2009: off to a giggin’ good start

This year (as I wrote about here) I am all about music and in particular, live gigs.

I have razzled up a few gigs already and have performed twice so far this year, which isn’t bad for January seeing as I only started organising the gigs in January itself.

The first gig (Tuesday 20th January 2009)

was at Ruby’s Lounge in Belgrave, (Victoria, Australia, The World, blah blah) which is just around the corner from where I live. I had a half hour spot from 8 – 8:30 and when I got there there was basically nobody in the band room at all. By the time I started there was about 10 people watching, including the mixers (there were two for some reason – one of whom turned out to be the co-producer of the my latest CD), the other 2 other solo acts for the evening, (weirdly) the man who cut my hair that afternoon, and my one solitary friend who made it along for the night, Steve.

Now this may sound a bit sad but it’s not – it’s totally cool. Firstly, I am a seasoned campaigner and I have no juvenile misconceptions about what to expect, and secondly, despite my many years of experience in live music, I am basically starting all over again, with no real profile to speak of, certainly not in Melbourne.

The fact that I am starting out all over means this:

1. I can’t expect all of my friends to rock up for all of my gigs – they have their own lives and to expect more than an occasional turn out would be unfair on them.
2. It is going to take time for me to build up an audience for my music. In fact I am allowing two years of solid gigging before I expect to be able to sell out a modest 150 head room. This would be a great achievement and I know that those first 150 heads are well harder to draw than the next 1000 and the reason why is because a crowd draws a crowd – been there, done that, know that it’s true.

But despite the tiny audience, there were a few more peeps hanging out over by the bar and I made sure to try to project over to them. Singing (and music in general) is a form of energy and I believe something a bit woo-woo which is that if you “send it” out directly to individuals in an audience like an imaginary laser beam, it somehow stands a better chance of moving each individual that you “aim at”.

I actually was quite disappointed with my set, but I made sure to try and keep this disappointment to myself as the last thing you ever want to do is insult your audience by telling them that you are no good, because this negates their own enjoyment of the music you are playing. Just because you know you’re off doesn’t mean an audience member does.

I was off because I was out of practice, because it was insanely hot, and because of silly things like not securing the mic-stand properly (so it was travelling south during my first song, most irritating) but on the other hand, there were some fine moments where things went just fine.

On thing that went well was my between-song banter, which I am determined to make an integral part of the my show this year, including an element of comedy. Humour runs right through all of my tunes (some more than others)  so this is not out of place with my style.

The reason I want to improve my between-song banter is to be more entertaining. As a solo acoustic artist I can’t really dazzle with saxophone solos and wild drum rhythms so I need to work with what I have, and one thing I have is an element of easy humour born (as a coping mechanism) of years of soul-crushing day-jobs and other such drudgery

I was happy to sell a couple of CDs after the gig, and also to swap with some of the other musos. I got some phone numbers of the other musos to organise more gigs together, if it works out, and then I proceeded to hang around and drink too much while chatting to the regulars. I gave away a few CDs which I am happy to do this year as it seems to be an awesome way to get the message out there, although I will from the next gig ask for an email in exchange when I offer to give away a disc.

The second gig (Wednesday 28th January)

Was at the Empress Hotel, Fitzroy North, which is miles from my house but closer to most of my friends. I invited everybody I knew along to this one, but when it became apparent that the temperature was going to be 43 Degrees Celcius (110 Fahrenheit) I didn’t expect as many to turn up as said they would.

I was given the whole night to put together, albeit at late notice after a cancellation the week before.  I organised for my mate Shane Walters and a friend of his, Faye Blais to play a set each as well and made it so that I was on first because I am well older than them, therefore so are my friends, which means they were more likely to come out if I was on earlier. So I went on at 8:15 to 9pm.

A nice little crowd filled the intimate space, which is just a gorgeous room to play solo acoustic in, and after a slightly shaky start I soon warmed up and played one of my best sets in recent memory, spurned along by an encouraging crowd who kept laughing at all my jokes (well most of them) and generally being the kind of audience you would seriously consider paying to be there for you.

Thankfully they weren’t all just my friends either, but about two thirds strangers, which is just what I wanted. My prediction about the heat coming true, there were only about ten mates/family there (which is ok – see above).

