Signal, Noise, & Facebook Newsgroups

Over the past couple of years Facebook Groups have really risen to prominence as a way to get the word out about creative work. Unfortunately they have also proliferated to the point they are hard to keep track of & many have been so inundated by promotional posts that they are no longer useful. So I made this spreadsheet to help sort through things.

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Kickstarter versus Indiegogo

So as some of you who regularly read the blog know, I’m working up to doing some more stuff for fan funding projects.  I used Kickstarter last time & though my project was successful, I’m not sure that half the projects of my friends have been.  So I was looking around at IndieGoGo, which seems like the biggest competitor with Kickstarter for running fan funded projects.  So I wanted to let some people who might find it of interest know some of the reasons a person might want to use one over the other.

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Internet Promotion from Zero in 2011

I know similar articles to this have been posted here many times, but I thought it would be worth giving my take today, right now, with my perceptions, right or wrong.  So please comment & debate.

Recently a friend of mine was asking where he should post up stuff for his brand new band (no web presence yet at all) given the decline in MySpace.  So I came up with this as my list in order of importance.

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Sonic Youth & Romantic Relationships

So Kim Gordon & Thurston Moore are breaking up.  This one didn’t hit me too hard as I was never a huge Sonic Youth fan (just a guy who liked some of their music), but back 15 years ago when Michael Gira & Jarboe of Swans broke up it really threw me for a loop as far as the hope of ever being able to find that ideal relationship of either (a) two equals that are successful artistic individuals (I’m not going to get into the debate about how many people are willing to shush off Jarboe & Gordon as tagalongs as I think it’s false) or (b) the ability of a semi-broken man (representing myself) to somehow ensnare an angel.  Of course both of these things are wrong & about celebrity worship, but when you’re someone obsessed with music it’s really hard to find any role models that present themselves as being in any kind of successful romantic relationship that doesn’t seem detrimental to their art.  There have been a couple minor rock star couples I’ve been friends with that have made me retain hope for the dream (in fact I did a series of interviews with them a few years ago in QRD), but also see the reality of the everyday problems in any relationship because in the end we’re all just people, which unfortunately kills the dream of one day rising up to having some kind of ideal indie rock god life.

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Brian John Mitchell has run Silber Records since 1996 & the zine gone webzine QRD since 1994.  He is perhaps best known for his music in the band Remora.  He runs a daily blog about running a label where this article originally appeared.

Bad Music Can Be Good

So I saw this video today that’s going around:

I’m not sure exactly how I feel about it. I mean clearly it is pretty awful in a certain way. But it makes me think that maybe all of the horrible singer-songwriter stuff you see on an open-mic night might be the performers & not the songwriting. & also it reminds me that when the music & lyrics are thoroughly separated that most lyrics are pretty freaking awful (as I’m sure mine are). & it reminds me that I was never impressed with the music on The Wall. & that if you are going to do a cover song & don’t have the chops or equipment to pull it off, you should alter it into something thoroughly your own.

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Fighting Piracy Without Alienating Your Fans

Okay, so I know people’s view on combating or embracing album leaks goes all over the place.  But I thought I’d share with you the letters I’ve been sending with a good deal of success when it comes to download links.  Of course I find out where the download links are through Google Alerts.  I think the parts you’d need to change are obvious.

Here’s the letter I send to the site/blog where I find the link:

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Subject: Thanks from Silber & Aarktica
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Hello,

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YouTube Advertisement Experiments

So recently I had a video made I was pretty proud of.  Originally it had about 500 views on YouTube from posting it on a few newsgroups & what not, which I don’t think is bad for a studio project that has been more or less defunct a few years.  But I thought it had more potential.

So I experimented with using the YouTube/Google Adwords promotions to publicize the video.  I was familiar with how quick the money can add up on those kind of campaigns, so I low-balled at $0.01 per click & a budget of $1.00 a day. 

The result over two months was spending $52.20 (pretty close to the $1 a day budget) providing the additional 5,220 views that would be directly caused by this.  After the two months the video only hit about 5,800 views & now (two months after closing the ad campaign) the video just hit 6,000 views.  Which means essentially no one who clicked an advertisement to watch the video shared it with anyone.  Also there has not been any type of sales spike associated with the video views.  (I’d hoped for a sales increase near the level to pay for the ads - a 0.1% click through to purchase sounds reasonable….)

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You're on the radio out of your market, now what?

So I recently was talking to Shane Sauers of Miss Massive Snowflake on North Pole Records about how things are going with his new record as I’d seen in the charts at a few stations.  He told me, “Yeah, it’s getting some airplay in Michigan & stuff, but now what am I supposed to do?”  Because he’s in Portland, Oregon & the odds of him doing a tour of the scale to get to Michigan is asking a bit much.  So I thought I’d throw out some of my general ideas on the subject & things I sometimes do & maybe should always do because I imagine a lot of people are in the same boat.

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