Séamus Anthony - Doing One Thing Every Day

Sad as it may be I spent my Saturday arvo getting some serious social media action happening to promote my music. Well, to my credit it is a rainy old winter’s day here in Melbourne, especially in the hills where I live. And I did break it up with a disgustingly healthy walk with the dog and other humans…

I was at a loss as to where to start so I just googled something like how to promote your music online and got this article and went off from there. I was obviously already on MySpace so decided to hit iLike.com instead. I was surprised to see it was considered such a big deal because I signed up once ages ago but had kind of forgotten about it. Anyway I relocated my log in details and found my profile, languishing and attention starved little bastard that it was. Well, still is really.

The short story from there is that I spent yonks uploading my songs and tweaking yet another fucking profile page, but at the end of the day I am not sure how to use it still. To promote my music that is, although I am sure I could use it to totally waste many, many precious hours, but when you get past 30 you don’t want to do that.

I read as much as I could stand but, call me a Luddite, I still can’t figure it out. I worked out that it somehow links up with Facebook, although (without asking me) it created a new artist page for me (Fuck! Like I need TWO goddamn Facebook profiles in my life! Aaagh!) and I am not sure how to link that in with my existing Facebook page yet. And besides, seeing as I use Facebook pretty much only to find out how fat or bald old school mates I haven’t seen in years have become, I am not really sure what the point of promoting my music through that service is yet. Like some girl you made a drunken fool of yourself in the sack back in 1990 is going to get all excited about your new tunes when she has three brats to look after and an alcoholic husband who never stops griping about how much he hates his job. Or whatever… anyway …

Then I figured out that it also linked up to Hi5.com - which seemed weird. I mean I really don’t think that all that many two year olds are going to get my particular brand of world weary grumbling but what the hey - get ‘em young right? So I went over there and realised that it’s just like ANOTHER Facebook or MySpace or whatever, and before I knew it I was slavishly filling out yet ANOTHER freakin’ profile page. Strange thing was I pretty quickly found out that there are at least 7 real world friends using the service, and all people who I know already use the usual culprits. What do people DO with their time these days? No wonder I never see anybody anymore! Everyone’s too busy keeping up with the rampant proliferation of social media sites to get out and visit each other in the real world!

And if you go and look at these two new profiles I created, here and here, you will see that they look completely and utterly lame. I really love the way they say things like “Seamus currently has no friends” or “Total fans: Zero” which, if anyone ever actually manages to stumble into these virtual-backwaters is just gonna look to them like “Ok, this guy is, like, the world’s worst Nigel-no-friends ever. I am totally outies.”

Anyway, jokes aside, I went through all this pain because apparently I am going to be able to promote my music through this beserko thang called social media, and if so, then fine by me. But I can tell you now, today I learned two things:

1) Social Media may work (I bloody hope it does) BUT it is fiddly stuff that will chew up a WHOLE lotta time. So you will need to figure out which strategies work for you and stick with them, but lose the blind alleys. I will be. Oh yeah, I’ll be like the Jack the Ripper of the social media world, silently killing off any street-scum profiles that don’t work (okay prostitutes do actually work so that analogy didn’t really fly did it…)

2) I gotta get out and do some real gigs or I am gonna disappear up my own butt. Amen.

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No, I don’t mean Prince, I am referring to Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow and thinking how ‘being remarkable’ is really the key to success, in music or anything.

Last night we went to the Sigur Ros concert here in Melbourne, Australia. I didn’t know their music very closely before the gig but it didn’t matter because I was blown away. They were truly purple. A bunch of Icelandic dudes including a singer (who very realistically could actually be an alien) singing in a high pitched squeak in a made-up nonsense language? A hairy brass section dressed in white who disco dance to the slow motion music when they aren’t playing? Music that sounds like a psychedelic ocean of stardust and laser beams? Remarkable, uncompromising and adored by a legion of devoted fans.

Then today I have been checking out the amazing Derek Sivers who obviously so passionate about helping musicians to build a career for themselves that he isn’t content just to sit back and enjoy the rewards of being the CDBaby.com guy, but also has a huge long list of other projects he is starting to help musicians do their thang and thrive. Reading his free e-book right now. Do yourself a favour and download it here. A remarkable man indeed.