It was plainly obvious to me that the amount of practice I put in between the first gig and the second really paid off. I made myself get out into my little one room bungalow (The Office of Imagination and Procedure) out the back and rehearse my set right through without too much ado. I was just so much more in control at the Empress gig as a result. (Duh. Yes, Seamus, practice helps.)

I also really pulled my finger out and didn’t just rely on off the cuff banter but also dropped in two pre-prepared jokes, one of which bombed dismally and one of which floored ‘em, so that was an experience.

I have over the last two gigs noticed that some songs might be great in my studio and on record, but they are a little too subtle for an audience that doesn’t know my material, and most of these are the songs on my current CD, so I think I am going to have fairly quickly put out a sister disc to “Dogs May Bark” which features more of the “party” songs, which are the tunes that tend to get a better response from audiences who don’t know my tunes already.

After my set as Shane and then Faye did their respective thangs, I was again stoked to sell a couple of CDs and be plied with free beer – the latter which was just so refreshingly cold on such a disgusting hot night that I was silly and got way too pissed. I can hold my alcohol (usually), so I am sure I didn’t make an arse of myself, but the next day I felt as shit as a shit thing. I am really going to have to self-moderate the after gig beers if I am going to be gigging regularly (which I am). Easier said than done though, as my adrenalin is usually pumping hard after a gig, so I will report back on what I believe will be a major challenge for me this year.

Why?

Well, the truth is, I drink a little too much (like a lot of Aussies). I’d like to tone it down a bit, as I am not getting any younger and I am getting a belly and the hangovers are a bitch, but then again, I am an artiste, and maybe I will always have my foibles? See how we go…

If you read this far, you deserve a dollar for perseverance. I could never read this much about some obscure musician’s rather un-incredible musings myself…

Seamus and Peter (ex-Reckoning) doing “Naked”

Ok – Seamus is me (blue shirt), Peter Owen is the handsome guy on the drum. We used to be in a band called Reckoning and this is us on December 4th 2008 doing one of our old Reckoning songs “Naked” at the Grace Emily Hotel, in Adelaide.

There was a small but appreciative crowd that night, maybe 50 or more in that small back room … so it was cozy. The laughing at the beginning is because I was cracking jokes about the lyrics (most of the people there would have known the lyrics back in the ’90s). The joke was that (as the song says) if ‘we’ were to “sneak out at 2am” these days then we’d need to get a babysitter… well, I guess you had to be there …

Anyway, me and Pete will be recording and gigging some new music this year plus wheeling out golden oldies like this so stay tuned…

Why booking gigs by email is better than the phone (and how to do it well)

I have noticed that a lot of venue bookers are more than happy to organize gigs by email these days.

And this is great…

Because it saves calling, getting an answering machine, getting no call back, calling again a few times until you catch the booker but he or she has had a bad day and you’re nervous and they smell blood and it all goes really badly and because you’re the artist you feel personally rejected when it doesn’t go so great and then you want to give up and slit your wrists…

I’m sure you know the drill.

BUT

If you have bad email skills it can still go pear-shaped so here is:

A Simple Crash Course in Emailing Venue-Bookers about Gigs

1) Be Polite – “hope this finds you well”, “thanks for your time” etc.

2) Be brief – get in and get out.

3) Get a name, spell it correctly and use it like this “Hi Fred,” not “Dear Fred” (it’s not a letter to your grandma).

4) If you can’t find a name or aren’t sure just start with “Hi,” (Not “to whom it may concern”).

5) DON’T USE CAPS (it’s shouting), and proofread over your spelling, grammar etc before you press send. They aren’t going to grade your use of the Queen’s English but you don’t want to come across like some semi-literate moron do you? It amazes me how many perfectly intelligent people don’t realise how bad excessive spelling mistakes and other typos make them look.

6) Keep all details to a minimum, don’t bother talking about money or anything too presumptive just yet.

7) Briefly point out your experience level, but don’t tell your life story.

8 ) If you think it’s appropriate (it usually is unless your applying to get on some kind of pre-existing bill), come prepared with a ready made line-up (i.e. other musicians to play the night with you).

9) Point out that you will do your best to promote the gig, i.e. find an angle like “it’s a CD launch” or “I have a lot of friends in the area who I will invite”, etc.

