It must have been about 1976, a cold night on the Iowa plains just before Christmas. This was my sensitive-singer/songwriter period, with a stunning afro, a wispy beard, an old vest and an older guitar (I wish I still had that one, a ’29 Gibson Nick Lucas). I was on my way to my fiancé’s home in Spencer, with a stop at a so-called “club” in Mason City (coincidentally the hometown of  Meredith Wilson’s, composer of the great  ”Music Man”).

I’d never been to the place before, it was booked by my agent at the time, and I should have smelled a rat before I walked in the door. I don’t know what my agent told them about me to convince them to hire me, but none of it was true. I think I was the first live entertainment they’d had, and as inexperienced as they were, there was no lack of preparation. The owners had built a one-man stage in the corner, about 10 feet from the pool table.  As befitting the season, the stage was ringed with Christmas lights, with a nice sign; unfortunately the sign announced me as “Kris Kringle” (arrgh….) like I was supposed to in a red fat suit.

Everybody seemed friendly, though, so I set up my PA and tuned up the ol’ sixer.  My repertoire at the time consisted of some original songs, a few instrumentals, and a fair amount of swing and old jazz tunes, and I headed straight for my best stuff, my sure-fire crowd-pleasers, not exactly pandering, but starting to suspect that it might be a tough night.

What crowd there was had moved to the front of the bar, as far away from me as they could get.  One brave couple continued with their pool game, he with a lovely cowboy outfit including a nice belt with a hand-tooled “Leonard” in big letters, she with a medium-height beehive.  After about two numbers the brave cowpoke came to the stage and asked me if I played any country. I knew that what I called “country” wasn’t the kind that was on their juke box, and wouldn’t be recognized as such, but I launched into “Miss the Mississisppi and Me”.  It didn’t seem to be working.

Luckily this is a short story. The owner came up to me, said that I didn’t need to play any more, gave me the promised $75 and shuffled away, no argument, no discussion.

It was only a few degrees colder outside as I loaded up the gear. I could hear the jukebox  blasting away- the patrons forgot about me pretty quickly, probably had a pretty good time.  Hey, they didn’t throw anything at me!!!!

Whew….

Except for a few breathing the rare air of celebrity (a fleeting thing, anyway), nobody is making money selling CDs in the real on-the-road world. Let’s do the math for a typical band, as if there were such a thing.

Let’s say you’ve got a four-piece band that makes $1000 on a good weekend gig, and you’ve got a new platter. Let’s expect a modest crowd of 100, and let’s sell 10% a CD for $10 (you may get more, but it’s a zero-sum game, the more you charge, the fewer you sell). So you gross $100 on your CDs, get 10 into the world.

You won’t get rich from the sales; it’s nice frosting on the gig-cake, but not much more. So WHAT IF your game plan instead was to give away 500 as step one in your promo plan, with the goal to get gigs. You’re thinking, send to 500 clubs? No, they are barraged with submissions, often, the only way to rise from the mire is from an outside push. This means the booker hears about your CD from a “3rd party”.

“I just got so-an-so’s new platter, wow, you should get ‘em on the calendar.” Comments from trusted friends mean more than you can imagine. Now for the ciphering: Maybe you get a gig indirectly from 1% of your promos, that’s 5 jobs, gross $5000 (plus you sell 50 CDs on the gigs)- and you should do better than that.

So forget the business cards and fancy promo packs- just put your best foot forward, start giving away as many CDs as you can.

Make sure every friend you have gets one — you just can’t beat the gift of music, especially if you are trying to make a living at it..

not your grandfather's clock

There is so much pretty good, so much more pretty bad-  you don’t have time to wade through amateur hour to find real value. In about every aspect of modern life you are being asked to deal with more and more information, more and more versions of oreos and goldfish.  It all takes time, more and more time.  Faster, more powerful computers- are they saving YOU any time? I used to only wait on one computer, now it seems like whatever I do, I’m punching or clicking and waiting, waiting

I’ve been saying it for awhile, a third arm and hand would be a tremendous advantage,  just to keep you from falling on your face.

Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.  So don’t waste your time on triviality.

Get over the idea that your success is equated with selling the right to listen, or selling control over when people listen. Relinquish the opportunity to make money by controlling who can listen and when. That’s gone. It’s over. It would be like a bakery selling the right to sniff the fresh bread or a wine maker selling the right to look at the cool label. It’s now a public good, something you see as you walk by.

What you can sell, what you better be able to sell, is intimacy. It’s interactions in public. Souvenirs. Limited things of value. Experiences. Memories. People will pay for those things, IF: your art is actually great and if you make it possible for them to buy them.

“Like a bakery selling the right to sniff the fresh bread” he says,  but of course smelling is not the same as consuming. You buy the bread, you eat it, it’s gone, period.  Paintings, he notes, are often free to “experience”, and while it may not be as “filling” as owning the art, you can stand next to the owner of a painting and get the same enjoyment. Music is different, as he points out, not like bread, not like a painting.

Salvador Dali once said the difference between one of his original paintings and a good reproduction was the price. Stand back a few feet, you can’t tell the difference.  So what’s the difference between you standing up and spilling your guts out in front of an audience to an audience listening to a “reproduction” of you, say on CD? We all know the CD will probably sound better, but still, there is no comparison, nada, zilch. They are like apples and tennis balls, completely different items.

So what does it mean? You gotta eat, assuming you don’t have a patron, so how do you price your art and make a living? What’s the business model?  Seth says you can sell ‘intimacy’, which is a pretty good (but maybe not great) word to describe what we do in front of a crowd. (Some musicians get by creating ‘amazement’ in their listeners, with technical prowess, we’re not talking about that)

It’s not a lonely art; it may start that way, but eventually it has to go out into the world, with the people, with your friends, for your friends.  Let’s pick, as we say.
PS
Painting: visual art
Bread-making: culinary art (craft??)
Music: performing art

One thing you’ve got to admit, the internet is what we call reality-based even if the reality is virtual.  And it’s based on science, isn’t it? Acts logically, mathematically, to make it all work. You want better odds on being heard, an increased chance of success, so put SCIENCE ahead of ART for a few minutes and consider this:

Go to Google and start typing. But just one letter, say A. Whoah. What do you see? I get Amazon, AOL and American Airlines suggested to me. Mind you, you may get different result, especially if you are logged in to, say, a Google account; they know everything about your browsing habits and will attempt to choose what their computer’s think you are looking for. But no matter, Google is still using science to make those suggestions.

OK, so what? Well, let’s examine how they come up with these suggestions.  If you want to do any testing (you know, the scientific method), log out of any account that might affect your searches, again, especially google. You also might want to delete your browsing history. This takes any ‘user bias’ out of the equation (notice how we can smartly bandy these math terms about)- try the A test again.  I still get the same big three, and I bet I know why. There are 671 million reasons for Google to pick Amazon first, as that’s how many LINKS they found for that term. What’s more, I can see from Google Keyword Analytics that 83 million people a month search for that term. They are just laying odds that Amazon is likely to be what you are after when you start typing with an A. Number two, AOL, as you might expect, has lower numbers than Amazon, take my word for it or check for yourself.

Get to the point!

You may have thought that having a snazzy website was all there was to it- well, the website is really just the anchor, a convenient and “respected” place for a link to point at.  It’s not about the website, it’s about the LINKS! Strictly math here, the more the better, and even better if there’s some content with the link. We’re trying to achieve some virtual heft here, just to impress Google’s robots. They won’t be listening to a track or looking at your video, just looking for info. “Just the facts, Ma’am”, as Jack Webb used to say.

So instead of hacking on your own site, spend some time spreading the links around. Use the obvious, MySpace and FaceBook, of course; doing that much gets you in the game, but getting noticed takes a bit more. Now I’ve never said that an efolkMusic presence is your key to success, but it is an example of how you can bulk up your web-resume.

