Stevie Wonder and Barack Obama say your music isn't good enough to just have people show up at a gig.

Have you heard of Stevie Wonder? Have you heard of Barack Obama? If you knew that a free Stevie Wonder concert was being staged at your local University would you go? Would you at the very least tell someone else about it? Is this too many questions to start an article with?

Stevie Wonder was performing at the University of Cleveland, in Support of Barrack Obama, during the U.S. election and only two hundred people showed up.

The reason given is the organizers forgot to promote the show. Only sending out a tweet about 30 minutes before the show. Most of the people who came followed the sound of the live music. 

What does that mean for today’s indie musicians who aren’t in the 4th decade of our career?

It means:
As much time as we spend writing our songs, rehearsing and setting up gigs. We absolutely have to spend even more time telling people about our stuff.  We need to reach out to local bloggers, newspapers and morning TV. We still have to create our posters, flyers and stickers. But now we also have to Tweet and Facebook and Pin and newsletter and e-store and fullfill shipments. We have to [buzzword alert] organize, enable and activate our fans and followers into an engaged community of people who love to tell our story for us. But beyond that we have to use our creativity to find the ways of promotion that don’t exist yet. Finally we have to just keep doing it until we’re exhausted from doing it … then just do it some more.

At this point I’d love 200 people to show up at a gig when I only tweeted ½ hour before I play but the organizers of the Stevie Wonder concert are probably feeling pretty let down.

Do you do anything different that you’ve been finding success with to get your story out there? Let me know in the comments.

Read the Aux.tv article here | More about me and my music at SongsTuckerWrote.ca