Hey Aunt Jamima!
by ryan
On monday one of my MuseZu cohorts and I attended the San Francisco Music Tech Summit. It was an all day affair, 8:00-8:00, and there was a certain camping feel in the air due to being stranded in a treacherous hotel, far away from an abundance of wall outlets to charge our survival laptops. I have never been to any music-related conferences before, and let me tell you: everyone who has anything to do with music should attend these. Google, Myspace, iLike, Pandora, Youtube, Gracenote, Jambase, Burning Man, Noise Pop, and many more very weighty industry players sent their impressive sounding title toting representatives, and the evening culminated, for me anyway, with a short but inspirational talk from Third Eye Blind’s lead singer, Stephen Jenkins.
I have to admit that I felt pretty elite just for being there among the 600 or so attendees, and although many of the day’s 17 panels were geared towards Music Tech, there was a healthy amount of talk about how to succeed as a local band. My favorite panel, which included a lot of information about the importance of social networking in a band’s marketing strategy, included Emily Whitesmith of Whitesmith Entertainment. During this panel I came to the realization that a dream I have always had has finally come true: the “which music gets heard” playing field has been changed forever. The gatekeepers are no longer the few big wigs who pull strings in monster record company conglomerates. With information now moving at the speed of the electron, the gatekeepers are the millions of people all over the world who use the internet as a tool for finding new music.
So what does this mean? It means that, although this will require some amount of work on your part, you have an equal opportunity to have your music heard as anyone. Radio stations used to be major gatekeepers (albeit controlled by the record companies), literally deciding which songs will have the opportunity to become hits. La creme de la creme was a myth, but now it is true! I’m thankful to say I haven’t listened to the radio on purpose in years (it’s unavoidable sometimes when you’re out and about… if I hear “Hey There Delilah” one more time I’m going to throw up). Creme de la creme for music was a myth, but now it is true!
So here’s our first item on the “to do” list: sign up with iLike. I knew iLike existed, and I knew people put their music on it, but I had no idea why I should put my music up there, it really seemed like a waste of time to me. But having heard everyone at the Summit tout the virtues of iLike, I’m sold. For one, Google is teamed up with them so when you do a google music search, iLike is the streamer. It really is a radio station with gazillions of listeners, and anyone can be on it. Five minutes a day, remember? This one might be more like fifteen, but it should be a fun one so I don’t think you’ll mind so much. It’s really the starting that’s the difficult part anyway; the sitting down to do it. And, as promised, I’m going to do it too. So don’t be shy, let’s compare notes. I’d love to hear from you.
MuseZu… and Be Heard!
Ryan
Pancake Photo Courtesy of Gene Lee @ Dreamstime.com
Comments
“Hey There Aunt Jemina”…iLike! That’s pretty funny, man.
Seriously tho: I could’ve told you the playing field was much much wider. I’m still a bit worried about the influence of stupid radio on the “kids” today, but then again my little brother Taddeo listens to what *I* listen to, or some of it (He likes MGMT, Eminem, Spoon but not all of it, The Raconteurs, Hot Chip,..). But we’ll see once he starts to want to rebel. He might just be listening to the new Avril Lavigne of Heavy Pop Metal (Lookee! I just invented a new genre! Or maybe I just put a name to My Chemical Romance’s and AFI’s musak…)
Yes, Byron, this is not a tremendous mental leap to know that the playing field is much wider. The big wigs still have more $ to constantly bombard us with tunes, and there’s a reason they do this: it takes 5-7 “impressions” for someone to become familiar with a song. In the past it has been much harder to get impression #1 of your song, but once that happened much easier to get 2-7. Now it is EASY to get impression #1, but much harder to get 2-7, exactly inverse. This article is going back to the concept of 90% of business is execution. Even I said I was going to put my tunes on iLike, but honest to goodness haven’t had time to do so yet. There’s always an excuse, my current one is that my co-worker had a baby so I’m working double what I usually do (after all, it took me 3 days to even write a reply to your comment even though it was #1 on my things to do once I had a moment). Point is, the task is usually easy, but the execution of the task is, for one reason or another, usually rather difficult.
replying to my comment was #1 on your list?! Awwww…