Like most “social networking” sites, efolkMusic is designed to allow multiple places to add search engine accessible links: Artist page, Member MP3 pages (each track creates a separate link), and the ever-popular video section. We also have blogs, each artist can publish their own from their artist page.  Use all the tools and you may have 20 links with content from efolkMusic alone. That’s a start- but you have to do that everywhere you maintain a presence; don’t think that just signing up and getting a page going will do it, you need to make it “rich” in content and links.

The other tool you need to work is RSS or “Really Simple Syndication”- the little RSS buttons are popping up everywhere, giving you a way to extend your reach.  Here’s how it works: Let’s use the blog example. Say you have a MySpace blog (you should!)- well if you can find the RSS feed button and the URL it points to, you can then “publish” that content on another website- efolkMusic artist pages have an “RSS” tab, a place for you to publish any RSS feed. Login to artist admin, click on the RSS tab, add your MySpace RSS URL, and voila, anything you add to your MySpace blog is automatically published on efolkMusic.  Published AND updated every time you update your MySpace blog.

This is a very powerful tool. Not only can you be published in multiple locations, but people can subscribe to your feed, and automatically get your latest post.  Add a audio or video file to your blog and you are podcasting!  For example, the efolkMusic Song of the Week has about 150 subscribers, plus it’s published as a “widget” on about a dozen sites.  The subscribers get the song downloaded automatically whenever a new track goes up; people viewing the widget can download manually or subscribe from the widget.

Make these tools your micro-business “partners” to carry a corner of your promotional load, if you just get a hundred new links a day you’ll catch Amazon in about 18,000 years!  Better get busy… your odds are improving by the minute.

PS efolkMusic.org

A game-changer for traveling AND stationary pickers.

The email came from from Massachusetts folk-rocker Erin McKeown, and announced a series of house concerts, with a twist. She’s webcasting the shows using a new service, ustream.tv. The service allows anyone with a webcam and a mic to broadcast live “TV” from wherever to an unlimited number of viewers- and if you have higher production values (lights, good sound, nice video cameras, duh) it looks and sounds fabulous! The best part is that she is selling tickets on her website (through paypal, $10) and sending ticket holders the URL and a password just before the show to give them access.

Her press says she is “inviting you into her living room, onto her porch, into her river, and into her yard” and I’ll be shocked if she doesn’t make some money on this. I’m not trying to sell tickets for her (although I wish her luck and will be curious as to how it turns out), but this is just such a great concept, I had to tell you about it. I suggest you get your email lists up to date, sign up at ustream, and produce a concert.

efolkMusic wants to help artists and producers get the word out when a concertcast of interest to our community is happening, so please write us and we’ll let our 9,000+ newsletter subscribers know: concerts@efolkmusic.org

Pamuk is from Istanbul, and his stories are laced with pashas and sultans,  high rankers in the Ottoman Empire.  They are forever disguising themselves and escaping the palace and trappings, eager for some honest interaction and  a break from being the living projection of their subjects.  They wear a costume and play a role as a commoner, to find out who they really are, and then return to the palace to resume their full-time gig, acting the royal role.

Luckily my band doesn’t wear costumes (although we have gladly suited up for our histrionic projects)- it’s an unwritten rule (all of them are) that the question “What are we wearing for the gig?” gets no answer. But that doesn’t mean we don’t individually ponder over our public “face” and the right shoes.

Is this a ‘persona’ I put on when I pick the Fez or the pith helmet, or is it me expressing “myself”? Am I being fake, pretentious, posturing?  I was reminded of this seeing an ‘alt-bluegrass’ band recently, they didn’t quite seem real.  Not actors in a play, pretending to be artists, these guys were players.  Good players, but pretentious, and I was not touched emotionally by their performance.

I think it was obvious to most of the crowd, whether or not they had a musical bone in their body. If you go to a play, you know that what you are seeing isn’t real, that the actors aren’t really experiencing the emotions they are trying to convey- but if they are talented, you may be moved by the performance, they’ve “pulled the major wool” as a pal of mine used to say.

