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.
Tags: Ariel Hyatt, Becoming Yourself, commoncraft.com, dBpoweramp, Facebook, Flickr, id3, Jan Engels-Smith, mp3, Music Alley, music success in nine weeks, MySpace, podcasting, social networking, Twitter