10) Link to your music on Myspace, Facebook, or even better, BandCamp.com. Alternatively you could link to a youtube clip but only if you have one that doesn’t suck. (Ok so you should probably have a fancy electronic media kit right? Well, sure, but most gig bookers won’t read them so don’t worry if you haven’t gotten that organised yet.)

11) Give a phone number in case they prefer to follow up by phone. And once they email you back with some kind of positive interest, take a chance: wait a day or two, then call them on the phone. Seriously, once you’ve made a positive connection, phone is more efficient and will usually get you better results. Why? Because it is easy to ignore or forget about an email, and easy to go with the pro-active guy who follows up by phone (and is polite about it). See what Derek Sivers says about being persistent and following up.

Anything to add to the list? Drop it in the comment box below.

my music up on Last.Fm

Finally got around to it. check it out, have a listen, download for free, enjoy!

http://www.last.fm/music/Seamus+Anthony

P.S. drop me a comment or whatever as my last.fm thing is a bit lonely looking!

More on the Purple Ocean Music thing

I had my attention drawn to this post of mine yesterday because Derek Sivers tweeted about it, which drove over 150 people to the page (thanks Derek!) and as I also had a tiny set last night at the Empress Hotel, which I enjoyed beyond expectation, it made me think about this point that I made in the post:

“I don’t want to do the same old rounds of crap gigs all over again. I might take the easy gigs that come my way but I am sure has hell not going to invest bulk time and energy into chasing two-bit gigs.”

Well since I wrote that I have had a massive change of heart. You see I was simply defaulting to the mode my brain had been set to for the last few years: that of the world-weary musician who had seen it all and was over it yadda yadda yadda which is SO BORING and CRAP.

I forgot how much I LOVE PLAYING MUSIC.

I WAS over it, and I guess that’s just the way it goes when you’ve seen the highs and the lows and just wound up with more lows than highs (my own fault too I might add) but I had a loooong break and now I am like a teenage kid all over again. No really! I’m champing at the bit to play any gig half worth doing and I’m doing crazy shit like leave my incredibly cozy domestic arrangements, drive for 45 minutes either way and then hang out in a bar for a couple of hours without any close friend there to hold my hand (tough call for an introvert like myself) just to play a 15 minute set! (Thanks to Robin and Frank by the way for the very affable reception and professionally run open mic night. Open mics are usually so terrible that I was in two minds about doing the gig at all, but it was a lovely atmosphere.)

I simply needed a break and now that I have had a long rest and a good think, I know that gigs are worth doing and DO help you to get where you want to go, even if it does mean sometimes putting up with crap (or no) money, dodgy PAs/sound engineers and grumpy promoters.

Here’s why doing little gigs is a good thing:

1. It hones your chops. It keeps you tight. It gets you ready for the nights that really matter.
2. If you are (at least a bit) organized then you can use little gigs to start a snowball of popularity rolling down the hill. You want to make sure you promote your BRAND while you do gigs. If you promote the same brand every time you do a gig then you build up a cumulative effect. If you chop and change names or don’t really bother getting people to remember your name and don’t leave them with a CD or get their email or whatever, then yes, marketing wise, the gig is a bit of a wasted opportunity – so make them count. Think it through. Be strategic.

More on the last point:

• A) I know from experience that if you do what I just said in point 2 then years later, when you have a bigger profile, some people will hear about you from a friend or wherever and will think “Oh yeah! I saw these guys years ago in some little dive bar! They were really cool/friendly/talented.” Then they will feel an affinity to you because you shared a very real evening once, so when they see you doing well, they feel connected to that, it gives them hope. (I have a theory that giving people hope is one of the biggest functions of successful creative people. We live vicariously through our favourite stars; we project ourselves against them and imagine that we too can escape the hum-drum of reality as we know it.)
• B) I have noticed that when you have even a small profile, like I do in one tiny city called Adelaide (and it’s a small profile these days let me assure you, but I am refanning the embers because where there is smoke there is fire) then some people will be happy to buy your CDs off of you after a gig. BUT when you are playing somewhere in which you have zero profile, as I did last night, people may enjoy your gig, but they strangely tend to resist the idea of buying your disc. I experienced this last night (crowd seemed to dig the tunes but did not respond to my calls to come up to me and buy a disc for $5) and seeing as I had clocked which people in the crowd had been obviously enjoying my music, I decided to give the five discs I had on me to these people.

