(Note: I have been wanting to blog about social media for a while, but I wasn't sure where to start. Therefore, it will now be an ongoing series, possibly even stream-of-consciousness at times. Consider yourself warned:-)
Dr. J's Social Media Experiment Part 1: Introduction
I suppose I first entered the online world in the early 1990's when I joined my first BBS. I think it was called the Gold Coast Macintosh bbs, and I was living in Miami at the time. I was also an early adopter of AOL, but I dropped it in 1996, which was coincidentally about the time it became popular. Next, in the late 1990's, I taught myself HTML, and created my first website, which I called The Jazz Vocal Resource (check it out at the Wayback Machine)
For a number of reasons, I had to drop the website, ca. 2001. For the next five years, my online presence consisted of a single page on the Greenville College website with a photo and bio that I never updated after it was originally posted.
Then, one fateful day in June of 2006, I opened my first MySpace account. Sure, it was a little late, but at the time, hardly anybody my age was on MySpace. I initially did it to promote my music and the music of my band, but I soon created a second "personal" page, and began to search for anyone and everyone I have ever known! Before I knew it, I was fully immersed in the world of social media.
In no particular order, here are all the services I have signed up for. I continue to use some of them, but some I have either cancelled or neglected:
MySpace
Facebook
Friendster
Tagworld
PureVolume
Bandspace
IACMusic
MacJams
Bolt
Photobucket
Xomba
Xanga
Linkedin
Last.fm
Pandora
Twitter
Jaiku
Digg
StumbleUpon
Delicious
Slashdot
Macslash
YouTube
Vimeo
12seconds
Musebin
Blip.fm
Friendfeed
Geni
iCrew
Hulu
Joost
Popego
BlogTV
Plaxo
Several random Ning networks, including NetNewMusic
I'm sure there are a few I have forgotten about. Of course, last but not least, I started this blog. My intent with this was especially to help independent artists, and I hope I have helped at least a few of my dozen readers!
If I have come away from this experiment with one overarching theme that applies to musicians, it would be that the old methods no longer work. Social media is not about promoting your music in the traditional sense. It is about creating a connection or relationship with your listeners. In fact, I believe it has more in common with the traditional idea of signings and "meet and greets" than it does with promoting a specific product. I also believe this will translate into career longevity and a more entrenched fanbase. However, even the "experts" don't yet know how musicians will be able to pay their bills in this new world.
Well, folks, that's all for now. Thanks for listening. In my next installment, I will talk about Twitter, which has taken up quite a bit of my free time for the past six months.
Dr. J's Social Media Experiment Part 1: Introduction
I suppose I first entered the online world in the early 1990's when I joined my first BBS. I think it was called the Gold Coast Macintosh bbs, and I was living in Miami at the time. I was also an early adopter of AOL, but I dropped it in 1996, which was coincidentally about the time it became popular. Next, in the late 1990's, I taught myself HTML, and created my first website, which I called The Jazz Vocal Resource (check it out at the Wayback Machine)
For a number of reasons, I had to drop the website, ca. 2001. For the next five years, my online presence consisted of a single page on the Greenville College website with a photo and bio that I never updated after it was originally posted.
Then, one fateful day in June of 2006, I opened my first MySpace account. Sure, it was a little late, but at the time, hardly anybody my age was on MySpace. I initially did it to promote my music and the music of my band, but I soon created a second "personal" page, and began to search for anyone and everyone I have ever known! Before I knew it, I was fully immersed in the world of social media.
In no particular order, here are all the services I have signed up for. I continue to use some of them, but some I have either cancelled or neglected:
MySpace
Friendster
Tagworld
PureVolume
Bandspace
IACMusic
MacJams
Bolt
Photobucket
Xomba
Xanga
Last.fm
Pandora
Jaiku
Digg
StumbleUpon
Delicious
Slashdot
Macslash
YouTube
Vimeo
12seconds
Musebin
Blip.fm
Friendfeed
Geni
iCrew
Hulu
Joost
Popego
BlogTV
Plaxo
Several random Ning networks, including NetNewMusic
I'm sure there are a few I have forgotten about. Of course, last but not least, I started this blog. My intent with this was especially to help independent artists, and I hope I have helped at least a few of my dozen readers!
