I think you should put your energy where you’re going to receive enjoyment out of the process. If you’re enjoying it, it will reflect in your presentation. By all means, keep your want-tos and your have-tos in balance.
One of the things that’s really baffled me about the social networking part of this is something that I brought up in a previous blog post, What a Big Day This Is!, and it’s the private vs. public life situation. I’m not by any means comparing myself with big names like Tiger Woods or Bill Clinton, but look what happens when you do something controversial that captures the public eye. They rake you thru the coals and it’s not pretty. How are you able to keep a private life separate from a performance life? And with social networking, that line gets blurred even more. The latest talk in the music industry is all about exposing yourself as a person, not just a performer up on a stage, where the fans get to know you and possibly have one-on-one contact with you. That’s all well and good, but where is the line drawn? Is there a line? I’ve been facing this dilemma especially with Flickr. I guess I can kinda consider myself an old skool Flickr user, since 2003 actually. What I ended up doing was starting a new Flickr account just for music related photos. I’ve decided not to connect my personal account with my music account. Ariel suggests letting your fans get to know you at more of a personal level and I’m okay with this to an extent. But the way I’m looking at it, if I post something to my blog about my personal life, it will be premeditated. I will have decided to divulge something about myself that I feel is something I’m comfortable sharing. It took a long time for me to decide to expose my dream blog, but in the same way that I will only share photos that are relevant to my music, I’ll only share dreams that don’t cross the line of the ultra personal. This is completely subjective and probably different for everyone, and even for me, that line could change at any time. Maybe to truly be a successful artist, you have to be completely exposed! I’m not sure. A teacher of mine, Jan Engels-Smith told me that when she was writing her book Becoming Yourself, she received guidance that she needed to be completely open about her personal life to touch her readers. In a lot of ways, I do that as a song writer as many others do, and maybe that line is part of every artist’s personal journey.
Ariel’s step-by-step procedure for each site is comprehensive and she points the user to commoncraft.com to watch well done videos that explain in detail the concepts that she’s sharing in this chapter and other parts of the book. You’re in good hands here, and probably have a small likely-hood of failing if you dig in and follow her plan. I’ll probably be working with this chapter for a while myself and there have been some really good suggestions that will take time to implement and seed with information and photos, etc.
Last but not least was the inclusion of your music in podcasts. I’m still working on this angle. What I decided to do was offer some of my songs on my first CD without voice, just instrumental which I thought would be good for background music because there’s a lot of electronic texturing in the songs. I’ve bounced down the songs and I’ve converted them to mp3. Next, I’ll update the id3 tags using dbBpoweramp which is an awesome music converter that runs on Windows. The site I’ll upload the music to is Music Alley which connects musicians to podcasters. I’ll have to get back too you on the success of this venture, but right now, it looks promising.
I think that’s it for now. Stay tuned for next week’s chapter on blogging. This gets really interesting, technically.
Week 3 is all about setting up your web site to build your email list and creating two-way communication between your fans and you as an artist or band. This is actually a really short chapter but is going to be the spring-board for a number of other chapters because it starts opening a can of invertebrates, which will become more apparent in the next couple of weeks. You see, I needed to jump ahead in the book because I’d already done a number of the things that the book requests, as I’ll note later, and I’ve known that there were things I needed to do like opening up this blog to really get things rolling on my site. This is also where most of my work has gone into.
Something that is of high importance for other web sites and yours is to maintain a similar look and feel, as well as maintaining similar content and messages. How does a potential fan draw the connection between you here and you there? This was easy for me because it had already been done. “Music for the heart, mind, and spirit” was already my moniker that was on MySpace, Twitter, FaceBook, ReverbNation and everywhere else I’ve created an account, and I’d created a background image for my website long ago that I also used on Twitter and MySpace. I set up a couple quick colour schemes and added other items like photos that exist across all my web presences to make it all cohesive.
Next, I was to make sure my site loaded quickly and had no Flash intro. Well, that was also done years ago. Luckily, I have years of experience working on the internet and I know what works and what doesn’t. I wrote all the code for my initial web site in 2001 (gasp) and it does need an overhaul to bring it up to web standards admittedly, but it was built for performance and ease of use.
Lastly, the part I actually had to put some work into. Ariel wants you to offer a free download to a song as an incentive to sign up on your mailing list. Since I host my own mailing list created by Active Campaign, I had to build this into my site. I decided to offer “Be the Change”, a song that’s on my latest CD, “Between the Lines”, and currently the only song that I have a video for from the new CD. There’s another coming REALLY soon, but more on that later. And so as not to be unfair, if you’re already on my mailing list and don’t have a copy of the CD or that song, email me and I’ll make sure you get a copy.