Sure it cost me a few bucks, but they were really happy to get the freebie and now they have something to remember me by, and will hopefully dig my tunes, and come again to see me sometime or something good like that.

The other option, as I allowed to happen for far too long during my cynical, unproductive late twenties, is to do bar gig after bar gig, enjoy the evening but leave the crowd with nothing tangible to remember you by. Sure they might recall you once you are doing well like I laid out in point A – but the irony is, if you don’t practice point B then point A scenario will most likely never happen.

Generally, you gotta spend a little to make some.

P.S. and this doesn’t mean I am not going to do ‘Purple Gigs”. This is still part of the plan – but it is, in my opinion, best to do BOTH (refer to point 1).

Back on the Horse

Been gigging more and more frequently and really starting to enjoy it all over again. Just got back from Adelaide where I did a solo set and then a set with my best mate Peter (who was in reckoning with me). Here’s some photos of the gig, I am the git in the blue shirt, plus an old photo of the two of us backstage somewhere circa 1894 for comparative purposes (thanks Sonja).

Pete and I have reformed as a duo now and will be recording some new stuff in 2009. Peter never does things by halves so I am very excited about it…

CD Released and Getting Ready to Play Live Again

Hi – have been totally busy with Rebel Zen but have been getting some key things done music-wise in spare moments:

1.  The CD is available for purchase via CD Baby . As per this funny post  the four discs in stock at CDBaby are CD-ROM, but I just received my order of commercial CDs proper, so what I am doing is emailing the people who buy the (perfectly fine) CD ROMS and posting them a complementary copy of the commercially pressed discs.
2. I have a Melbourne Gig, October 16th at 303 (303 High St, Northcote) and an Adelaide gig at Grace Emily (date to be confirmed) in the pipeline so I’ll get all “promotey” about those over the next week. Yep, it’s time to tread the boards again after a long break.
3. I am going to get a redesign of this site done soon with a “static” (but not static) homepage and more features, like free music downloads, video, and I’ll be making all of my older material (there’s shitloads) available for pretty cheap soon to.
4. I have been getting a few requests for new copies of my old band Reckoning‘s CDs, but they’re all sold out now, so we are going to release a best of CD and get all the tracks available by digital download. Also I’ve got a copy of the only half-decent video we ever did which I will get around to converting from VHS and putting online eventually. I also have been meaning to set up a proper website for the band one day also. Just for old time’s sakes
5. This will tie in nicely with the recording that Pete (Reckoning drummer) and I will be doing over the summer, after that we hope to start playing live together on a regular basis. I am really excited about that.
6. Oh and my new recordings are supposed to be available through iTunes soon, via CDBaby and also a bunch of other online distributors. It seems to take a while to set up but hopefully that will come together in time for my all singing all dancing live efforts again.

So yes, has been a bit slow for the last couple of weeks, but this year has been all about laying the groundwork for me to re-enter the music business again in a sustainable way. Wish me luck (now go listen to my tunes at MySpace or just go buy them already!)

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A Purple Ocean Music Model

Derek Sivers: Promotion! Creating the music is easy (though still underrated). Distributing the music is so easy it’s moot. So now the delicate art of calling attention to your music means everything. Marketing is distribution.

I just read this interview and the above quote in particular got me my mind racing. Especially about this: If you are running around saying that you want to be “a successful musician” – what does that actually mean? What will you be doing from day to day when you are a successful musician?

When I started out in music I knew what I wanted – big crowds, pretty girls falling at my feet, free beer and weed – and a get-out-of-work-free card that lasted the rest of my life (which at that point I saw lasting until about 1998 if I was lucky).

Well I got the first three for a while before the sum combined effect of these gifts on my little boy mind caused a complete blow-out and I went off the music scene radar. And now, at the youthful age of not quite 35 I am playing a kind of music that I can see myself playing when I am 95 and I am eager to get out there and “be a successful musician again”. Not because of the same reasons though. Not because I need the ego trip – but just because I enjoy making music. Not because I think “I’ll be happy when” but because I am happy now – even when I am not (weird but true) – and this gives me a a kind of freedom and confidence to just do what feels right. And not because I want to get rich but (call me a hippy) because I am abundant.