If I have come away from this experiment with one overarching theme that applies to musicians, it would be that the old methods no longer work. Social media is not about promoting your music in the traditional sense. It is about creating a connection or relationship with your listeners. In fact, I believe it has more in common with the traditional idea of signings and "meet and greets" than it does with promoting a specific product. I also believe this will translate into career longevity and a more entrenched fanbase. However, even the "experts" don't yet know how musicians will be able to pay their bills in this new world.
Well, folks, that's all for now. Thanks for listening. In my next installment, I will talk about Twitter, which has taken up quite a bit of my free time for the past six months.
2 comments:
That's awesome. Waybackmachine WHAT!? I tried looking for my old website but had no luck thankfully, LOL.
To add something interesting about social networking and age and whatnot. My wife has been totally against MySpace and Facebook and the likes since day one. She thought it was an invasion of privacy and all that. Then after years of making fun of me and my MySpace and blog habits, what does she do? She goes out and opens a Facebook profile! What made her do this, you might ask? Not me, not her friends, but her grandma! I'm not kidding you... my grandmother-in-law has a Facebook!!!! LOL!!!
So Mike, you don't have to feel old for being on all these social networking sites! :)
My feeling is that the implications for the music business that social media and related disruptions provide.. well that there massive and complex, but not entirely unpredictable.
There's a huge scene of marketers and communications people.. whom are in the social media space in the Boston area.. that are mapping out a lot of this stuff relative business more generally, and I think it's application to music business stuff is not entirely un-straight forward.
Relationships as a part of social media.. is really a kind of new way of thinking.. and I think it's implications are complex. On a basic level, the sorts of people who read blogs and listen to podcasts are influencers.. as are the people we develop relationships with more generally in social media.. so there's a kind of network effect to it.. which I imagine is differentiates it form the traditional meet and greets..
Further along.. there's the idea that business is all about relationships anyway.. there's the networking of it and all that.. and an obvious problem the music industry suffers from is how do you manage change.. big business versus the guerrilla.. is a bit like the difference in steering an air craft carrier versus a skate board.. and increasingly change management is becoming more and more key to success in business, it seems to me..
So.. it is perhaps possible that we'll see a new way emerge that is sorta "un-business" as we have known it.. where perhaps people come together on a project to project bases.. so its as if the organizational principles of how you do it have been granularized... From my point of view, developing relationships is a part of trying to lay the ground work for the phase of things.
Then there's the.. I think anyone connected to music making is probably aware of this, one would hope.. but the shifting economics of the technology.. Just what you can do with a project studio today..
But it's not just limited to music production.. the tools a guerrilla needs for social media marketing and communications are largely free.. In my home studio I'm now struggling to learn tools for video, motion graphics, and high end 3D.. The video tools alone.. less then 10 years ago would have run you 6 figures.. and wouldn't have been anywhere near as good.. and the computers you needed to run your high end 3D software were also in the 6 figures.
It used to take, what.. like a million dollars to bring a band to market at a major label? Theoretically.. I could do a music video, album, marketing, and all the rest of it.. for pennies on the dollar.. or perhaps fractions of pennies on the dollar! That's a crazy huge shift in how you think about it.. if it were all about record sales.. I could squeak by on selling.. like.. the equivalent of selling 6 thousand cds..
So I think a part of it is a shift in skill sets.. In a recent issue of sound on sound someone was lamenting how we lost the good old days when someone would just specialize in song writing.. give the song to Frank Sinatra.. who just did his numbers.. and damn those singer song writers for disrupting it all!
We'll loose a degree of specialization.. but I think what it really is.. is that the lines that articulate what your area of specialization are.. are shifting.. we need to think less in traditional compartments and more in terms of.. what sort of glass we want to hold our water in..
And I imagine the music business will likely look more like the publishing industry then the music business we've grown up with..
or at least those are my thoughts today
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