I have a few big gigs/events to go to next year, but they’re spread across many months. I’d like to use each gig as a base, and play concerts along the way.
Here’s the routes I have to take:
- Dallas, TX to Clarksville, TN – this one is around March 18, 2011.
- Dallas, TX to Macomb, IL – Around April 7th, 2011. I can also go through OK City and Wichita and Kansas City on this one. If there’s places to play there, that is.
- Dallas, TX to the Los Angeles Area – In Late October 2011. I would like to drive and play a few concerts on the way, but otherwise I’ll have to fly.
Do you know any venues in the areas or along the way? Would you like to host a house concert? Are you a classical guitar teacher and want to have a Masterclass or Concerts just for your students? Please leave a comment below or get in touch via email.
Thank you!
In a business roudtable-style discussion today at the APSU Summer Guitar Workshop a participant asked me what I thought about CD sales. He asked if I thought that was a dead end — an unprofitable business. I’ll tell you my answer in a bit, but first a story.
Richard Smith, the most fun guitarist on the planet.
Richard Smith is the man. He’s a great, fun-loving guy who plays the crap out of his guitar. When I saw him in concert last night, he blew the audience away. And he also sold a ton of CD’s afterward.
When Stephen Aron gave a concert of his own music, he sold it to the audience because he played with a passion that made it appealing to anyone. Steve writes great music, but his played sealed the deal. And he sold more than a few copies of his arrangements and compositions at the merch table after the performance.
I could go through every performer at this festival and talk about how they sold their product after the concert. They did very well, and they all created fans.
Take Home the Experience
When you buy a CD at a concert, it’s taking home part of the experience — it’s grabbing a chunk of the performer to put in your pocket for later. You catch the audience member right after they’ve had a euphoric experience in the concert hall. They are ready to buy something from you because you’ve spent the last hour tell them a story. Marketers do this all the time to sell us products: they make us believe a story. Musician’s do the same thing, but with a different language. A CD bought at a concert is forever associated with that euphoric, intense concert experience. People with cherish those CD’s forever because they cherish the memory of the concert. In short, the audience member told themselves that they loved the performer in concert and, therefore, would love them on a CD.
The CD is no longer a commodity. It’s now part of an experience.
Selling music is not a dead business, musicians just need to find a way to make the same product more of an experience than a commodity. Maybe that has to do with creating passionate fans — finding a way to instill the same, post-concert feeling no matter what the distance. Creating true fans, in other words, by mimicking the post-concert feeling.
PS: what everyone should have done at this event was encourage folks to sign up for their email mailing lists, gaining permission to interact with them on a continual basis. No one did that, however.
This is one of the pieces I played the WIU Guitar Festival. Great footage.
It’s kind of odd being on the other side of the wedding music thing. As I’m a composer (sort of), and my Fiancée is contributing her visual art skillz in making invitations, I thought I should creatively contribute to the wedding plans.
So here’s my first attempt. It’s an easy piece. AND infinitely repeatable (awesome for wedding musicians).
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(very quick recording, lots of flubs, but you get the idea).
See the music here (PDF)
I’m always really touched when students give me drawings or cards. Shout out to Ariana for this sweet frog (she did really well in her lesson today, too!).
Talking Frog
When you study music for a long time, you analyze music almost without thinking. You tear things apart and generate formal, melodic, and harmonic maps of pieces almost without thinking. I was teaching a webcam lesson earlier this week on the Merlin Suite Del Recuerdo, and without thinking about it I had analyzed the melody and form.
This is a good thing in the sense that it makes it very easy for me to have something to say about a piece when teaching, even if I’ve never played it before (as was the case with the Merlin: I’d never looked at the sheet music before). On the other hand, this makes it very hard to listen to music while doing anything else. I can’t listen to music when I read; I can’t listen to music when I write blog posts or papers. About the only time I can listen is when I set aside time specifically for that or late at night.
It’s kind of a cool development, like the last six years of music training* has finally started to catch up with me. I can’t even imagine what goes through veteran musicians’ heads when they hear a piece of play through it for the first time. I have to think that the level of analysis that takes places unconsciously is amazing.
*That’s a long time–25% of my life so far has been spent in college/grad school.
- HTML/CSS You don’t have to be good at it, but you should certainly know something about it and be able to screw around until you fix things. How can you update your website more frequently than never if you can’t write a bit of code? It’s a valuable, easy to learn skill.
- Basic Audio Editing I own a Zoom Q3 which I use to make most of my youtube videos and recordings you find here. I would not be able to post any recording without some basic audio editing skills. Just download Audacity and start screwing around.
- Engraving/typesetting Music I use Finale, but any notation program will do. Part of my brand is teaching, and part of teaching is creating useful materials for students. Even if you’re not a teacher, what would happen if you sold PDF’s (full sheet music or lead sheets) of your tunes? That’s a new revenue stream. Whatever program you use, take the time to learn it thoroughly enough to create beautiful scores.
- Basic Video Editing Youtube is huge. Being able to create content specifically for that medium is important. You might as well be able to do it yourself. I use iMovie. It’s not great, but get’s the job done. There are plenty of open source video editing options.
I’m teaching a music technology class this semester, and it’s extremely frustrating that my students largely don’t care about the skills that I’m teaching: engraving music, basic audio editing, and basic HTML/CSS. Part of being a savvy musician is knowing your way around the computer. Those musicians who don’t are doomed to have an unexciting, stagnant online presence (unless they can hire people to do it for them). In a world where we increasingly rely on the internet, not having a strong online presence is a big problem.
Click the images to see larger versions.
Here’s my lecture from the WIU Guitar Festival. It just goes over some basic tips on marketing and branding for musicians. The handout for the lecture is here.