So I have my new CD – click here and go have a listen and then if you like it you can buy it. It is also available through digital distribution outlets like iTunes and the like. And I have well and truly returned to live performance. Yup, I am slowly but surely getting my thang back on the boil.

But what does this actually mean?

Well I know what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean hedonistic excess for me anymore – I’m over it. And it doesn’t mean ‘not having to work’ because I love my work which is more like play and have no desire to give most aspects of it up.

And it doesn’t mean “Rock Star”. That concept is hackneyed and irrelevant as far as I am concerned although I concede that this may just be because I am, like, totally ancient.

And I don’t want it to mean countless gigs in front bars full of barflies who don’t care about my music. Why would I bother with that strategy? Popular wisdom has it that you do it to build a following – but is it really an efficient way to do that? I seriously doubt it. All those hours spent negotiating with horrible grumpy egotistical promoters just for that? Pah.

Personally I think that what is called for is a new model. This may not be revolutionary for others, wiser than I, but for me it needs to get clear in my head if I am to take my new music and get it heard by a decent amount of folk who will appreciate it.

So here is the model I have in my head – well it’s a model in the making actually and far from complete (and assumes that great music is being made else why would you bother). It draws on Seth Godin’s “Purple Cow” book and the business strategy called “Blue Ocean Strategy” so instead of being a blue ocean it is a purple one to combine the two (very similar) theories.

My Purple Ocean Music Marketing Model

1. Use Social Media to promote music:
   
   

I know, revolutionary hey? But actually it is.

If you were to successfully use social media to actually sell a largish amount of music then you’d be a God in my eyes because you’d have done it from your lounge room which is actually very flipping revolutionary.

And in my limited but rapidly increasing experience with using SM it is not just a case of jumping up and down screaming “look at me, look at me”. You have to have something to say otherwise you might as well not bother. I suppose there are people who do this already. Be cool to know who and explore their methods.

2. Do Purple Gigs:

Seriously you don’t want to be stuck in front of a screen all the time as this will never come close to the sensation if playing live. (I mean it’s just crazy how much screen I do these days and yet ten or twelve years ago I didn’t have so much as a hotmail account and everything to do with music had nothing to do with computers for me then.)

But like I wrote earlier, I don’t want to do the same old rounds of crap gigs all over again. I might take the easy gigs that come my way but I am sure has hell not going to invest bulk time and energy into chasing two bit gigs. But how to approach playing live then?

Well, I have this model in mind of basically just copying what theatre people do which is they book out a theatre and pre-sell the tickets so that on the night they know how many crew are going to be there and all the emphasis in the lead up to the night is on the actual show itself.

None of this madly texting everybody at 6pm to try and convince them to come out to some crusty bar to hear you sing. No way, instead the idea is to book one night in a small theatre, pre-sell the tickets and then make sure it is such an awesome show that word of mouth kicks into gear and the venues start getting larger.

Think about it like this: Hit theatre shows don’t do endless gigs in two-bit dive bars. They rely on good self-promotion and then word of mouth based on the quality of their show.

3. Sell Across My Brand

What I mean by this is:

• I, Seamus Anthony, am a brand. My brand is that I am a musician, a writer, and an entrepreneur.
• Giving away music is an excellent promotional strategy but relying solely on music sales is a poor business strategy.
• So I will give away as many mp3s for free as people are willing to take. I will also sell them to those who are happy to buy them and will also sell other forms of music like CDs, USB sticks and live shows.
• But I will also sell across the brand into my other offerings. For example, at Rebel Zen me and my business partner Steve have released an eBook I wrote about how to get high without drugs, call Psychedelic Meditation.

So you might come across my free mp3s, dig them, dig my blogging style here, also get into my writing style over at Rebel Zen and then buy the e book.

Voila. I gave away music and free blog content to sell a book. And that’s just one cross selling example. I have many more. But I’d rather do them than hypothesize about them.

• This is where the Blue Ocean theory will come in because a lot of musicians don’t offer other services and products. Ok it has been done – Henry Rollins’ spoken word for example – but it isn’t wide spread and I am not aware of anybody who has offered the kinds of stuff I am thinking of.

