Longing for the day ...

The Musician's Third Leg - extended ...

It's nice to see the concepts I created enter the thinking of others - or at least, appear in their writings. Over at Music Think Tank (for whom I aspire to write), Bruce Warila (whose work I respect and admire greatly) has posted an article outlining his vision of a music business's Three Legged Table.

It's a great article and quite right, though I hear the comments and think they'd make useful amendments. I have no idea whether Bruce has even heard of my book (happy to give you a review copy, Bruce!), so I'm not accusing him of anything. Just noting a trend: since I published my e-book, many of the concepts in it have appeared in other places - by name or detail. Certainly, Bruce has taken the three-leg metaphor into very different territory from where I left it.

It's fascinating how this happens. Just last night I started viewing the Marshal McLuhan archive, in which the Man Himself debunks many of the misinterpretations of his work. The intro, by Tom Wolfe, points out that McLuhan's legend is as much a matter of the success he experienced in cultivating a media profile as it is of his brilliance ...

And it also points out that his brilliance lay not in concocting new ideas but in synthesising the ideas of those around him into an easy-to-digest package for the masses. Doing for Media Theory what Galbraith did for Economic Theory.

Great stuff and a theme repeated throughout history ...

Don't Make Me Steal ... please

Just found the Don't Make Me Steal project via Hypebot. It's an appeal from movie fans to movie makers, setting out a manifesto for the conditions under which they promise not to illegally download movie online.

Great idea ...

Of course, it basically reflects the wisdom of people who've paid attention to the record industry's problems with illegal downloaders and file-swappers. I can't help but wonder how different things might be had the record industry been given this kind of advice early in their campaign against pirates.

Would they have listened? Probably not. Would they have learned faster? Possibly. The people in charge of selling recorded music might be blinded by greed, but they're not stupid. They are clever people with large resources and their livelihoods at stake.

Of course, that description also applies to movie makers. Let's hope that they don't fall prey to same faith in legal protection and unwillingness to adapt to a changed environment.

Stay tuned for that one ...

The Most Popular Music Websites In 2010 - hypebot

This map is a really freaky depiction of the relative amounts of US traffic for each of the major websites where music is streamed or downloaded (websites with less than 100,000 monthly visits are omitted):

The article around it explains that Green means the growth for December 2010 was an increase on traffic in December 2009 - the darker the green, the greater the growth. It notes that this is traffic only from US sources, which means that non-US websites like Spotify are under-represented. It also raises more questions than it answers in terms of what's really going on with music websites.

But the real kicker is in the full chart:

A couple of quirks in the data: apparently this data reveals that the average Vevo user watches 23 Lady Gaga videos per month. That figure alone gives me reason to doubt the accuracy of this report. Also, the exclusion of non-US data makes this pretty meaningless in global terms ... but it is certainly indicative of a pattern in current music consumption.

And, of course, the size of the overall traffic does not reflect the amount of traffic any particular video might receive. There is almost certainly a Long Tail of music within this large number. Putting your music videos in here will NOT guarantee that anyone will watch them - you still have to promote, market, engage and so on.

This clearly shows that, despite the demise of MTV, Michael Jackson's legacy lives on: music is a visual artform. Or, at least, commercial music is ...

The takeout for Indies:

If you want people to engage with your music you can't afford to limit the way it is presented to them. Your art is more than your music and it needs to be recorded, played live, combined with video, synced with TV and/or movies, portrayed in static visuals on merch ... generally re-purposed and re-expressed in as many ways as people can comprehend. At the very least, you are missing a huge potential audience if you're not making videos.

Huge's January Review

Well, 2011 is not off to the start I had expected! Floods, cyclones, dead websites, lost mobile phones ... still no PhD ... can we start again, please? :-)

Special thoughts go out to Tah Phrum Duh Bush, who came home in a NYC snowstorm to find his apartment waist-deep in his neighbour's water. Tah's a true champion of the underdog and he's had a bit of a rough trot recently so check out his brand of theatrical Hip Hop at http://www.tahonline.com and show the man some love.

