By Jordan Reyne
If you are reading this you are doubtless someone who makes music. You might be a professional, a beginner, or somewhere in between. Whichever the case, you doubtless love making music, but are probably aware of the increasing difficulty of securing live shows in todays quick-profit-only focussed industry. You are probably aware of the various websites you can upload recorded music to – even the places where you can release an album via the good guys who are music focuseed: bandcamp, CD Baby and the like. But it’s not the same as getting to play your music live – it’s not the same for listeners either, and statistics show that they only bother to listen to the first 10 – 15 seconds with recorded music1. Live performace is the key to connection. It’s also one of the true pleasures of being a musician.
There is a global audience already engaged with viewing live online performance. It’s accessible, it’s almost entirely free, and last but certainly not least, the usual gatekeepers and entertainment giants have not yet cottoned on to the power of it – which is why it shall remain, almost free, accessible and open to you making what you want from it. The playing field of online perforamce is still about as level as you can get. The price of “competing” has not been raised by the need to garner the interest of “the right people”, nor to invest hundreds of thousands in advertising, videos and production to keep up with the majors. In fact, those things are all completely within your grasp. Your audience is out there, and you probably have the tools to reach them aleady.
This article is about why your budget, your location, and your life situation don’t matter anymore when it comes to becoming a professional, full time, performing musician. It’s about the fact that, that regardless of your level, income, and lifestage, you can play shows to international audiences from the comfort of your own home, and with a bit of dedication and savvy, possibly even quit your dayjob to do so.
Beginner, or hardened professional, online performace is a new, open territory, available to everyone with a net connection, a computer, and a love of community. It is new territory populated by lovers of music and makers of music, untouched by the claws of major music corporations. It is a brand new world that the powers that be, have zero power over. It is run, maintained, and populated by communities – people who are dying to see what the commercial world has held us back from for so long: music in all its colours and forms.
The era of online communication has altered a few more things than people even imagine. The average man on the street (or A&R guy behind a desk) has not changed their ideas about how a musician gets their music out there, but that is part of why this new territory can become what we, indie musicians, make of it. The fact of the matter is: we now live in a day and age where it is very easy, and cheaper than chips, to play to an international audience from home. This new fact only seems like a secret because not everyone has cottoned on to it yet, and not every musician knows how to do it, or even where to go. This article is part of a series of articles and webinars from a book I am releasing called “Gigs In Space”. They are designed to help you setup and perform online, and get your music out there. They will give you the tools and know-how to be the one who has the influence over your musicial future.
Why Play Music Online?
1) Because the potential audience is massive, and already engaged in listening to online performers.
You probably had a rough idea already, but there are 6 billion internet users, according to http://www.internetworldstats.com at the time of writing. That’s 6 billion people who log on to the net to watch, read, socialize, download, listen, and otherwise engage with content. We all know the interest in sharing music online has been massive enough to terrify entertainment companies. It’s also been massive enough to make or skyrocket artists like Lilly Allen into fame via her use of an online platform (myspace). She saw the opportunities to be heard that it created, and got in there quick. There are, in fact, far more people spending time viewing music online than there are attending live music festivals in the UK – which has an estimated 3 to 4 million music festival goers annually2 compared to 51 million interenet users3. That’s a lot of people who would rather NOT have to brave the maddening crowd, sleep in a tent or sit in trafic jams in order to see music they like. There are a lot of people who are looking for their entertainment or experiences of the arts from the comfort of a home.
To cite specific platforms, the virtual reality website, “Second Life” has 6 million registered users. In the last 90 days, 1.8 million of them logged on. The place is full of venues, performing musicians, and listeners looking for gigs to attend (there are dozens of shows every hour). I play to them 4 – 8 times a week. For a fee, tips, and album sales.
2) You don’t have to camp in a field, or drive for hours to reach this massive audience.
Gigging, in the traditional world, is expensive. From vehichle hire and promotion through to accomodation. It’s also sometimes uncomfortable – long drives, dodgy food, lack of sleep, venue owners who decide not to pay you at the last minute. It is also sometimes financially disasterous – small turnouts due to bad advertising or unknown clashes, damaged or lost stock and gear.
With cyber performance, there are no overnight stays on couches, in fleapits or in the back of your van. There is no taking a wrong exit that costs you a gig. No months-long planing to co-ordinate radio, newspaper coverage and gig listings. In fact the time investment for planning and promotion for each gig is minimal because there is no travel time at all, and lead in is a week or less. You basically pick up your intrument and log onto the net.
