Christopher Davis

People do things because it makes them feel important. People who feel that their work is meaningful are happier with their jobs. Bloggers and companies become obsessed with their stats because they want to know that their website is visited — that people read what they have to say. I’m writing this post right now because I want to share with you things that I learned and thought about. I want to feel important by getting your eyeballs and minds engaged for a few minutes.

Making People Feel Important

A lot of Dale Carnegies How to Win Friends and Influence People is about making people important. How? Listen to them. Sincerely sympathize with them. Remember their names. Chat with them. Ask questions. In short, be a human being.

By doing this sort of thing you turn prospects in friends and, if you’re in the business world, friends into customers.

Cognitive Surplus and the Modern Human

We have a lot of time on our hands. Well, that’s not true. We’re all busy. And we all have a mile long to do list that never gets any shorter.

What’s not required of the modern human is the extensive work to fill basic needs practiced by our predecessors. We just don’t have to go kill our dinner all that often. As such, all that left over time goes into developing cultural and artistic institutions. We put our cognitive and time surplus to work.

Where We Place Our Attention

Every individual chooses to put their cognitive surplus into one or two things that make them feel important. That’s why people help with Linux OS development. It’s why forums have participants. It’s why parents run their kids around to way to many activities. It’s why anybody does anything: it makes them feel important.

Can you imagine a professional musician in prehistoric times? It wouldn’t happen. Everyone’s job was to try to not die from starvation, predators, or (insert scary thing here). The time we don’t have to spend surviving anymore goes into hundreds of cultural things and interests and ideas.

The real question, of course, is how can we turn those ideas into a way to make a living if so desired. How can an interest be monetized?

Make Other People Feel Important

Simple. Convince others that they need your product/service. Make them feel important by being your customer. Turn prospects in friends and friends in customers.

Now the hard part: don’t forget that those customers are still your friends. Treat that as such. Listen. Send them messages or give them a call just to chat. Be a human.

For the past few months, I’ve been reading a lot on how people make decisions. Specifically, why decisions go wrong. Here’s an (extremely) brief summary of what I’ve learned.

Two Brains

Generally speaking, we approach problems and decisions from two directions: the rational and the emotional.

The rational brain has been held up since ancient Greece as the be all end all of decision making powers. It’s what makes us different from animals. The emotional brain, on the other hand, is said to be irrational — not to be trusted.

We’re Irrational Anyway

Turns out people are irrational anyway. It doesn’t make how much we tout our logical ability, everyone makes very predictable, irrational decisions. Knowing what sorts of errors we’re susceptible to, however, can often mitigate the effects of irrationality.

The Power of Intuition

Intuition is an extremely emotional thing. It’s that vibe we get from something, or the nagging sensation that we should make a given choice.

Human beings take in a lot of sensory data. In fact, there’s so much of it that we have to “tune out” some of it. That is, much of our sensory processing goes on in the unconscious mind. We do tend to notice changes in our environment and become acclimated to those changes over time, eventually tuning them out.

The output of our intuition, that feeling we get, is the result of all that subconscious data processing combined with our expertise and the ability of our brains have of detecting patterns. Our subconscious minds take all that data, run it through what we know (expertise), and strive to recognize any patterns or similarities between what’s happening and what we know or have experienced in the past.

If the subconscious mind recognizes a pattern and knows that the end result is undesirable, you will probably get a bad sense from your intuition. If the result is positive, however, you’ll probably get a good feeling from your intuition.

Intuition Isn’t Fool Proof

Human beings love patterns. We find them everywhere, even where there are none.

Take a slot machine. It’s designed so that you win at random intervals. Your brain, however, will start to recognize patterns in the numbers/spins and start to make predictions. Because the reward schedule is variable, the times when you win feel amazing and convince your subconscious brain that it did indeed recognize a pattern. Thus we continue playing — our intuition tells us to!

In reality, there is no pattern. Your intuition has failed.

Rationality is Good (Sometimes)

The key to make good decisions is recognizing both the power and failings of intuition and rationality.

