… 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…
… but the caravan moves on.
That’s an old Arab proverb apparently, and I think it speaks on many levels: about how our lives are just brief moments in the vastness of time. About how we do and say things but when you compare our actions to the hugeness of the universe - we seem so small.
And about how songs we write only ever really capture a moment in time. When you sing a song it’s like “this is how I was feeling then”. Hopefully, it’s a universal enough feeling that it resonates with people whenever, but each songs is just a bark in the night really, and the caravan just moves on (baby).
So the thing I did yesterday was to choose “Dogs May Bark” as the title of the CD, and I wrote all of the text for the CD covers, and chose the kind-of-pop-art-version-of-the-painting-in-yesterday’s-post as the cover image. So now it’s over to Ze Arteest to finish it off.
Not sure what I am going to do today, kind of busy with work, but that’s the point right? To, no matter what excuse you come up with, Do One Thing Everyday to move yourself closer to the goal.
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!
Now all I need is an audience, maybe even two 
Yep I have extracted the songs from my iMac and am sitting out in the Office of Imagination and Procedure listening to myself really loud while the wife and baby sleep inside the house (Duh) and thinking “this shit is cool dude, you are ok”.
Couple this with the fact that I am pretty sure that the young lady who works in the video store has thang for moi, I could still be onto something here
(Really the guy who started that wink thing has a lot to answer for - EVERYTHING I say is said with a wink).
Yeah so that’s my thing for today. Tomorrow I’m just gonna call the nearest CD burning dudes and place an order.
One Thing Every Day, dude*, what about you?
*I know too many winks AND too many ‘dudes’ but what can I do, dude, I’m like a refugee from the Bill and Ted Gen, man. And that rug really set off the room, y’know?
… Like yesterday for example, I identified the One Thing I could do which would move me closest to my goal. In this case it turned out to be calling up a friend to ask how the hell to get my tunes that I recorded in my iMac out of my iMac and onto a disc with out the sound quality turning to poo.
Well it turned out to be relatively simple, but I had been stuck on that point for MONTHS! I was intending to release these tunes properly LAST FEBRUARY! But I couldn’t get them onto a disc without the sound going all muddy and I spent hours looking for what the problem was, and hours searching through forum posts on the web and had let the whole project slide out of frustration and then …
… one tiny, five minute phone conversation was all it took.
Now I can go ahead and get a CD made, and distribute the songs digitally over the web, and all the rest.
One Thing Everyday, it makes all the difference.
Now, what will I do today? What will YOU do?
… to get some music action happening in my life again. That’s the plan. And preferably it should be the “biggest rock” (the action that will achieve the most out of the available range of possible actions) but I am pretty much happy if I do something at least. And practising* doesn’t count - this is about getting it out there. Practising is about being ready for when you are actually out there.
So today I didn’t have a lot of time but I finally managed to spend some time pimping my myspace page (yes like a big old kid).
The most exciting thing that I did there was add a RSS feature to it so that this blog gets fed into the myspace page.
Damn! Somebody might even read it! Then I’ll be in trouble!
Yesterday’s thing (similarly busy day) was that I struck a deal with Steven Mills . He is going to use me as a guinea pig for his new system of promoting yourself effectively across the web. Which means I should soon be getting heaps of eyeballs and ears checking out my tunes and mad bastard ramblings …
Not sure what I will do tomorrow … maybe something more “real world” orientated?
(*practising? practicing? I can never figure it out. And who cares really?)
Yesterday I was mooching around in the garden, organising the firewood when I found one big lump of gum that was too big to fit into the wood heater (we live in the hills so all this kind of thing is par for the course).
I grabbed my trusty axe and started chopping to split the big lump in two.
Two hours later, and after much grunting, groaning, swearing and a zillion axe blows I was still going - sweat flying everywhere, alcohol being skulled back to kill the pain, a mad glint in my eye - and my girl was starting to get a bit worried.
I knew it wasn’t the most useful usuage of my time but I didn’t care. Why? because I am a stubborn little shit and I don’t like to quit until something is bloody well done already. So I kept at that lump of concrete masquerading as wood until finally after 2 and a half hours it eventually split.
I then held the pieces of defeated wood aloft, standing admist the splintery carnage of the battle and let out a macho roar (and my girl called me a tosser - but that’s beside the point).
The point IS that I am a stubborn little shit and I don’t like to quit until something is done properly. And frankly, when I was younger I started something - becoming a professional muscian - and I didn’t finish it (for various reasons, none of them good enough) and I just can’t live with that. Call it pride. Call it stupidity. Call it what you will.
I don’t care what you call it.
You see, last November, when my baby girl was a newborn, I was staring at her sleeping in my arms and I thought to myself “What am I going to tell her? That I just gave up?”
Fuck no. I want her to learn that the persistent win, not just the talented, or the lucky, but the PERSISTENT.
So here’s the deal. Stupid and pigheaded and unrealistic as it may seem, I resolve to do at least one thing everyday to move me towards my goal of becoming a professional musician until such point as it becomes reality.
This is a big call. But I don’t need to be Bono or Mick Jagger or anything, just earn a modest living playing music. Of course if I earn zillions, then fine, that’s cool, I can roll with that…
So what did I do today? Well the single most important thing (the Biggest Rock - Google it) I did today to sit down with Steve, my partner over at Rebel Zen and start learning how to run an effective social media marketing campaign. This means I will begin to build traffic to this site. I did other things too, like buy seamusmusic.com for my “static” music site, join Twitter (despite my reservations) and cancel the hosting I have here so that I save myself $150/year (all adds up), but the “biggest rock award” for today goes to the social media marketing lesson. very powerful Over at RebelZen.com, for example, Steve rustled us up 177 unique visitors in one day in our first week of the site being “live”. As for this here blog, well I think it’s pretty much just a few everyday, but soon … things will be different (cue evil laugh) Moo-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha!
