- This photo provided by designwallah under a Creative Commons License
In the midst of my “4P’s of Marketing” series, I thought a dose of reality, aka “what this all means for me in the real world” would be helpful.
For those that know me personally, you undoubtedly know that I think the world is a very small place. From running into the first person I met at college while on the tram at Gatwick airport, to meeting a co-worker’s girlfriend at a bar who has worked with my uncle (a professional photographer) before, this theory has been proven over and over again.
It was again proven true last night, when I met Andrew from Half Fiction. One of the three partners is a guy by the name of Sage, and in addition to having at least one person in common through a few degrees of separation (See? Small world!), he is the inspiration for this post.
Sage is involved with a number of projects, one of which is Ready Fire Aim. Kind enough to send me their electronic press kit, I took a stroll around the RFA website and happened upon this blog post.
By way of a preface, I write from the perspective of a marketer who has been obsessed and involved (the playing and listening kind, not creepy ‘involved’ romantically kind) with music her entire life. Sage’s perspective is that of a performer, and someone making a living off of their art. Excerpts provided below (emphasis mine), but you really should go read the whole thing here.
….I am going to say however that it is seriously hard fucking work rehearsing non stop and trying to work to pay the bills and have any kind of personal life at all. I call it rockstar 2.0–all work and very little play.
The days of letting the label do all the work while the artist gets fucked up, throws TVs out the window of expensive hotel suites and does irreparable damage to the room are long gone. GOOD RIDDANCE. The middle man is no longer required. What is required is that every band leader think like a brand manager. That every artist must also come correct with an unlimited supply of elbow grease and a multi-tool in his/her back pocket is also a given, but the truth is that no amount of work on the part of the artist can compensate for one crucial factor–the only thing that REALLY TRULY MATTERS regardless of label support, management, agenting or directing from ‘on high’–THE FANS and their support.
In the last 2 weeks for some strange reason I have been contacted by more people who are saying that they have bought or want to buy my record, love the music and listen to it all the time and are telling all their friends about it than in the last 2 years combined… Not only does this make me want to keep working, it makes me want to please my fans. It makes me want to work harder longer and more intensely to make them happy and keep making music-music they laugh, cry, dance, make out, have sex, meet/break up with boyfriends and girlfriends, cook dinner, drive and dance in their undies lip-synching into their hairbrush to. In other words, music to live life to–a partner/soundtrack to whatever it is that they are doing. The digital revolution makes that possible...
In a perfect world there would be no free downloading and I would be paid a fair wage for my work. Music is free and a whole generation now thinks of their media as a portable, constitutional, God ordained, inalienable right. You can either play a Lars Ulrich… or you can adapt, roll with the change-by-the-hour tide of technology and figure out a way to get people to WANT to pay you… I’m not sure why or how that is going to happen en masse but for my part as long as i can continue to engage my fans on a one-to-one level and initiate real contact between artist and consumer of art (fan has egomaniacal connotations to me so I’m going to try and stop using it) who is a REAL person on the other end of the phone, keyboard or social media platform then I will consider myself a successful artist.
…That means that the labels really ARE irrelevant as long as I outsource carefully and creatively certain aspects of the business to individuals who know how to do that better than me. That means that the fat bloated days of rockstar entitlement to bad behavior, mountains of drugs and waiting rooms of young women (and the fat bloated middlemen who plied them with it all so they could ROB THEM BLIND while they were drunk, high and fucking their brains out in extravagant hotels they were unwittingly paying for) are gone for good–replaced with the leaner meaner rockstar 2.0 approach of DIY ingenuity and hard work, the very things that made America great. See rock and roll IS America. Rock and Roll has become what our parents and grandparents did to put food on the table and roofs over our heads–just another job. It’s come full circle to being willing to do the work, play the game and write the songs that make the whole world sing from some ‘Alice down the rabbit hole’ wanderland that it has been for the last 4 decades.
In the end it all comes down to one person reaching out and touching another (consensually of course) and the honest exchange of some dollars for doughnuts as my dad would say, and to that end, my dear reader YOU are the most important part of the equation-not me. And so on this, the moment before I go and play the most strategically critical show of my life, the one for which I have rehearsed for 15 years I want to thank you for not only reading my drivel but for buying my music, telling your friends, for dancing mostly naked in front of mirrors and writing to tell me about it. YOU give me a reason to keep working non-stop all day and night, sweating my tits off in a shoebox rehearsal space at 10 in the morning 3 times a week after staying up til 4am editing and posting videos on my 20+ social media platforms. . . and for that I am EXTREMELY grateful! IT’S A BEAUTIFUL THING.
In case you’re too lazy to click on the blog post, Sage posts Beautiful Thing as a track at the end of the entry. Listen here.
What’s the point?
The point is that it’s about the music and the fans… it’s ALWAYS been about the music and the fans. For awhile, the business got in the way. Now? The business model is broken, and it’s back to the music and the fans.
Go through and read about how to figure out what your product is, how to price it (that post was a struggle to write), and then learn about where to put it and how to market it… but relate it to your life. Relate it to your art, and make it work for you.