If you’ve followed my last couple of posts, you’ll know that I’m participating in a contest created by Ariel Hyatt of Ariel Publicity. The second chapter of the book is all about defining who you are as an artist, and the style of music that you do. To help you define yourself, Ariel takes you thru some exercises to help you create “The Perfect Pitch.” This pitch should be something you can use at the drop of a dime when someone asks you about who you sound like, what your music evokes in others, what to expect should someone come to see you perform live, what your CD might sound like. Many have called it an elevator pitch because from the moment you step into an elevator til the time you step out, you should have been able to share you with someone else to the point that they have a somewhat clear understanding of you as an artist. Sounds easy, right? NOT.
Now, I’ve always felt there was value to having a moniker, a one-liner, and something that accompanies the name, “Rhythma”, if not for any other reason than to just inform someone that I’m a musician. So, as many of you probably know, I’ve been using “Music for the heart, mind, and spirit…” for years. I still think this is sufficient for the purpose of adding something to Rhythma for high level clarification. The thing that’s gotten tricky for me is that Ariel’s book wants you to put your perfect pitch on myspace, twitter, facebook, your web site… and I think that there are different pitches for different reasons. My moniker is already on all those sites as well as my business card and has been for a long time. The only thing that’s left me unsettled is that it doesn’t work when someone wants a clearer idea of who I sound like. This is where Ariel’s technique came into play.
She had me break down certain elements of my musical style, influences, and other details, and then combine these elements into the pitch. Then you have to try the pitch on for a while to see how it sticks. If it sticks, then you get another unique addition which is access to her private ning.com group where you can try the pitch out with your peers to see how they react too it. This was helpful too me since I couldn’t come up with just one pitch.
So, all in all, I decided to stay with:
“Music for the heart, mind, and spirit…”
for my overall catch phrase which accompanies my profiles online, my web site, and my business card. It feels right for me. However, when asked to describe my music in the elevator, I’ve settled on:
“If Paul Simon produced Jack Johnson in a studio a Tesla coil.”
Now, if that’s just too obscure for someone or they just stepped off the boat and ask me, “Who is Jack Johnson?”, then I’ll try this:
“Where pop, rock, jazz, folk and hip-hop collide.”
If that doesn’t work, I’ll just tell them I’m the TV repair man and I’m offering year-end discounts right now.
As I commented on in a previous post, I’m participating in a contest to get 3 months of dedicated publicity. To win, I must post 9 blog entries taking readers through my experience with the book and blogging about how it is helping, where I’ve learned the most, and where I’m are getting stuck.
The book is “Music Success in Nice Weeks” by Ariel Hyatt. It’s a “step-by-step guide on how to use social media & online tactics to supercharge your PR, build your fan base, and earn money.” Sounds pretty good, eh?
Week 1: Getting mentally prepared. This chapter wasn’t really about music or social media, but rather to put perspective into the next 8 chapters and help the reader decide on the goals that they want to achieve. I love the way the universe works with this kinda stuff… just a week prior to reading this chapter, I had a conversation with my friend Marilyn Schwader who runs a business and website called, Clarity of Vision. Her business is teaching writers how to market themselves, and she has a free download on her site that outlines the in-depth process if envisioning your long-term goals for your career as a writer, much as Ariel’s book leads you thru exercises to define your goals as a musician. Marilyn’s approach is to create mission objectives, and to define your dream, your purpose, and your values, which in many ways requires you to look at things from a more “spiritual” perspective. Kind of like, “Why are you here in on Earth in the first place and how does that define who you are and why you’re writing?” Ariel’s approach is more practical and calculated. Determine your goals, both short and long-term, not just for your music, but for your money, your family, and your long-term goals for life, and do those in both 12 month and in your lifetime.
I found Ariel’s approach to be a little more complicated because I don’t like thinking about things in terms of goals. For me, my goal is to make it to tomorrow. My goal is to make the right decisions for myself so that I perform well at work, so that I can sing well the next time I perform, so that I remember to to remember my friends so that remain my friends, so that I don’t go too long without calling my mother. In other words, my goals are very practical and rarely extend beyond tomorrow. This is all well and good, but it’s really not the philosophie du jour. Back in the day, Ram Dass was saying “Be Here Now.” Well damn, it took all this effort to learn to pull my head out of the clouds and actually commit to doing the things I was dreaming about, and I’m here, now what? Now I have to make goals? Isn’t this just like putting my head back into the clouds? Well, I’m trying not to think so.
Ariel’s and Marilyns approaches both touch on something a little more woo woo, that is, a little less accepted and sometimes hard to fathom, but never-the-less proven by quantum physics and by modern psychology. It’s around manifesting your reality by defining it. This is so critical to this whole procedure that Ariel put it in chapter one of her book. Marylin would rather you not move forward with her program until you go thru her exercises. These principles are the same that the movie “The Secret” tries to teach it’s audience: Form follows thought. Simple to say, much more difficult grasp. Ariel’s book engages this principle by asking the reader to first adopt of perspective of positive thinking and let go of self criticism and gives some ideas on how to do it. I’m all for that! By insisting that you create goals, she assures you that this it the first step to achieving them. I’m for that too!