But a musician is playing a different tune altogether. Are we trying to fool the audience? Surely not- it’s not an “act”, it’s art in real time, it can’t be phony or pretending to be something it’s not. I catch myself, too often, singing not in my own voice, instead doing an “impression” of singers I’ve been influenced by. Especially if I’m doing a cover, it’s very hard not to emulate the recording I learned from. (It’s nice, isn’t it, to learn a song from a piece of sheet music, never hearing another singer perform the song, it frees you up)

And what are we, but the sum of our experiences? Tom Petty likely listened to a lot of Bob Dylan, was “influenced” by the experience.  It is possible, but highly improbable, that he came up with his vocal style “out of the blue”.  Just as dialects are learned by “ear”, vocal styles are determined by what you listen to. My advice? Listen to everything you can, don’t fixate on a singer or a style.  Be the sum of a large number of influences,  the larger the better, the higher the “sum”. It’s only when no one can tell where it all came from that it is you and only you.

You are unique, to begin with, and that’s what interests me if I see or hear your performance; I want to see inside your soul, see the real you. You are not an “impressionist”, are you? That’s a neat trick, a skill, but it’s not art.  You are a musician, an artist, you exist on a higher plane.  No tricks, no gaff, no fakery- and of course, no auto-tune….

Who is that in the mirror???

Sources: Rolling Stone Magazine, US Dept of Energy, overthinkingit.com

This little chart comes from overthinkingit.com, and shows peak oil production in the US about 1965, charted against Rolling Stone’s list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All TIme"; this is not just rock, we’re talking great songs (#1 is Bob Dylan Like a Rolling Stone, FYI). You can’t dispute the oil numbers, but it’s IMPOSSIBLE that songwriting quality declined as pictured- and ignores some of the best songs ever written, just because nobody’s heard them??? What did they do, find a hundred boomers and take their word for it??

Blogging the Future

Cause that’s what you really want to know about.

-gl

We are living through an amazing time in the arts, the beginning of an epoch. Artists of all types, (even those of us with limited resources), have access to tools that hadn’t been dreamed in the “golden era”, fabulous instruments musical and technical. Everything has changed- the playing field, the game, the players.  This presents us with a challenge, but luckily we threw the rulebook out with the old game.

We must seize this moment. WE THE PEOPLE, the artists, the musicians, the dancers, WE can write the new rules, and take back our art from the puppetmasters. We can go around their weakened forces, directly to our fans.

We are talking  revolution, here, and what the new post.alt music business 2.0 will look like.  If anything is certain, it’s that you will be in control of your art and your business if you intend to survive- and you will be using any and every tool available, to make your music and to get it into the ears of your listeners, wherever they are.

I won’t go too deeply into music production tools (although there may be a bit about the Death of Autotune (2009), sticking mainly to the marketing and distribution of your “product”, the micro-business of you or your band.

Yamaha CX5M, c1984

Musicians were early adopters of computer tech. It all started, for me with a Yamaha CX5M in 1984, hooked to a DX7.  The evolution to an Atari ST in ’85 and an internet connection was logical and orderly, and I had email (Compuserve, 1987!) for about a year before I had anybody to email to.  But I knew then, it was something that could be leveraged, a huge network I didn’t pay for, a pipe of ever-growing size from my computer to yours! Practically free, I could send a song for a song, and it changed my life.   The wires  and the satellites are  there, we can use them willy-nilly. How do we do that? How can we make the most of it?

Answering this and looking ahead, this is all about surviving in the real world by utilizing the virtual world.

Guaranteed Pundit-grade or Better Opinion and Consultation, Right Here!

I first saw it in  “This Is Your Brain On Music“ by Daniel Levitin, about expertise, and the 10,000 hours it takes to get it- from Wikipedia, the expert  is

…someone widely recognized as a reliable source of technique or skill whose faculty for judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely is accorded authority and status by their peers or the public in a specific well-distinguished domain. An expert, more generally, is a person with extensive knowledge or ability based on research, experience, or occupation and in a particular area of study.

So I’m definitely an expert, in I don’t know what, but I guess it’s music, it sure isn’t golf.

taggit: Folk Music, MP3s, marketing