Some decisions are better left to the rational/logical mind, such as the slot machine example above. Others are better done with the emotional brain and intuition.

The reality, however, is that we use a combination of both. Every decision is emotional and logical to some extent. We know this because of studies done on brain damage patients. Folks who have trouble with the portions of the brain that control emotion, also have trouble making decisions.

It’s up to us, as decisions makers, to recognize when one side of the mind is better suited to a task. We would then give that thought process more weight.

Satisficing and Maximizing (and High Pressure Situations)

There are two types of decision makers: those who pick the first option that works and those who search for the best option.

Of course, we are all combination of a satisficer and a maximizer. We care more about some decisions than others. Do we endlessly debate what toothpaste to buy? Nope. It’s not worth it (unless you’re really into toothpaste). But we often spend more time finding the best option for decisions about something important to us (what concert to attend, where to go for school, etc.).

When in a high pressure situation, however, we all turn in to satisficers. We pick the first option that comes to our mind and act. Mostly because of the whole flight or fight response, and because we’re often not in a position to think and weight options.

This is both good and dangerous. If the high pressure situation happens to be related to our field(s) of expertise, then the first solution we generate is often really good. That expertise helps our minds generate a good solution from the start. If the high pressure situation is something we’re not familiar with, however, our solution generating abilities are severely impaired.

This goes back to intuition. When we know a lot about a subject, our first judgments and decisions are often correct. It’s often best to trust these intuitions. When people are asked to explain, logically, why they made a given decision in their field of expertise, they often assign reasons. The reasons people assign often are incorrect (or, more colloquially: the reasons are bullshit).

Conclusion

Don’t be afraid to trust your intuition, but recognize where it can fail. Don’t be afraid to trust your logic, but remember that human beings act irrational in very predictable ways.

The Book List

How We Decide
Why We Make Mistakes
Blunder
Predictably Irrational
The Upside of Irrationality
The Paradox of Choice
Blink
Sources of Power

The biggest mistake any musician can make in marketing themselves is just not connecting people that can help them. It takes a lot of work to develop a relationship with someone, however.

It’s All About Trust

Online relationships (Facebook friends, etc.) vary in their depth. But generally, they’re much more shallow than relationships with people you see every day. Some social media networks support really in depth relationships (Facebook being one), but others feel more like mass media one-to-many communication that has no real in depth connection (Youtube*).

In any case, relationships are about trust. We get married because we trust and love someone enough to be sure they’ll be there for us (and they agree to marry us for the same reason!). We count on our friends because we trust them.

Back in the Day…

Early hominids and humans probably didn’t have language in the sense that we think of it today. Their communication was probably what Steven Mithen calls “Hmmmmm”: Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical, and mimetic. In other words, their communicative vocalizations were mostly likely musical (think bird song) in nature and probably included gestures; the goal of such communication would have been to elicit a certain response from the other persons (manipulative).

Because they lacked the in depth communication system we do, early hominids probably relied on touch and grooming to develop relationships, much like great apes do today.

As language developed, the conversation replaced touch and grooming (though touch is still important) to develop bonds. It’s no different today. We trust because because we maintain relationships with them by talking or communicating.

Reach Out, but Don’t Ask

If you want to make friends with a blogger, you start commenting on their posts and emailing with them. I freaking love emailing with blog readers, and the theory course I just launched in generating a ton of really cool interaction.

Start relationships with people by reaching out. If you want to get a CD review on a blog, reach out to the author. If you want to be referred for gigs, reach out to prominent musicians who can’t possibly handle all the gig offers they get. This is key: don’t ask for anything. Just be a friend. Support those people in their activities. Two things will happen: (1) you’ll most likely get to experience some great stuff and (2) when it comes time that the person can help you out, they will.

Be a friend first, and a business person second. Do the things humans do and help other people out, and those people will help you.

Bottom line: don’t be afraid to reach out. The most important marketing any person can do is maintaining relationships with others.

*Though there are people on Youtube who I message with regularly.

