Promoting is harder than creating.

I have a lot of friends who are in the middle of making records.
Some of them are half way through the process.
Some think they are half way through and are much farther away than they realize
Some are nearly done and don't want to admit it.

There is a strange disconnection between recording an album and releasing it.
I think this is because there is a great deal of work that goes into releasing an album that has very little to do with music and a lot of musicians get held up in all these non-musical parts.

Art work always takes ten times longer than it should.
Duplication takes forever.
Getting the credits right takes forever.
It's a lot of leg work and once you've finished recording, it seems like a lot of drudgery.

That's because, for a musician, it is.

But drudgery quickly turns into procrastination and it becomes really easy to second and triple guess everything you've done musically, until the album becomes a huge and heavy burden. You place massive expectations on it. It must succeed and therefore requires some sort of supernatural strength and planning to release it. And where will that strength come from? Usually the answer becomes... "somebody else"... "maybe if we just wait for a label..." and a whole bunch of other stuff that means "anybody other than me"

I would love to be able to offer some sort of advice on how to overcome this, but the fact is, making a record is a lot of hard work. And a lot of is boring, unsexy and tedious. It requires working really hard and doing things that are not that interesting. Or else finding people who are willing to do that work for you.

The best advice I can offer is, just get it done as quickly as possible. Rely on experts, if you can find them. Hire the best ones you can find, and if you can save time by spending a little (but not too much) extra, then do it. Don't wait around for it. Just get it done. Make some decisions and move on. Your second and third albums are waiting for you to make them.

And come up with a plan. Releasing an album requires planning and preparation. And you may need an expert for that too... More on that later...

Top 10 Issues Facing Music 2.0 (From Hypebot)

This is a pretty useful and insightful posting from Hypebot

I haven't been keeping on my blogs (or my blogging) this weekend... see last post.

Finally a weekend day of doing nothing computer related.

Oh wait, I'm on the computer again.

Back to not computer. Have a nice weekend.

Overwhelmed with the internets

OK. I have to admit it right now.
I'm really really tired. It's been a long string of 12 hour + work days plus supporting my fiancé who just finished her masters thesis.

That leaves me feeling really easily overwhelmed. And it's one of the first things I keep hearing from people who are trying to figure out this online music business: it is totally overwhelming.

There are just so many competing players out there right now, that it's really difficulty to cut through the noise and figure out what's useful, what's fluff and who the hell is paying attention to all this stuff anyway?

I've been busy promoting my new band Super Adventure Club over the last several months and through it, I've learned a great deal about what's out there.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that I've learned what really WORKS. There are a few sites that I visit regularly (even when I'm this tired) and try to keep updated, but there are a lot that feel to me like they are languishing in obscurity.

So here are my top sites of use in my state of overwhelm-edness

1. MySpace - the original social networking site still has the biggest audiences and is a place where people come to discover new music. Commenting on other bands and friends pages is a very good way to keep people remembering that you exist. And that's a very important part of being in a successful band.

2. Facebook - this is more for my personal life. I keep track of my friends and can read about them. I don't really view it as marketing and I don't promote my band here very much. But I enjoy learning what all my long lost friends from grade school are doing...

3. ReverbNation - this is a new one for me and I'm just starting to discover its usefulness. The most useful thing about it so far, is that it has an excellent mailing list collector, lots of widgets you can employ to get your music on loads of websites and they are pretty artist friendly. I'm going to explore these guys more once I quit feeling so damn tired.

4. My own websites. - theoretically this should come first. And this is me, in my tired state, admitting shortcomings of self-promotion by not updating my own site enough (and not doing it first).

My approach to web promotion is still hackneyed and haphazard. The more I learn about what's out there, I'm determined to put a plan together. I have a feeling I'm going to need some help on that from some one who is younger, more dedicated to it and has a lot more time to devote to it than I do.

Or perhaps when I get some more sleep, I'll get right on that.

Jay Clifford's big break

Sardinia with Jump Little Children (Michael Winger Drinking with Jay Clifford, originally uploaded by mwingerski.

Here's a picture from way back in 2002 when I travelled to Sardinia with Jump Little Children working as their sound engineer / Italian translator.

Jay has recently had some great success with his new album "Driving Blind" and the single from it was just featured on Gray's Anatomy last week.

Meanwhile, he's got a promotional site up to make his next music video. His friend, Zach Braff, is making it by soliciting clips of people lip synching the song in various parts of the world. Check it out at www.jaycliffordmusicvideo.com and watch as Zach explains the process while he pimps Jay's new record.

I've known Jay for a while and he's one of the most talented musicians I've met. We toured together when I released my solo album and also with my old band, Dayroom. I always love seeing old friends get the success they deserve... congratulations Jay!

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

MySpace is about to make your life easier?

If there's one thing that I've found most frustrating about having an online presence as an artist, it's the sheer chaos surrounding the environment of social networking, band profile sites, blogs, facebook, myspace, imeem bebo, garageband, ilike and the list goes on and on...

Yesterday, Digital Music News reported that MySpace is going to make "profiles" portable. What this means to the artist is that instead of having to update your photos, blog, bio, and video across 15 websites or more, you can do it once and it will show up on whatever social networking sites you might choose to put them on.

This is pretty profound and what I think will be the way to go in the future.
At the SF Music Tech conference yesterday, I heard Tim Westergren, the head of Pandora
online radio suggest that bands should actually add an extra band member whose sole job is to manage and handle your web presence. Theoretically this sort of job falls into what a label or manager would traditionally do. But we don't live in traditional times anymore...

And the web presence is hugely important. Perhaps music managers will start adding these types of team members to their teams, if they haven't already. And if you're looking to get a start in the music business as a young internet-savvy person, then that's certainly an opening you could position yourself with.

But I give props to myspace for getting the jump on this "profile portability." Anything that makes life easier on artists in this crazy new music business is a good thing.

How to properly announce a tour

Tom Waits Press Conference