3) The advertising is FREE.
Not cheap or “comparitively low”. It’s FREE. In the online world, you combine social networking with the established infrastructures of the communities you are playing in for sending free advertising. In fact, the infrastructure also ensures a certain kind of advertising quite different to old school ways of doing things – one focussed on information, rather than pure hype. Posters and flyers need not be glossy, photoshopped pictures – though pictures of most kinds do get more shares and likes on social media – they have to convey where to go, what time (in several timezones) and how to attend. There are no tree-deaths, printing costs, or paying out for someone to stick them up all over town either. Advertising your shows on the various platforms you perform on, generally costs nothing. I say generally, as some of the webcam based cyber performance platforms will charge to get your show placed on their “coming up” or “highlights” image changer. This is where money-focus is begging to override the idea of a level playing field, so this book focuses on the platforms and online venues that offer advertising in an informative way and are fully free of charge. There are plenty of them, with numubu.com being my favorite for its accessibility, community mindedness and quality.
4) You can do it in your pajamas.
The Look. Image. “Cool”. All these things are staples of the old school music world. In an aural medium, you may be as frustrated as I am with the focus on looks and image – with the cult of narcissism and musician-on-a-pedastal advertising that permiates our culture.
In the online word, you’ll be happy to know, it’s not necessary. Sonic artforms can, in fact, be decoupled from the selling of a physcial and somewhat mythical character. For those of you who like or don’t mind all that, or see it as your strong point, you can still indulge to your hearts content, but for those of us who find it a tad tiresome/ shallow/ beside the point, you can shirk it entirely.
No one has to see you unless you want them to. This is especially true of VR (virtual reality) platforms, but it can also be easily done in webcam based shows. In V.Rs, you decide how you want look via something called an Avatar. You can shape and make your avatar look any way you want. You can do branding in the traditional way if you like, but you could also be a pink dragon, a blue cube, a battle dwarf, a necromancer. If you want to stick to the traditional ways of branding the possibilities are endless to. You can be a guy with a 6 pack. A woman with ridiculously large breasts. In short, you can look any way you want from your own cultural/societal ideal to the bizarre and crazy – you can also be yourself. The choice is entirely yours.
Of course, my own politics are shining through here, but I’m letting them. Being yourself, or something unexpected isn’t something to underestimate, and we will go more into why later. One of the key differences between online performance and old school models is the fact of connection and community. You aren’t a rock band on a far away stage, or some untouchable beauty who has been photoshopped out of attainability. You are on a level with your audience. You are a real person rather than a rock-star-on-a-pedastal because onine performance is about creating community. This might sound dissapointing for those that crave that kind of fame – and daunting for those who may feel like they don’t measure up. The music industry has been dominated by looks-driven judgement for so long that it can be easy to feel like you just can’t compete. Those feelings can stop you enjoying playing, contribute to nervousness when you are starting out, or make you feel inadequate even if you are a great musician. That’s why it’s important to know this – online, you can chose how to present yourself. For marketing minded musos out there, you can brand yourself to match the kind of style you think matches the music. For those with contempt for branding and all it stands for, you can look as ecclectic and non genre-pigeonholed as you like. Online, any and all of that is ok. It’s what you say and play that counts most.
5) You can make money.
Having just disparaged money-focussed record companies, you may wonder why I think this is such a big deal. It’s a big deal because it is a side effect or doing something creative and that you love. It is not the primary focus, but it is something that enables you. It enables you to carry on creating.
The fact of an income based on doing what you love sounded too good to be true when I first heard about it, but being paid to play online is no urban legend. There is already an audience out there that actually wants to hear music – for more than ten seconds too – and they will pay for the privelidge once they know they enjoy you, just like they would in the venue and festival scenarios of old. The pay varies, of course, and even on the best paying platform (Second Life) it will take you a while to build up to the sort of level of income where you can actually quit your job (and it’s easier to get there if you live in a country with a weak currency than the US dollar), but there are nuerous musicians who have done just that. I currently earn my living by integrating the venue and festival gigs with playing shows online. The pay from touring and gigging in traditional venues and festivals varies from great to terrible, as is generally the case for most musicians. The stable mainstay of my income is the online shows, because there are few risks, no overheads, and the per hour return is far, far higher in the long run.