Then there are my friends in eddy current suppression ring lead by Mikey, a character so obsessed by garage rock that he pretty much eats and sleeps it. I was watching him at a lunch do the other day and he was off in his own world, jerking his head and mumbling a riff over and over to himself. His girlfriend tells me that all he does is music, literally, and he is certainly quite shy and not a schmoozer but almost overnight (well over the course of a year or so) these guys have literally exploded and become one of the biggest rock bands in Melbourne. Why? Well I really think that they are just so unique, remarkable and uncompromising that people just react positively to that and want in. Me too; I think they are the shit.

Anyway, my point is this. I know from experience and from observation that if you want to make it in this world, as a musician or as an anything-you-want, you need to be utterly unique, original, uncompromising and remarkable. True some people make it without being that, but I reckon it’s a poor bet, you’ll as soon be forgotten.

Meanwhile I am gearing up for my CD (or collection-of-tunes-in-whatever-format-you-prefer) release, and have been doing the Muck Work that is signing up for all the social media/bookmarking sites to get ready to do a social media marketing campaign. So - always - doing one thing every day to get my music out there. What about you? Getting off the couch much?

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I have mentioned before that Steve Mills my Rebel Zen partner and I have an agreement to help each other out. He will scratch my back by teaching me how to market my music online, and he will benefit from this by refining and promoting his SPOKE system.

So today we begin.

Lesson One
Here’s the email I got:

Yo (we email each other all day so nothing formal tends to go down)

Long process I know, but is your spokey foundation for linkage. If you
cant get them all done, don’t sweat for now, but try to get as many as
you can.

Great! I thought. I just go to social marker.com and sign up for all of those at once. But I couldn’t tell how so I emailed Steve back and asked for further instructions:

For the Spoke part 1, What you need to do is go to propeller and sign
up for a user account as seamusanthony, and fill in the bio
information and url link to point back to seamusanthony.com

Repeat for the list that I gave you

Oh dear, that IS going to take me some time isn’t it.

Ok. I’d better hop to it then!

It’s important to watch out for hidden costs when executing your music marketing plans.

As I have been setting up my CD Baby page it somehow eluded me that there were a couple of set up costs: a once off $35 joining fee and a once off $20 fee for a barcode. And I also didn’t factor in the cost of posting off the first 5 cds to the US for CDBaby to sell for me. Couple that with the recycled (refilled) ink cartridges I had to buy for my printer, the CDs themselves (with the printable white discs) and the nice card for the covers (I could only find 40% recycled which sucked). Then when you factor in the (roughly) $500 I paid the guy to record my guitar and voice, the costs mount up. Off course if I was any good at sound recording I could have saved a bunch and done it myself but I firmly believe in not trying to do everything yourself - it’s better to be good at a few things and enlist the help of others who have their own area of expertise.

Other costs: Petrol to drive around getting stuff. Time away from my work. New guitar strings. Oh dear, the little red numbers are getting bigger!

Well firstly, you can’t let it get to you. You have to spend some cash to make some and the trick is not to worry about money, just keep an eye on it. Be it’s master not it’s slave. (And if it really starts to get to you - let go.) Be wealthy in your mind and your reality will soon follow. (This does not, as some people mistakenly believe, mean “spend lots of money on a lavish lifestyle when you can’t afford it”. And yes there is a difference between “being wealthy” and “being extravagant and financially irresponsible”.)

Secondly I am having to amend the amount of CDs it will take me to sell before I get my investment back. I originally expected a small return after just ten CD sales, but I guess that was a little hastily thought out. It will in fact take more like 100 BUT I am sure as hell going to get my investment back plus a return. (Also, this doesn’t factor other streams of revenue like gigs and err, *cough* t-shirt sales?)

In other exciting news, CD Baby seems great so far. I have set up my CD Baby account and they are just waiting for the CDs to get to them before they can sell them. They also offer what seems like a fairly comprehensive digital distribution service so that’ll hopefully result in a far greater reach for my music.

And I discovered a function to embed some HTML from CD baby into this blog which will result in a “Buy Now” kind of thing and a link through to the sales page, so that was freakin’ easy (I was quietly having a little non-geek panic attack about how to do that). Actually, I’d better get on with doing that now, not to mention my day job! Back tomorrow

Now, you! Go do one thing to get your music out there!

