Not Locomotion, Its Self Promotion

Well time to pull up the rocking chair, break out the pipe and sit next to the cracker barrel… What the heck is a cracker barrel anyway? I can’t find one at Costco and it doesn’t sound as though it would be good for you if you could find one, but pull up a saltine and let me tell you how easy you young musicians have it now, even though your route has been changed and you don’t have a map.

Click to hear all about it…

It was never easy for us, or cheap, and I’m just talking about getting to school, not becoming a star. We used to travel twenty miles a day, through the snow, just to get to school. Nineteen of those miles were by snowmobile or we would never have made it on time. The cost factor was enormous because Daddy had the snow trucked in, since we lived in sunny south California, and there were fines for dumping tons of snow on people’s yards…and I don’t want to even talk about the trouble a snowmobile can cause in a busy mall after school.

Oh yeah, you whipper snappers have it easy. Well except when it comes to becoming a rock star. You see, the route has disappeared.

We knew it by heart. Actually, we knew both of them by heart. There was the time-honored method and the shortcut. The shortcut, you ask? Simple: Uncle Ernie owned a record company.

But even the tough route wasn’t bad. Get a few guys together that played, wood shed for a while. We didn’t actually have wood sheds in LA LA Land, but we did have lovely 3-car garages, which are, by law, not allowed to contain motor vehicles; another southland tradition.

Then you lined up a showcase gig and invited the A&R men from the various labels. One drank too much, thought your tunes were magic and signed your group onto stardom’s path. Add some good PR or slick payola and, if your musical musings didn’t cause the public to lose their supper, well then, there you are, a star up on the stage.

Righty-O, thank you Felix, that route is gone bye-bye, vanished with the wind, computers and corporate self immolations. Have you ever heard, “Can’t get there from here?” Well, you’re here and the route is kaput. Welcome to the wild, wild west, the brave new world of pop music stardom.

How does it work? How the heck should I know? Do you think I’d be knocking out this column if I had the answers? The record companies are broken. They’ve circled the wagons and consolidated until you can count the big ones on one hand and still snap your fingers. Radio isn’t local; some computer named “Jack” programs it and he doesn’t care what you want to hear, but it will be the same in 30 different cities.

Do you try for a record? Boy, there’s an anachronism. A CD, an EP, a paid download, YouTube???? The list goes on and on.

Do you put 12 songs together, 5 songs, or just one good song? Do you give them the first song free and then $0.99 thereafter? Isn’t somebody just going to copy your music and give it away free to all of their anarchist friends?

Sure. I said it was the Wild West, didn’t I? You folks are the proverbial pioneers who are going to get backs full of arrows. You are searchers. A couple of hundred years ago you would have been looking for a water route to the east. Now you are trying to hack the code for digital musical dominance. It has got to be here, somewhere.

What I see is that you have to be proactive. I was driving across Texas and I saw a kid, with a guitar, out by a barn and I thought, “That could be Eric Clapton,” and suppose that nobody knew it, nobody ever heard him. In that case, there would be no “Fresh Cream” or “Layla” echoing from every elevator. His riffs would just be spoiled milk in front of some bored cows. You can’t hide your light under a bushel and wait to be discovered.

The good news is that, today, we have more avenues available for self-promotion and self-distribution than have ever existed before. YouTube and all of those social networking sites, and all for free.

I have a friend who has made a dozen CDs of his music over the past six years. I knew that his sales figures were rather disappointing and so, in a joking manner, I asked him how it felt to have produced twelve CDs and to have made a total of seven sales. He replied that while the low sales figures had been a disappointment, his 170,000+ views on YouTube more than made up for it. He cut the conversation short because he had to go pick up the new one-ton truck that the record company he signed with had just purchased for his tour. It seems that they had been very, very interested in talking to a musician that already had 170,000 people who had heard his music and knew his name.

The opportunities are clearly out there to establish name recognition and it would be criminal, to your career, if you did not take advantage of them.