6) Because you CAN.
At the pinnacle of it’s profit making days, the old school music business was very good at ensuring inaccessibility for most indie musicians. From elevating the costs of album and video production to million dollar levels, through to attempts to ban CD drives on home computers that could created copies of CDs (the Mellenium Copyright Act, which fortunately failed thanks to groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation). To this day, the old school means of distribution (eg record stores and radio) are syndicated and dependent on budgeted backing. Even live music events suffer from this plight, with festivals like Amphi (German gothic music festival) only chosing acts from their member-labels to perform. Grim stuff. And many of us got pretty dispondent. Even listeners themselves – those who relied on radio and television as their sources of hearing about new music – went about saying “there are no new ideas. All the music sounds like stuff we’ve heard before.” Which it did. The reason was simple – most record companies are cowards. They know they can sell things that sound a certain way: ie exactly like something they have managed to sell before. They will stick to their genres, styles and formulas rather than taking a risk on a new sound. As the entertainment industry became more and more focussed on increasing profit margins, they stuck even more rigorously to what they knew in advance should sell. In other words, they stifled innovation. But there were and still are innovators out there. The difference is, now, in the world of cyber performance and internet distribution, those innovtors can be heard once more. You, as an indie musician doing this without a record company, a booking agent, or a promotor, can be heard. So be heard! Because you can, and because people actually do want to hear something new.
This one word makes all the difference: COMMUNITIES
The most successful online platforms are based on community. The community itself is generally already there – and it’s a love and enjoyment of music that made them arise in the first place. Of course, not all internet platforms have communities because they dont enable that kind of interation. Later on, when we compare some of the webcam based performance platforms, you will notice that those with an existing community of their own – where people interact, socialize and gravitate to each other – offer much more opportunity and rewarding experiences. Communities like the Second Life music scene, the social networking side of NuMuBu and google hangouts support the coming together of people interested in the makers of music. They do not simply support select individuals with a lot of money to invest. Where this community is lacking, the cash as a weapon tactic can be used, and generally is by the site makers to gain extra revenue. Sites with no closeknit community use this paid advertising to generate revenue – but at the cost of the level playing field.
The idea of online communities is crucially different to the models used by entertainment companies, which essentially ensure ownership of infrastructure by throwing money around, so that you, the indie musician, are shut out. In an online community, these tactics don’t actually work well, if at all. For many, throwing money at an advertising campaign is simply not part of the infrastructure. For those where it is, you can advertise until the cows come home, but it won’t ensure anything other than a good first turnout. If you dont connect with those there, they won’t return. Their returning is vital to your making it work. The idea is actually to buid a community of your own, around what you do. The fact that your liseners come to see you repeatedly means that they develop a real connection to your music and eventually, you as a person. Your humour, moods, and whether or not you value their being there all come into play in online performance. This means that being a person (rather than a shiney music-dispensing product) is very important again.
Having read all that, you may already see why playing online is far more accessible and potentially rewarding than both traditional gigging, or focussing on static music delivery sites. In which case, tune in next month for more, or head over to Numubu.com and try it out as you may be able to take it from here on your own (their site is very user friendly and there is a very good how-to on setting up).
Next month we will be looking deeper into the comparison between offline and online gigs – for those still skeptical about how the two compare we will be talking about how the connection with the listeners, the atmosphere and more compare in ways more positive than you probably imagined. From there on we will look at the different platforms available and go into detail about how you can set up to play in them.
Until then, have a great month!
3Source: internetworldstats.com on July 22 2011
Jordan Reyne:
Hailed by Radio New Zealand as the author of a new sound, Jordan is a 3 time Tui Award (New Zealand Grammy) nominee, and has lent her voice to projects from Cafe Del Mar through to Lord of the Rings. A prolific writer and performer, she has seven internationaly acclaimed albums to her credit and has and toured the UK, Poland, Germany and New Zealand. You can hear more of her music here https://soundcloud.com/jordan-reyne and follow her videos on online performance at www.youtube.com/jordanreyne
If you read this far I really hope that you got some value out of it. And if you liked it I hope that you’ll use one of the hand-dandy social media sharing buttons on the page to share this post with anyone that might find it useful.
I include links to resources mentioned in this article and anywhere else on the website on the Toolbox page.
0 comments:
Post a Comment