I’m not going to tell you what my goals are. By following Ariel’s approach, I expect that over the coming months, you’ll see the results and they’ll speak for themselves. I am pumped because I’m gonna focus on nothing else until I see this plan executed. I expect it’ll be like going to school. You know when the semester’s going to end so it puts a nice frame around things. And this contest is another motivator to get this accomplished in the specified time frame. Actually, I’ve already leaped ahead in the book, that’s why I have this blog in the first place, because chapter 5 made me do it. In the coming weeks, I’ll recap some of the technical things I’ve done to get things up and running for myself, and being that I’m a web professional, I’ll try and do it for both the nubes and the geeks.
Back in the beginning of this year was my first encounter with Austin, TX and this little music, film and multimedia conference called SXSW. I guess a few people know about it since it’s been around for like 20 years. I’m well past doing a retrospective of it at this point, all but for one major thing. While I was there, I met a bunch of bloggers, mostly thru and ex-Yahoo! named Ernie. He’s this really funny gay Asian blogger @ErnieAtLYD who seems to know everyone. So, I’m hanging out with these bloggers during the interactive part of the conference, and then all of the talks that I sat in on during the music portion of this 11 day trip are all talking about blogging to reach your audience. Well, I’ve never been that great at math but, well, I got it…
So that week, I started a project. Ya see, I’ve actually been blogging for 5 years. In 2004, I hooked up CDBaby and the mp3s were downloadable and all that. I mean, just look at my web site and you’ll see what I mean. That was a lot of grunt work for one person to do. But, the sales sucked because I wasn’t doing any PR.
November came around and I decided to go to this conference called Road Rally. My Mom had been trying to get me to sign up with this service called Taxi which helps musicians and composers get connected with music placement peeps in Film and TV. These people are really hard to get to, believe me. I’ve tried. So, the service costs a chunk of change, and my first CD, “Rhythma” didn’t really have those “hits” on it. It was more for the music person who’s looking for masala instead of cheese. But with “Between the Lines”, I was feeling really confident that maybe I’d get the CD to the right person at the right time, and something unexpected and magical would happen. That didn’t happen, but I’m used to that it wasn’t a big deal. Anyhow, I popped into a talk that this woman Ariel Hyatt was giving. She runs this agency called Cyber PR and helps artists with online representation. I really like listening to her speak. She was really fluid, confident, and excited! She was one of the few things I walked away with from the conference and felt like there was something I needed to pursue.
So, when I got home, I went to her web site and was hunting around and came across this book called Music Success in Nine Weeks. I looked at the contents and thought, yeah yeah, I’ve heard this before, social media is where it’s at, you need to connect with your audience online, flickr, twitter, facebook, myspace… I’ve done all this. My first twitter account is REALLY old… my first post was on Mar. 5th, 2007. In internet years, that’s like 40! And MySpace? How about 2005?! That’s old and gray in internet time, for sure. I’ve gotten luke warm results from MySpace, mainly because I don’t really care for online socializing. I’m in this weird demographic that has the knowledge but would rather be hiking. I mean, really… I’ve been working on the internet for a living since 1996. That’s when I built my first web site for the company I working for, Haptek. I do this stuff all week long. Do I really want to devote MORE time too it to engage people that I can’t even see? I digress… Back to Ariel. Sometimes you have to bite the bullet and do things that aren’t the most pleasant to get the best results. I understand this. And there was something about the book, and something else about Ariel’s enthusiasm that struck me. Plus, it seemed like, “Hey, I know this stuff. How hard could it be to just dive in and give it a go. So, I bought the book
Now, we’ve nearly finished our journey around the equator and back to my dream blog. Ariel is all about blogging. She’s all about exposing yourself, well, within reason of course, she’s all about getting sh*t done. So, I’ve somehow beaten my nerves into submission, and decided to finish getting my blog online. I went thru 130 dreams and privatized that ones that I don’t want the world to see, and am putting the rest on my sleeve. I’m ready to jump in, eyes open and nose plugged, and see if the world is ready for me, and if I can handle the world’s criticism of my dreams, thoughts, and awkward taste, all with comments turned on!
So, if you’re ready, I’m ready. That’s why this is a big day for me. Strange, that too me, who’s already had a career in movies and television in front of the camera, released two CDs, and played music for the public for some 20 years, this is a bigger deal, for some reason. I guess because there’s no poetry or script to hide behind.
There’ll be three categories for my posts: My Dream Journal, which will be censored to protect the innocent (if there’s anyone left), Life in General, where I’ll share my garden pictures and maybe some tech stuff, and my Rhythma Music blog, which in the next 9 weeks will be getting the most attention. You see, Ariel has started a contest for 3 months of her undivided (well, maybe a little divided) publicity attention. All I have to do is chronicle my experiences with her book in my blog. So, expect that I’ll be doing my first 2 posts this week because I’ve already had the book for 2 weeks. Expect more soon.
And now, I big you adieu. If this were Twitter, they’d hang me.
