stevelawson.net

At the end of Pt IV, I said that band leaders could consider not hiring musicians who don’t blog to help promote the music. A few of you didn’t like that idea, suggesting that it’s all about the music, and why should someone have to be a writer in order to play music?
To which my [...]

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If you’re an avid watcher of my various online streams - be it Twitter, Facebook or Friendfeed - you’ll have noticed over that last few days I’ve been talking about, and link to, BeyondBassCamp.com.
It’s a series of monthly masterclasses, inspired by the ones I give in California every January - for the last 4 or [...]

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This post is taken from a current Facebook Meme, and the title is fairly self explanatory. Some people have done 25 albums. I’ll just write til I run out… These won’t be in any particular order (just don’t categorise music like that) and will definitely be incomplete and open to change:

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I was just browsing around on Facebook, and noticed on my artist page that there there’s a ‘Come To My Town‘ request-a-gig button as part of the iLike app.
So I thought I’d bring it to your attention, as it’s always nice to know when people would actually like to come and see us play.
So head [...]

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So, as I outlined in Pt 1, Social networks can be a really tough place to inhabit as a musician, because you’re going to get a LOT of artists sending you friend requests expecting you to check out their music.

The idea for the artist, in that case, is that numbers mean everything. If I have 80,000 Myspace friends I must be doing something right, right? Surely that means that a percentage of them are going to become fans, tell their friends and then go and buy my CDs. Surely those kind of numbers will land me a record deal? Any label that knows I’ve got 80,000 devoted Myspace ‘fans’ will surely snap me up?

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So, context: I’m on Myspace, ReverbNation, Last.fm, Facebook and Twitter. Oh, and Youtube, Vimeo, Seesmic, Phreadz…etc. etc.

All of them are social networks. On all of them, not surprisingly, I get followed/added/friended by a lot of musicians and bands.

Which is all well and good, except that I can’t listen to them. Not ‘won’t‘, ‘can’t‘ - the numbers don’t add up. Even if we ignore the 8000 myspace friends I deleted before christmas, we’re still looking and thousands of interactions. Even if I only listened to one song from each, that’s upwards of 4000 minutes of listening time, just to grant each of them a cursory ear. And given that a handful of them will really catch my imagination, I’ll probably end up listening to them a lot over time.

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Finally… part 3! The timing is prescient for two reasons. Firstly, last Monday I was invited to be a panelist at a discussion hosted by Mobile Mondays (MoMo) on the whole area of Mobile tech and Social Media.
Secondly, it’s because today I’m heading to Leicester to De Montfort University Business School to help put together [...]

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This morning I read a really excellent blog post by Ben Walker.
It’s headed Wake Up And Smell The Evidence and outlines via statistics gathered from Ben’s own audience just how little of this social media webby geeky stuff gets through to ‘your average music fan’.
So are we wasting our time? Not if, like me, you [...]

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Weeks and weeks ago, I was ‘tagged’ by the very lovely and talented Ben Ellis of RedCatCo, in a blog-meme about best practices in social media. It’s a great subject, because with social media stuff being as young as it is, we’re not as clued up on how to ‘use’ it as we are with [...]

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If you listened to the podcast I’ve been talking about in the last couple of posts, you’ll know that one of the things I’ve been thinking about of late is how Social Media lets the story of what we do and why we do it be told in as many ways as there are people [...]

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