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.

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.

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

But I will never put, “Christopher Davis, classical guitar,” on a program; I will never advertise my concert as, “Christopher Davis, classical guitarist.”

If it’s my mission to expand the audience for classical guitar, I owe it to that mission to attract unusual audiences. Avoiding the classical guitarist label avoids shutting down conversation about a concert before it starts. How many young people attend an orchestra concert? Not many. Most people are interested in guitar in general enjoy classical guitar at least a little bit. No one, however, knows they like classical guitar until they hear it. If I can get someone to come to a concert of art music by appealing to their general guitar affection, I’m a happy performer. I look at it as having the opportunity to share art music with an otherwise uninterested crowd. I don’t want to discourage them with a classical guitar label

The second reason I avoid the classical guitarist label is it makes more marketable as a teacher. I’m comfortably with just about any style of music. I don’t want to pigeonhole myself into one genre of teaching at this point in my career.

This was a particularly vivid story, really well done and well acted. Very convincing. And I thought to myself, “whatever auto-glass repair shop thought this up is amazing.”

Until the commercial turned into being about a brand of oil. Companies take note: if you’re going to tell me a story, try to make it relevant to your product. Thanks.

But still, some people matter more than others. Like a brand that has build up trust and loyalty among its customers — brand equity — individuals can build up a sort of social equity. The individual version of brand equity.

How person is perceived by their tribe is social equity. Do people trust them?

Do people following me on twitter perceive the links and content I post as good? Does that increase my “standing” in their eyes? Does that mean my word carries more weight?

I think it does: if someone likes what I post and respects my opinion (whether agree or disagree with it) that’s an amazing thing. And it’s something that has to be cared for and developed.

As Gary Vaynerchuk says: the fact that one person is following you or friends with you or reads your blog is awesome. That’s one person that is truly interested in what you have to say, and that’s something to be thankful for.