There is also video from that night at ESS. I can lay it on you at some point, it may never be public.

I do believe we’ve reached the tipping point for SM promotion…at least for musicians that is. Direct messaging IS more accurate, but it’s like driving a bike on the highway in relation to coverage. I’m very interested to see what the fallout is and what the next viable platform (not specific SM vehicle) will be. This is all coming from someone who spent years promoting bands/music pre-internet (or at least pre SM). About a million times more effort involved in direct grassroots marketing, but I do believe it is still viable…just wondering what that looks like in 2020.

Could be a number of different avenues that prove fruitful moving forward. Maybe blog/e-journalists? Maybe a combo of that and direct messaging/email? We’ll see, but unfortunately SM is still necessary IMO for the coverage it provides (if you curate your posts/engagement appropriately).

I’ve been doing some experiments with the placement, type, and amount spent on promoted posts over the past year and still don’t really have any answers other than the algorithms have changed drastically and I’m no longer getting the coverage I used to…that and people are just jumpy my ship en masse.

On the topic of gaining new friendly experiencers….this is tricky. Ideally, people hear me play live, stumble upon me online, or hear me on a track. But social media has introduced another way. Seems like an evolution of going on the radio to reach people who have never heard of you before. As I attempt to move away from social media, I will no doubt miss this aspect of it.

On the topic of texting, a conversation we have had in person before, I actually like it. I used to hate it. Simon Lott does not have social media. He does more than fine without it. But I’m sure that his career unknowingly suffers from this abstinence as well. Whenever he has a show as a bandleader, he texts me a photo graphic for the show. Not to a group chat, but to me individually. I really love it. Luckily, no one pays per text anymore. I also wonder what his system is for sending these texts. How does he keep the list? Is it a long and arduous process or does he have an app/program that makes it easier?

I’m going to stop there for now. If I get a second wind later maybe I’ll write my thoughts on streaming.

The Open Ears gig last night was quite successful, for two reasons. The first reason was that the music was REALLY GREAT! And secondly the artists did a really good job of getting their fans to know about the show, and to show up. They did well at the door, and he sold a reasonable number of CDs.

My question of “are we entitled to make a living from our art” is really asking, why some people think they should be paid well for doing something that creates no monetary value? The real estate brokers get their 6% because they provide a service that we value. When we contract a real estate agent, we agree to pay them 6%.

Similarly, when someone hires me to provide the service of playing trombone, we agree beforehand what I will be paid. If I do not like the terms, I don’t do the gig.

When I am trying to sell my art, it is a different scene than when I am selling my services as a trombonist. As an artist, it is up to me (or my team) to create the value. The most important part of that equation is to make art that is good. Then we must find and connect with an audience that will dig what we do. For those of us who make niche art, we need to be prepared to deal with that fact that sometimes that audience is small.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to grow our audience, but I am saying that we shouldn’t go to a city where we are barely known, play for 20 people, then complain that we didn’t make $500.

I think this question really breaks down into two unrelated questions:
“if my work is making money for other people, should they be required to share the revenue with me, and how much?”
“what kind of artists do we want to have as a society?”

The first question suggests that, like various other professions, perhaps there should be legal minimum requirements for any performance. Or not: most regulated professions require official licenses, and since any licensing scheme would raise freedom of speech issues, and bad music is unlikely to meet the standard of a compelling public interest, it’s hard to see the gov’t getting involved. It is also untenable from the union angle, since there is no penalty for hiring non-union. Maybe there is a workable way to have a “musicians’ minimum wage”, I don’t know. We could consider that any sales occurring while a musician is playing are subject to a legally mandated commission, set at statutory rates for food, drink, and cover charges. This may be possible (at the state/local level), but of course whether it would be wise is another matter. One thing I don’t understand is the Musicians’ Union’s failure to have solidarity agreements in place with other Unions.

The second is something we answer collectively as individuals vote with their dollars. It seems that the music industry is currently echoing society at large in that the erosion of the middle class in favor of the rich and poor is similar to the division between music “stars” and nobodies. People have in general decided to treat musicians as if we are all looking for our “big break”, so we should do everything for free until some tipping point when we will be rich and famous—it’s a winner-take-all mentality that treats musicians not as professionals but like people who decided to play some idiotic lottery. The idea of being a working musician, that all the day in, day out work is our work and should be paid—this has lost currency in the popular understanding of what we do. A TV show recently asked me to provide a weekly house band, with no budget. That they even ask that is indicative of the poisoned mentality I am talking about.

I don’t have any answers, either, but thanks for asking the questions and starting the conversation!

Jason

My response to the “gun control won’t end gun violence so why have any gun control” argument is that we never hear anyone say that underage drinking laws don’t end all underage drinking, so we should just have no underage drinking laws. People did at one point argue that seatbelts didn’t save all lives, so we shouldn’t have seat belt laws. We have in time seen that we are much safer on the road wearing a seat belt than not. Still we have seat belt laws even though they don’t save all lives. Fewer people die with them than without them.

If gun control legislation saved one life per year, would it be worth it? If one answers “no,” fine, we can agree to disagree. If one argues that gun control legislation will not even save one life per year, then one may be letting one’s ideology interfere with one’s rational thought.

BTW, did I see you on the ISIM schedule? I’ll be there as well. We should make a beverage hang.

The first time I heard about Kickstarter, I thought it was brilliant. Then I started seeing musicians asking for crazy amounts of money to make a record. KS became the new way to get some “major label largesse.” If it costs $14k to make a singer/guitarist solo folk record, you are doing something wrong.

I like the KS campaigns that have reasonable expectations. I guess like any other tool, some will use it well, and others will be greedy with it.

But when thought of in more practical terms, at least KS projects support the ideology that artists and art need to be financially supported. Not that they should be, but they need to be, which is more than we can say for so many restaurant and bar owners who feel it is a privilege to simply play for free! And really, as far as the bandleader and musicians go, wouldn’t the $15 spent for the food/drink minimum be better served as a donation to their project, in which the donor will get at the very least a digital download of some sort?

I don’t know… will the economy in the shape that it is in and our leaders incapacity to do much about it, perhaps a change to the KS method of financial support isn’t such a bad idea.

I fly a lot domestically, and it always boggles my mind when the same carrier has varying policies flight to flight.

I bet the folks over at FlyerTalk (www.flyertalk.com) would love to hear this story! The FT community is made up of frequent flyers (most log well over 100K miles/year), pilots, clueful FAs, mileage junkies, and airline nerds from all around the world– they’re bright, insightful, and snarky, and they love a good story like this. I’d bet you’d get some interesting feedback, or just some good old-fashioned commiseration.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN5V-6yCbpg

How have you been? I’ll be in Belgium soon with Hamid Drake. Maybe we’ll see you?

All the best,

Jason

Maybe nurturing an audience is the wrong term. Good music will find the ears that want to hear it, if we give it a chance. We need to stop “protecting” people from good music.

BTW Lucas clarified that he hoped the Kimmel audience would dig C. Scott. I think I misread his intention a bit, not that that changes anything I wrote.

“It is not our job as musicians to guess what people want to hear, it is our job to make the music that we hear, and do it honestly.”

I wish I could be as optimistic in general when it comes to the idea of good music nurturing audiences. (Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I am — sometimes even excessively so.) It’s hard to avoid being influenced by whatever microcosm of the music industry I happen to be inhabiting on a particular day.

I guess the bigger point is that audiences are never monolithic, and that sometimes they come to the table with ears open to change, and sometimes they don’t. And when media people go into the relationship with the assumption that audiences should never be challenged, that can become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Just riffing here, but I really like what you wrote.