Twitter

There are at least 4,397 social networking blog websites for us to choose from, and for those of you out there doing the whole independent musician thing, you realize that you're only cool if you have profiles on at least 1,000 of them. Bonus points if actually log into them all once a month.

My approach has been to focus on one at a time and see what happens. I set up a Twitter account on August 11 after reading some press about how various companies are using it for customer service and bands are able to... etc. Enough for me to check it out.

The first thing I noticed was that many of my friends were already on Twitter, but most had stopped using it. Next I noticed that I'm long winded, because Twitter is a mini blog, and you can only post 140 characters and spaces or less. That's hard for us Mizells.

Other problems... how often do you Tweet? Should new Tweets have anything to do with previous Twits? Is it lame if you only Tweet once a day?

In any case, I have found some interesting information thanks to Twitter. Plus the search function allows you to track queries that might be relevant to you. I'm following terms as varied as "Cameron Mizell" and "cameronmizell" and "Cameron Mizell is awesome." So far the RSS feed is empty, but I haven't given up all hope!

In all seriousness, I'm trying this out for a while to see what happens. This is the only way to figure out what sites work best for me. Ultimately, I'm just trying to reach a few more people that might enjoy my music.

Follow me at Twitter!

Fan Mail Gets Dear John Letter

Yesterday I read a short news story about Ringo Starr posting a video on his website asking fans to not send any fan mail or "objects to be signed" after October 20th. It will be tossed. The 68 year old has too much to do.

I can only imagine. Even if he didn't, the guy is allowed some peace and quiet (and love), right? He's almost as old as John McCain for Pete's sake. He's almost as old as the phrase "for Pete's sake."

Of course he comes from an entirely different generation. The Beatles were like nothing we've seen before or since. The way they interacted with fans in the early days probably set the tone for modern super star bands having so many restrictions and security surrounding their shows, or any public appearance. It comes as no surprise that Ringo would still be getting loads of fan snail mail. It also doesn't surprise me that he answers it, and now that he's made the decision that he can't do it anymore, he has some feeling of guilt so he posted that video.

But bands today interact with fans differently. Blogs, websites, videos, contests (by the way, all of these things exist on ringtostarr.com), all give the fans some extras to go along with the music. It's all about the experience, but today it's all about instant experience.

I wonder what will happen 40 years from now when a band decides they don't have the time or energy to do these extras? How will the next generation interact with their favorite bands?

Globalized Fan Base

How do you build a fan base when the hundreds or even thousands of people listening to your music are spread out across the world?

Have you ever seen that "Demand it!" widget on MySpace? Whenver I see this on a band's page that might have 10,000 'friends' and rack up a ton of plays, I usually see small tallies of people in many, many areas. This would make for a 150 date U.S. tour with an average draw of what, five people per gig? Even if there's a $20 cover and everyone buys two t-shirts and multiple copies of all of your CDs, you can't afford it!

This is something I've been trying to figure out. I don't really have the answer, but here's how I see the situation:

By looking at a site like Last.fm, there are about 900 people that listen to my music with about 3,600 plays recorded. On Last.fm, listeners are added up when either somebody with the Last.fm software listens to one of my songs on their computer or somebody streams my song on the Last.fm site. Whether a person listens to only one of my songs once, or plays all my music repeatedly, they still only count as one listener. Let's assume about half of these people stumbled across my music unintentionally, heard one track, but probably won't be repeated listeners. I can't consider them fans. That leaves about 450 listeners with maybe 3,000 plays, which is less than 7 plays per listener. There's a lot of room for error, so I'll just assume 100 of these people are actually fans. Sounds kind of bleak, but then again, do you use Last.fm? Most people don't, so it's a pretty narrow poll.

What's more important is that most people that use Last.fm live outside the U.S., and the vast majority of my music sales are to people in this country. Plus I only really perform in New York City, so the fact there are 100 people around the world that are into my music is actually pretty cool. Really, the fact over 900 people have heard my music around the world is pretty cool. If I factor in all the music I've sold, I'm comfortable saying that worldwide, there's probably 1,000 people that are fans of my music. Probably more depending on how widely available my music is on P2P sites.

One reason the internet and all these social network sites are so great is that it allows me to interact with my fans in Chicago, Portland, Madison, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, not to mention London, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo... should I go on? Even if there's just one person in Lynchburg, VA that bought my album, they have the same access to me as anyone else, with the exception of seeing live shows. Hopefully my new digital camcorder and YouTube will help change that.

It's difficult to nurture both the local scene, where I book and promote gigs, and also the global scene. I've sold more music in New York than any other single city, but it still makes up less than 10% of the total sales. So I can't ignore the bigger picture. It's just difficult to find the balance.

MySpace

I've been convinced of this for a long time, and I'm definitely not the first person to say it, but the MySpace community is not going to buy your album. The social networking site is a decent place to spread the word about your band, maybe gain a few new fans, and the band profiles have definitely become a familiar status quo to booking agents, club owners, record labels, and the general music loving public. When I want to hear a song by a band, I usually find myself going to MySpace before the band's own website. How fucked up is that? But at least I know the band is only going to put forth a select six songs. A nice little sampler before I move onto their site.

But back to sales. Do people wasting their time surfing MySpace actually decide to buy music? If you send a personal message to all of your friends telling them about your new album, how many do you think will buy it? My estimation is about 1%. One person for every hundred you write will buy it. And that's if your friends list consists of people that might actually care about your music, not other bands padding their friend count or those sexy vixens that update their status every 40 seconds so they show up in your friend updates.

MySpace is an easy method of stalling. When you don't know what else to do for your album, you start adding friends or leaving comments. But sit back and take stock of what you're getting back, and you might find that it's better to invest your time doing something else. Like blogging...