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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Hey I can’t be arsed writing much tonight except to say that if you are trying to get your music shit - or any kind of shit really - together, then you oughtta take this advice:

“What do you do when you take a shit?
You just shit. That’s what you need to do with your music.”

And then you need to read this post here about getting off your lazy, unfocused arse and just doing it.

Gee lots of rude bum type words in this post. Meh!

Hey here’s one I wrote that can help you get it together too. See ya.

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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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Suddenly I had a moment, like “fuck, I am like THAT guy? Am I an old sad-case who still thinks he’s gonna be the next Kurt Cobain?”

Then I relaxed, because the answer is no. My style of music has changed to one that would still suit me when I am an old man and I am in fact totally happy with where we live, our little family life and our modest day-to-day concerns, things like “can we get the baby to sleep through the night if we feed her up before bed” and “just which day IS bin day anyway?”. It’s true that I do miss gigging but I have my CD ready to go out and get gigs again and so very soon I will be back on that horse. And it is true that I often fantasize about getting out on stage in front of huge crowds again like I got to when I was like twenty four (11 years ago!) and that I would happily accept a level of recognition again and in fact do actively court it. BUT it is also true that I am pretty happy with just taking every moment as it comes, and as long as I am free to express myself myself through music and words, without being trapped in some hellish 9-to-5 job all week, then I am cool with however it all turns out. In fact sometimes I think about what it must be like to be like one of my heroes like Nick Cave and I think “Jeez, all those airplanes, all that rushing about, bummer.”

So I am getting my music out there again, doing one thing every day, but sometimes the things I do are pretty small, and truth is if I desperately wanted out of my situation I would be doing a whole lot more than one little thing every day. But I don’t want out of my situation, I am the kind of content that makes teenage kids puke, and that’s cool. I did my time being a wastoid rebel on the run (from myself). Now I just wanna enjoy life and my family, and play some music too.

But if you are unhappy with your life, if you are a stuck-in-a-rut suburban musician who feels like a rat in a cage, then for fuck’s sake - don’t take it out on the people in your life, it’s not their fault that you have an itch. Get up off the couch and go for it. Fact is: if you have even just SOME talent and a LOT of drive, then you can do it. Plenty do. It can be hard, but it is do-able if you keep it real and work like a dog at it.

And your wife/husband/partner/kids will respect you all the more for it too. They may knock you down when you TALK about it, but that’s just a mixture of their own limiting beliefs reflected onto you plus genuine concern for your mental well-being. If you actually go out and start DOING it, they will soon change their tune and probably get behind you and help. If they don’t then they may be the wrong partner for you - the kids you gotta keep though ok?
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Today’s thing was to deal with the big old pain in the arse that setting up my printer to work properly was. It took me bloody ages to get the blighter working again, and I probably taught my little girl a colourful new word or two, but I got there in the end (after yawning my way through countless forum threads until I figured why it wouldn’t print properly).

But then once that was done I was able to start printing off my CD covers, which means I am on track to have those discs ready for the (breathlessly waiting world to line up and carry on like my CD is the new iPhone or something*.

Geez, I am really stringing some Irish grammar together tonight.

Irrational expectations aside, I drew a tarot card for my new album, you know, how will it go and I got the Ten of Pentacles. “This is the card you want to see if you are wondering how your latest enterprise will turn out. Wealth and affluence are yours.”

Blimey, that’s friggin’ good

Meh. Time to watch a DVD and munch on chocolate biscuits (ah, domestic bliss).

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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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However, as it happens, I do enjoy blogging so that’s great. Personally, I reckon it beats the hell out of wandering the streets at 2am sticking posters up in the freezing cold only to find them ripped down again a day later, but that’s just me. I guess I did that enough back in the 90s, back when ‘they’ used to leave them up for a while. These days the Gentrification Nazis have them pulled down every morning at dawn by poor sods in fluorescent safety-jackets who couldn’t pay their (outrageous rip-off) parking fines…. sorry, went off on a tangent … where was I?

Oh yeah … So blogging is not making music, nor is it as much fun. It’s just not the buzz that gigging is. And, after a break for a couple of years to refresh (and father a baby!), I am keen as mustard to get out and start gigging again.

So what I am doing with this blog is laying the foundations to capitalise on every gig, to make it easy for whoever happens to be in a bar when I set up in the corner and start bawling out my tunes to find me online afterwards, and to listen to (or even buy!) my tunes.

You see I spent years playing gigs in bars, to some success initially but then to less and less. I don’t mean musical success, that was never an issue. What I’m talking about is marketing my music rather than just enjoying gigging for the hell of it (which I did). Truth is that by the late ’90s, once I had moved from Adelaide to Melbourne, I just did gigs and then went home. Or to some girl’s house if I was lucky. But I did nothing to capitalise on whatever favourable attention I won in the pubs and clubs that I gigged in. Some people enjoyed what I did every night for sure, but I had no idea who they were or how to contact them again.

And look - at the time I didn’t care, I was going through a, “like, totally zen” phase and just wanted to hang loose like I hadn’t ever done when I was in Reckoning which was pretty much my entire post-high school life.

Then ten years went past in the blink of an eye.

Whoops!

I had a lot of fun in those ten years but the old music career “break” was starting to look pretty permanent

But now, call me a sad case, but I want back in again, I miss gigging and jammin’ and all of that. But these days my time is precious (Wife, Baby, Extended Family, Career, Friends, House to Maintain). So what I am doing with this blog is making sure that this time around I do things properly. When people see and hear me in a bar, they will be able to buy my disc straight away if they want. But if they aren’t quite convinced I will make it easy for people to find me on the web. My first and surnames are Seamus Ennis. Try Googling that and see what happens. That dude totally beat me to it. So (although it’s taken me a while to get used to the idea) I am taking the stage name of Seamus Anthony. Google that. That one I got wrapped up.

So you hear me at a gig, go home with one of my tunes stuck in your head, you Google my name, Voila! Then you land on this blog and there will be an big thing saying “buy my tunes Now” and also “listen to my tunes now for free” (for the cheapskates). And whatever gigs are coming up will be easy to find. And you can subscribe to the email list and I’ll let you know what’s new.

And further to this, I am giving this blog a “point”. Rather than just being a blog that exists for no other reason than the fact that I have an enormous ego (fact) I have made it into a kind of “how to get your music shit happening - by example” blog. (Note: if you look through the archives, you will see that it was only relatively recently that I decided to focus the blog in this way. In that time I have already seen traffic increase by about 400%. Why? It’s called the “what’s in it for me?” factor.)

And so that means learning how to do all this online marketing guff better. So Steve is showing me how. I spent the couple of hours I could spare over the last two days signing up for every stupid social media/bookmarking site under the sun. Not my idea of bliss but you gotta do what you gotta do.

One other thing I gotta do is work out how to make a template for posting so it ends with a “subscribe to the blog or mailing list” link at the bottom, as recommended by Copyblogger. Meanwhile, why don’t you scroll up the top of the page and subscribe right now?

I’d better go and get on with it.

What do you gotta do today to get your music shit happening?

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!

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!

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 …