4. Start Pumping Out New Music – and partner up to do it.

Although ‘Dogs May Bark’is a 100% solo effort, and while I will surely do more solo stuff, I am currently preparing to team up with some other dudes to release music under a couple of different names. I don’t see why you wouldn’t. Mixing it up with dudes always makes for different music than I would just make by myself, and if one project takes off, then I suppose we’d just run with it. Meanwhile you could cross-sell the acts amongst each other.

5. Re-Package the Past

One thing I think is a real shame is how some bands burn really bright for a while and then just get forgotten because they are not then re-packaged and re-marketed (yeah, I sound like a corporate tosser I know, can’t help it, I flick from business to artists brain really easily, but really I am just a nuff-nuff in a funny hat).

For example I was in one band called reckoning, and not to blow my own trumpet but well, you know, Bwaarp! So me and Peter from this band are getting back together this summer to record new music and meanwhile we are going to put together a website and a best of compilation (plus make all the mp3′s available for sale too) of the old band because it was a great band and more to the point, when I get into a new band or solo artist, I always want to know what other stuff they have done, so I assume that’s how other music fans also think.

So yeah, don’t let the past just die (but focus on making new music of course). Your history gives you context and depth.

6. Just Study the way things are done and try to do new things. (or if not new then just plain excellent).

If any readers could offer some ways to help invent a truly different music marketing model then I’d love to hear them so leave a comment (so far very un-comment-y visitors to this site, I see the stats but I don’t get much feedback, speak up! I love it!)

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Barking Mad Dog

Ok so I still need to get the actual discs out there, they are on my desk still (got distracted by work and baby and a lot of expensive unpasteurized cheese) but meanwhile I uploaded all six tracks to Myspace so you can actually listen to and apparently download them there as some thing they call an Mp3, or something …

If you do download all six songs and want to try and imagine what they would be like if you were listening to them on some antiquated format like a CD (thing we used to use to listen to music, don’t worry about it) then just think in your mind like this “This see-dee is called “Dogs May Bark”, and you’ll do fine.

Meanwhile just a did a whip through my RSS. Here’s the highlights.

If you have been labouring under the misconception that you are at all big, then Albert 2.0 should help you to get a little perspective on your delusions of grandeur. Thankfully he will also inspire you to achieve great things, like downloadable snacks, surely the next big breakthrough in food since the much maligned microwave. Seriously the author has a point, I spent years shooting for the quickest route to the stars only to get to 34 and realise that if I’d taken the long way round I would be there by now. Oh well. Fuck it.

Greg showed me how The Material really know how to pimp the crap out of their myspace page, and I gotta admit it beats mine, but then I’ve got the sound muted to save from waking up the baby, so who knows? Maybe my tunes are actually better? (Did I mention my songs yet?)

I noticed (how could you miss it?) that The Material have a song on a thing called Rock Band. I took one brief look at that and shrank back into the safety and warmth of my grandpa cardigan. None of that computery-gamey type shit for me thanks!

Meanwhile Andrew Dubber well and truly K.O.’d any delusions I may have held that the Long Tail was in anyway a good thing for small time hucksters like you and me. That makes two useless tales in my life. Stupid dog knocked over my early morning chow earlier, spent the first ten minutes of my day mopping up the carpet. Then get this, he vomits as a second act. Big dumb piece of poo. But you gotta love his style.

At the risk of sounding vaguely serious, I loved this line from the ubiquitous Seth Godin:

Hope. Do you offer hope for something really big in the future? Maybe just around the corner, but perhaps in the long run… What does it look and feel like? Are you drawing a vivid picture?

You see, that is what I have always believed that musicians provide as a benefit to the rest of us. Actually not musicians but more specifically Rock Stars: Hope that there is a way out of the Blah. (The fact that I ended up quite liking the Blah is besides the point; most people don’t.)

Just read this blog. The dude is your new guru. That’s a full stop to the left there (or a period if you prefer, but in Australia, I assure you, we definitely do not).

While you are reading it, listen to my six new tunes (well, the recordings are new) and remember…

“Dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on…”

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The Hidden Costs of Rockin’ the Suburbs

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!

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