At least I now have a fully functional website once more, which I'm redeveloping here. Watch out for a significant ramping up of activity on that site ...

Fan of the Month

I was Feature Act at the first SNQ Presents night at Bohemia Bar, Caxton St Petrie Tce in Jan. Stu did some great work behind the bar and sang along so enthusiastically that I just had to slip his name into the last song of the set.

As you can see from the photo, he had to stoop to get into the frame with me ... he's a big boy.

Hopefully Stu will be at Bohemia when I play there again on March 31 ... see the gig list at the bottom of the page.

Tips for indies

Hardcore Internet marketers devote a lot of attention to the idea that "content is king" and that the key to online business success is to create compelling content and serve it up to your fan base as effectively as possible. "Compelling" is generally not defined, or is left as the je ne sais quoi of making a hit.

Recent research and discussion has provided a much better guide and in this blog post, I draw the threads together to show that the whole point of providing "content" is to engage with people. If the content is something people feel like putting the effort into engaging with, those people will quite probably become your fans. If they do, they'll do the work of telling like-minded people how much they loved your "content" and a viral hit is on the cards.

So, stop trying to produce "content" and focus on engaging with people ...

Into the future

My website has been moved to a new host and upgraded, so I will make much better use of it this year. I also have some videos of recent shows to upload. As soon as possible, I'm starting to program the "Step-by-Step Music Career" workshops around south-east Qld each month. Let me know if you'd like one near you ...

I've started pre-production on a second album, and have started putting the band back together, which will keep me busy for the next few months. Coupla questions I'd like your advice on: first, should the next album be a studio album or live? I've been told that my recordings don't do justice to my live shows, which will get even better this year when I add the band ...

Please let me know which you'd rather hear: a live album or a studio album?

It's all about engagement ...

This morning there are some great articles in various other publication that point to something I've been thinking about for a while now: building a career as an Indie is all about directly engaging with people who like what you do.

It starts with Kyle Bylin's Music Think Tank post (repeated in Hypebot) about how music fans value music more if they've put effort into collecting/reviewing/filtering it. Great point, and one I've argued for a while: downloading and storing an MP3 is a way of taking ownership of it. Sucking stuff from the Cloud is just like having the radio on - it's OK, but not something you necessarily engage with.

The fault in Bylin's article is that it relies far too much on the usual stereotypes of consumer behaviour: "casual" fans vs "core" fans and so on. In my view, the industry will never come to terms with music-buying behaviour while they rely on such crude categorisations. People buy music, and people are inconsistent and irrational. They change constantly: one hour they're a core consumer and the next they tend towards casual. It depends on what else is happening in their lives.

The next article that caught my eye was one in Hypebot about what works in Facebook fan pages. Not surprisingly, Linkin Park discovered that it was less about "content" and more about "a personalized connection" with the band. "Engagement, interest and constant connection keep fans coming back on Facebook", as the author put it ...

Let me suggest that these are related. When a person "likes" your band on Facebook, they are putting effort into forming a relationship with the artists. As with all relationships, these work best when the band reciprocates by paying the fan some attention. It's not rocket surgery: people value you most if they put effort into liking you and you respond by putting some effort into them.

The Takeout for Indies:

I'd take this further: the best time to build lasting fan relationships is NOT online. It's at gigs, when the person has taking the time to come and see you, sing and dance along and perhaps eve meet you face-to-face. If you take the time and put in the effort to meet that person and thank them for their effort, you are likely to begin a relationship that will support your music. You can then extend it by asking them for further efforts: buying your latest release, helping promote your show, sending you some live footage that might be used in a film clip, turning up at the video shoot to appear in a film clip ... and so on.

All of this makes much more sense of Michael Epstein's Music Think Tank article: Seven Rules for Effective Social Networking for Artists.