Sometimes when I am looking at a massive To Do List I get overwhelmed, especially when most of it is about everything BUT making music.

But it’s ok. I have a special place that I go to that helps me to deal. A happy place in my mind

In my mind, I go back to a Saturday about 6 months ago when I was in at the LivingNow office in the city (LivingNow is the magazine that I work for). I was doing some extra work, nobody else was there. The sun was shining and I decided to go eat a sandwich on the little balcony off the second floor. The sun was hitting it nicely and by the time I finished eating I was as warm as toast.

You know how sunshine makes you fell happy? Well I was soon feeling very contented indeed. I got to thinking about making music and about how I had wasted so much time in my life so far; how I should have done One Thing Every Day instead of nothing much most days. But, for once, I didn’t think about it in a disappointed-with-myself-way but rather, in a “Hey! Whatever! A) it doesn’t matter and B) I’ve still got plenty of time!” kind of way.

I thought to myself: “I am 34. If it takes me 15 years from today to reach a level with my music making that satisfies me, then that’s fine! That’s 15 years spent having fun doing what I love!”

So that’s my goal since that day, to be a successful musician by the time I turn 50. Thankfully, the cantankerous, grizzly old zen-bear music I write and play these days will only get better and suit me more the older I get, like Johnny Cash or Nick Cave or something, so that helps!

And whenever I get impatient or overwhelmed, I just remember that day in the sun and that I still have 15 years (and more!) … and that it doesn’t really matter anyway.

Because it doesn’t matter, you know. Not that much anyway …

… and the only thing you have time for is a few Twitters, but it’s better than doing nothing to get your music out there for one whole precious day.

Hopefully tomorrow Steve will show me a cool trick to get more traffic coming to the website so that once the CD* is up for sale, somebody will know!

*or collection of downloadable songs … whatever that’s called

So this weekend I print ‘em up and ship ‘em out.

Then my training into online music marketing begins in earnest. And maybe a gig or five as well.

Meanwhile check out the first song from the disc, “Go Away”, here at the ubiquitous MySpace page

Here’s the cover…

Here’s a couple of the potential cover designs, all reworked-on-photoshop versions of an actual painting of me by my partner, Laetitia Gerard. Cool huh?

Well I really put myself in the pressure cooker over the last week and my plan to have my CDs up and ready for sale by yesterday didn’t quite pan out but almost and that’s alright. I achieved everything I said I would, the only things I still need to do are decide which CD cover I want to choose from, decide on a name for the disc, and also get the written element of the covers done. I also need to insert the html that CDBaby.com provides to set up a ‘buy my CD now’ button in the sidebar on this blog, then I need to post them some completed CDs.

I think that I pretty much underestimated how much there would be to do (lots of things came up that I didn’t account for) and also over-estimated how much time I would be able to devote to the project. Oh, and I discovered several hidden or unaccounted for costs so that means I will really actually need to sell about 100 CDs before I make any profit (for example, I didn’t factor in recording costs from last year - duh!)

BUT

All is well, I will have the music on sale in both ‘digital delivery’ and CD form within a couple of days.

So it’s early morning Day four of the 7 Day CD Sale Plan and I am up early because things are running a little behind (and because my eight month child doesn’t really let me sleep much anyway!)

Things are not running behind in an “Oh Crap - this is going badly kind of way” but more like in a “It’s cool - I still got this under control” kind of way.

Day one went fine. Day two also except that Steve told me that first we’d better move this blog to my new hosting on our own server. This took some time and now this morning we do the mailing list thing (behind the scenes tech stuff done already) and make sure the RSS feed is hunky dory.

Day three I was so busy at work I plain forgot to go buy CDs but I can make that up today. Which leaves me with today’s task which is to set up CD Baby page.

Couple this with all the work I have to do for bread-and-butter it looks like it’s going to be a busy day!

Okay, so my CD is ready, the recording that is. It’s not perfect but it is beautiful. So I want to start getting it out there and into people’s CD players, iPods and the rest. And I want to get from here (CD not available for sale) to there (CD available for sale) in seven days by Doing One Thing Every Day. Here’s the plan:

DAY ONE: SUNDAY

Begin CD Manufacture Process

Yesterday I looked at prices to get a run of CDs professionally produced. Unsurprisingly, it costs a pretty penny and I don’t want to fork out 500-800 dollars just to end up with 300 CDs that I am sick of under my bed. That would be hard to explain to my partner!

