Life Happens …If You Let It

23 03 2012

I’m blowing the dust off this bitch. For a long time I felt like I didn’t have anything important to say, and honestly I didn’t. Instead of half-assing my way through crippled excuses at worthwhile thinking, I buried therealkfish. That isn’t to say that exciting shit wasn’t popping off left and right. There was just something about all of it that seemed really self-serving, and somehow less than blogworthy as a result. Truthfully, it was completely self-serving. I had to do something to reassert my independence. To allow myself the complete freedom to do, think, and act, exactly how I wanted to without the stifling social laws of the workplace, of living with roommates, or even seeing other human beings. However, this liberating little adventure hasn’t been completely devoid of moments worth documentation. Sometimes it takes a random act of emancipation to open up possibilities that couldn’t have existed beforehand.

Three months ago I quit my job and moved to a cabin in the gold country. Bam. Fuck you world, time for me to jet. I felt stifled, bored, and most of all entirely unfulfilled suffering through every week to do my best to enjoy two days of freedom. It wasn’t working for me, so I removed myself from the situation. I finally had the freedom to get back to the things I love: making music, reading, writing, drawing, hiking, riding my bike, most of all being free to do whatever the fuck I want whenever I feel like doing it. One of the things I yearned for most was the feeling of playing music for people. There’s something truly special about creating art for people to enjoy at the exact moment it’s being created. At the time I hadn’t played a live show in 5 years. Less than a week from moving up to the cabin I received this email:

Hey Ninja, wanna go on tour?

My boy Banah is in need of a guitarist & bassist and told him I know just the people.
Let me know what you’re pondering Koi Fish

-Lindonesia

Though a little cryptic in its colloquialisms, one need only really digest the first line. After more than 5 years not playing live music, the opportunity landed in my inbox. Christian (“Lindonesia”) and I auditioned and got the spots. Keep in mind, at no other point in the last few years would it have been at all possible for me to do this. I wouldn’t have even been able to seriously entertain the idea. But, after just leaving my job, I could, and did, say yes. Doors opened when I allowed them to. We toured California for a week and are looking forward to a full west coast run for the month of May. Granted, I have been up here not working for 3 months, and I have no idea how I am going to swing rent and pay my bills and still have enough left over to front a month on tour. It hasn’t been easy, and at this point I’m quickly running out of money and starting to look at the realities of what this decision has cost me. But you know what? All of the costs have been monetary. I can always make more money. When I was working money wasn’t enough to satiate my rabid desire that life be a fucking adventure, and this solitary jaunt to the middle of nowhere has been exactly that.

One of my favorite quotes right now is from Hellen Keller: “Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.” We’ve all tasted the lack of fulfillment of waiting for paychecks and the two weeks granted to you each year for the freedom to do what you actually want with your time.

Fuck that, live an adventure.


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Art v. Commerce

8 08 2011

Art thrives on risk. Taking an abstract idea, filtering it through a unique vision and creating something new, is in itself a risky activity. Truly great art exposes ideas in a new way, forcing those witnessing from their comfortable universe to view through the intended lens of the artist.

Commerce thrives on stability. Making calculated decisions, measuring analytics, and responding accordingly is necessary for growing and maintaining wealth. Commerce requires measurable results that can be repeated with predictable outcomes. Risk is an inherent enemy of this type of operation.

The worlds of art and commerce may have never collided so catastrophically as they have in today’s independent music industry. Not only are artists expected to produce captivating content, but they are also charged with simultaneously fronting a business enterprise. DIY musicians must be constantly cognizant of the commercial aspects of their art, and balancing these conflicting ideologies has proven difficult to orchestrate. Creation and logistics require different types of thinking, even different sides of the brain, to work out the intricacies of the particular problems associated with each.

The trend I have noticed amongst independent music artists in the last few years is that they seem to be spending lots of time focusing on the business side of their craft, while neglecting the art that is the basis of the enterprise itself. Let me be clear: artists make art. Anything else is a distraction from the primary objective. Now in no way am I advocating the days of the label model, where artists gave up the control of their business (music) to a record label, who, under the guise of the artist’s best interest, made the business decisions, took the profits, and after recouping, hopefully paid the artists some small percentage of the proceeds. I think it’s great that artists now have the opportunity to steer their own ship as far as their business is concerned. My issue is that I see literally hundreds of mediocre artists spending their days hustling the back alleys of social media trying to boost their follower numbers in hopes that they’ll find some type of success, while altogether ignoring that it’s their art, not their notoriety, that is holding them back. People have things backwards. What’s the point of having 20,000 Twitter followers when the content you’re creating isn’t enthralling enough to keep them interested? Content is king, and always will be. If you aren’t creating content so good that it cannot be ignored then you need to reevaluate your focus.

Artists please stop spending all day grinding out new ways to play your music for people. Spend all day in the studio. Realize that truly great content will ALWAYS sell itself. Perfect your art, the rest will happen organically.


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As It Stands: Digital Marketing in the Music Industry

11 03 2011

The current state of digital marketing in the music industry is one of hyper-fragmentation. Picking and choosing marketing tactics for the extensive number of platforms and media outlets through which fans consume content is a representation of just one of the extremely daunting tasks that marketers have in today’s music business.  The digitization of the social sphere has helped, by amassing communities of like-minded fans interacting, sharing, and participating on unparalleled levels, but there remains a problem of accessing these fans as they sit amongst the hundreds of millions of other (“non-fan”) users. For these, and a myriad of other reasons, digital marketing in the music industry is a very promising field. Fans are out there, and they are consuming and sharing content like never before, it is merely a matter of finding ways to reach them. There are infinite opportunities for new strategies, new methods of analysis, and new ways to target a fan base—success depends only upon ones ability to be creative. Though there are no surefire systems for attaining marketing success, there are some proven methods for maximizing effectiveness in the current digital landscape.

The first is accessing social networks and integrating the artist into the conversation. Keep in mind that these networks are communities, and must be treated as such. Marketing within these communities is problematic because input seen as inauthentic (i.e. a sales pitch) is immediately recognizable and risks exclusion. Therefore, marketing within the social media context must be performed very carefully. Traditional push marketing techniques are not appropriate, as members of the community are interested in the communal aspect of discovery and sharing, not a commercial agenda. Marketing strategies need to take this into account, and should first seek to join the conversation, before pursuing any attempt at monetizing the social sphere. This is not to say that marketing isn’t permitted via social media, only that it must be done tastefully, with careful attention paid to the attitudes and interests of the community. The artist’s interactions facilitate the formation of relationships directly with fans, but it is up to the marketing team to devise an appropriate means of turning these relationships into revenue.

The second, and quite possibly the most important aspect in creating effective digital marketing, is the aggregation and evaluation of analytics. The proliferation of software tools for information collection has made it possible to acquire data from almost any online interaction—data that is invaluable for reviewing the efficacy of marketing strategies. Not only can marketers assemble information about how many people opened an email, but they can see who clicked which links, bought items, or any number of other important statistics. An artist and their marketing team should garner all the information they can get from their fans, so that they may find ways to more efficiently and more effectively market to them in the future.

Digital marketing in the music business is a hustle. Social media etiquette and a scientific attention to analytics will help, but there is no blueprint for an effective digital marketing plan. One has to keep in mind that marketing is about each individual user experience. Fans want authenticity, relevance, and personalization, and providing these is the only way to create a successful digital marketing campaign.

Originally posted at Fame House.

www.famehouse.net


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