There are downsides to giving away things for free. I have a ton of music on my hard drive that was legally free (thank you Amazon MP3!), and I listen to very little of it. On the other hand, that Shostakovich CD and Imogen Heap album I bought months ago still make it into my regular rotation. I suspect many folks notice similar patterns with their listening.

Free stuff is so enticing that people grab it, even if it’s not needed. There’s only so much time in the day, and only so much music to which we can listen. Giving away a free download will probably get it listened to once, but it may not create the lasting impression a musician wants. Specifically a free, downloaded track might not turn a person into a fan. And that’s a problem.

If we want fans to consume our music in the sense that it gets listened to and enjoyed often, this one time interaction generated by a free track isn’t going to cut it.

The Power of Expectations

The alternative to free is charging for your music. Price is a strange thing, however. Whether or not to buy something, even something costing a dollar, is an entirely new psychological game for the consumer.

With a price comes expectations. And expectations are powerful. They’re the reason name-brand drugs work “better” than their identical, generic equivalents, and why we’re convinced cheap wine tastes worse.

Making your music cheap or free is dangerous for this reason. It creates an expectation about it that may be contrary to what you want to say about yourself as an artist.

The Non-Monetary Economy

Free and cheap have their place, however. Giving away from free tracks is a great way to get permission to contact fans. That permission (usually in the form of an email address and name) is far more valuable than a few bucks over the longer term.

Giving something away for free (monetarily speaking) doesn’t mean that you can’t get something out of the deal. An email address is a valuable thing to receive in exchange for a track. Getting permission to use a fan’s social networks (see tweet for a track) in exchange for some music is powerful.

Being a musician with an online presence is about deciding what you can and can’t get paid for. For those things you can’t get paid for monetarily, it’s about creating a non-monetary market in which you can trade. In other words, always try to get something for your artistic work.

Questions

Before giving things away or setting a price point, think carefully about how this decision fits into your overall brand. Does giving something away generate real value in ways that can’t be measured monetarily? Does the price create an expectation you don’t want? What does giving something away for free or cheap say about you as an artist?

You don’t have to and shouldn’t give away everything for free. The trick is finding a balance between free and paid and the price point.

I enjoy reading and learning about random things. I also really enjoy libraries: I’m cheap, and once I’ve read a book and taken notes I probably won’t read it again. I also enjoy raiding my friends bookshelves and borrowing books.

In a conversation, a friend brought up that fact that digital books can’t really be shared in the same way that physical copies can. You can’t borrow your friend’s digital copy of a book or album. Doing so would probably be considered piracy despite the fact that we borrow physical copies of books and other products all the time. (Maybe libraries are the real pirate bay?)

I can’t help but wonder what the social and cultural ramifications of being unable to borrow books (and other things such as CDs or DVDs) will be. What if we can no longer hand a book to a friend and tell them its awesome? Seems like we’ll be much poorer as a culture. There will still be plenty of recommending going on, I’m sure, but if everyone has to buy a copy I suspect there will be a lot less reading/listening/watching.

Physical products may be so 2004, but they do have a lot of advantages their digital equivalents can’t match (yet). Then again, the entire culture of the digital world has yet to really shake down. Old school institutions are still clinging to their last vestiges of power and trying to use scarcity economics in the world of abundance online. And the new crowd of digital natives are beginning to expect free as a standard. Perhaps not everything will go behind a pay wall and the technology for consuming digital information goods will have the same look and feel as the current physical products. Who knows.

Sometimes being a human is hard to do online, but here’s three simple thing to incorporate into your “social media repertoire.”

1. Humans have conversations

Humans don’t hand out business cards constantly, or take every speaking opportunity to tell others about their products or services. Humans interact — they share stories about little things that happened during their day. And they do it because it’s cathartic and interesting. Sometimes the craziest, coolest stuff happens during a day. That’s the kind of stuff I want to read about.

I truly enjoy reading Peter Hodgson’s (@iheartguitar) updates on twitter. It really doesn’t get any better than this. Peter is successful because he never pretends to be anything but himself, and he interjects all that personality into his writing.