What I want to do is make a run of 10, sell them at a profit, then reinvest the profit back in and make a run of 20, sell them at a profit, etc, etc until I have built up enough money to get a professional run of 100 or 500 done.

Some people might cringe at the idea of selling homemade music Cds but not me. I think it will add a nice touch to the product because let’s face it, mass produced CDs are just that, they lack any personal touch whatsoever. So the first thing I am going to do today is get started making 10 CDs at home. They won’t be perfect, but they will be unique little works of art, and if someone who buys one says it skips, well then they can ask me to send another one.

I will ask my partner to do the art because she is a great talent. And she doesn’t read this blog, so I am not just saying that.

I will also begin to burn the discs on my iMac and personally sign them, just because I have tickets on myself so that one day they may bring the purchaser the ability to sell them for big bucks on e-bay and go on a nice holiday ;-).

I will need to decide on a name for the CDs and do a double check to make sure there aren’t any last little tweaks I should give the mixing so that I am not overly plagued by self-loathing for the rest of my life (musicians will know what I mean by this).

I predict that getting the Cds made will take a few days; I will need to steal moments to burn them off when I can around changing nappies (diapers) and heading into the office to sell advertising space and other such drudgeries and adult responsibilities. And it will take my partner some time to design the art.

DAY TWO: MONDAY

Fix RSS subscription and add a mailing list to this blog

There is no point having a blog and attracting visitors if I don’t offer them the opportunity to return and get involved, and (frankly, from a hard-nosed marketing angle) if I don’t “gather their data”.

Now just the other day I noticed that RSS feed button up top isn’t working. I had a quick look, but I am no geek and couldn’t see what the problem is. (STOP THE PRESS! I just tried it again and it seems to work, so I dunno, maybe it’s ok, maybe it’s buggy, why don’t YOU give it a go right now and test it out for me? Leave a comment below if it doesn’t work.)

And I need a mailing list so people can subscribe to that so that I can contact them every now and then (only when I have something to say - I HATE over zealous mailing lists and usually unsubscribe if I find myself getting too many emails).

Monday and Tuesday I have to work full days in the city at the office (that’s three hours per day of commuting right there) so will have pretty much no time to scratch myself, and I am useless git when it comes to geekery anyway so I am going to ask my friend Steve today if he will fix it up for me tomorrow. Hopefully he will say yes! Otherwise I could feasibly stay up all night taking way too long to figure it out myself. We’ll see how that pans out - but it will get done.

DAY THREE: TUESDAY

Buy All Needed Materials

Like I said, busy with day job all day (and of course family responsibilities at night until I pass out from exhaustion) so have to be real about what I can do. Let’s just make it that I go to the shop and buy nice quality blank CDs with cases and some paper to print the covers on (recycled of course). This will give me an idea of what I will need to charge for the CDs to make a modest profit, although I will also need to factor in postage, and potentially other hidden costs yet to be identified. It is (admittedly boring but) VITAL that I keep a track of this.

DAY FOUR: WEDNESDAY

Organise Online Sales Systems

I will set up a CD Baby page and a way to sell to Australia and New Zealand without CD Baby (silly to send CDs to the US just to send them back again - and environmentally unfriendly). Will also explore other avenues and ebay.com as well. There goes a few hours right there, potentially.

DAY FIVE: THURSDAY

Organise Sales Page on this Blog…

…and some kind of BIG noticeable graphic on the home page to encourage people to go and look at it - and buy a CD

This may take Steve’s help again.

DAY SIX: FRIDAY

Finish Manufacture of CDs

This means my partner will need to have finished the artwork, I will need to have set up the printer (it’s been in the box since we moved house), I’ll need to print and crop the covers, finish burning the discs, and apply labels to them or print on them (ooh just thought of that, might need to do that before I burn the discs? Not sure, will research).

DAY SEVEN: SATURDAY

Post 5 CDs off to CD Baby and upload all sales material to website and announce to the world in general that they are on sale. I don’t care who buys them, even if it’s my own grandmother, but they gotta pay full price.

Then it’s time to start working on a serious CD Sales Marketing Plan, and a gig or two wouldn’t go astray either. Oh well …

One Thing at a time! Wish me luck!