This goes two ways, however. Humans also listen to other humans talking about their lives: they engage in a dialog. Earlier today some folks and I were talking about choral music on twitter. A choral composer interjected, but he did it in a not so good way. Instead of adding to the conversation (about understanding music) with some insightful thoughts, he asked us to go check out his music. That’s fine–I did check out his music. But I also didn’t follow that user. I didn’t give him permission to interact with me on a long term basis. Had he shared some insightful comments on the subject, I guarantee I would have been more interested in what he did.

2. Humans tell others about cool stuff

If you’re a human, you’ve probably told your other human friends about a cool restaurant you found. Or maybe you told them about a sweet new CD you bought.

It works in the same way online. Find a cool article? Share it. Chances are you’re connected to people with similar interests, so they’ll be glad to check out something you found cool.

In Trust Agents Chris Brogan and Julien Smith recomment promoting others 12 times as much as you promote yourself. Here’s a more general rule: one or two out of every 10 or 12 updates should be self promotional. Have conversations and spread the word about all that cool stuff you find.

3. Humans do favors

Humans help each other out just to help others out. It’s easy, and it makes you feel awesome. Helping your friend move might be painful during the work, but nothing feels better than the exhaustion and sense of accomplishment at the end of the day.

As a human online, you should make it your mission to provide a service to others. Sometimes that service costs money, and that’s okay. But most times it’s free.

A service can be anything: a few minutes of entertainment, an instructional article, a thoughtful discourse, or a helpful response to a question. Try to be useful in some way and you’re truly being a human being.

I like hanging out with other humans

So this is my personal message for people that don’t quite get using social media for marketing. It’s easy: be yourself and have conversations, share cool stuff, and be useful.

Most musicians do a terrible job on their websites.

Their design is often really good and unique, and all the relevant information is there and easy to find. But that’s not the whole story.

Tell People What to Do

In other words, provide visitors with a call to action. Tell them exactly what you’d like them to do.

Many independent musicians have a CD or three to sell. If you want visitors to listen to your CD and maybe buy a copy, put an image of the CD cover and a sleek flash player so folks can check it out. You probably want people to listen first, so make that the call to action. Perf de Castro does a great job of this.

What you tell your visitors to do depends on your brand, of course.

Don’t Waste the Top

The thing about Perf’s website, linked above, is that the call to action is above the fold. That is, you don’t have to scroll down to know what’s going on.

Think about the same things on your website. The most important things you want your visitors to see should go above the fold. Don’t make people scroll down.

Learn from Business

Take a look around the web at tech companies and subscription websites. They are (usually) great examples of well structured landing pages. You can also read up on landing pages at Copyblogger.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

1. Build a House. Build a sweet website, a base of operations. This could be a blogger blog or a self hosted thing or something like weebly.com. Doesn’t matter. Build a place where people can come to get to know you. Build a place where you can share things with the world.
2. Make Friends. Connect with other people on social media or via email. Reach out. Don’t just put yourself on there and expect to be famous. Engage others with similar interests.
3. Invite Your Friends Over. Presumably you’ve filled house with cool shit. That is, you have some great content. You’d like to share it with the world–you want your friends to come over and check it out. So invite them. Send out a link on your various social media. If you think someone would be particularly interested in the content, send them a personal message. Don’t be afraid to invite people over. As long as you have something for them to do when they get to your house it will be okay.
4. Keep Adding Things and keep inviting people over. Create more content and share it.

Internet marketing is simple. Yet most art musicians suck at it. They have a website. And that’s it. There’s nothing really there. One visit is enough, I never need to go back. Nothing changes and no new content is added.

Give the people you’re trying to reach a reason to come to your home, and make it so cool that the next time you invite them over they can’t help but come back. That’s way different from traditional advertising in which the advertiser seeks only to expose their products to the world. It’s the independent musician’s job to engage potential fans in such a way that they continue to visit.

In short:
Dear Art Musician,

Thanks,
-CD