The Japanese Storyteller

These guys were adorable.  I think I just found the fun I was looking for...

Where is the fun music community??

Help!  I'm stuck!  The whole point of this blog is to find cool people who are doing chill things with their music on the internets.  I'm finding more and more company-based stuff--Topspin Media allowing you to market and sell music directly to fans; this new company Root Music that makes free and awesome skins for Facebook fan pages (you can pay a little to make it even cooler)-- BUT WHERE IS THE MUSIC?  All this stuff is for the business of music.  That's important.  But where is the fun?  Where are people making music that's fun and inclusive and doesn't take itself so seriously??

I went to this party a couple months back.  They called it a "Talent-Is-Overrated Art Party."  Everyone came and just chilled and painted or drew or did something else creative.  Fun, communal, nonjudgemental.  That's what I want to find for music. It's not that I don't think that my music is good enough, I just get a lot more from the community than from hustling.  I might get the hustle bug someday, but for now I just want this to be fun.  Please comment if you have any ideas.  In what corners of the internet are these fun communities??

Hmmm... or how to make one?... hmm

YouTube's Musicians Wanted

YouTube was at the Grammy event hyping their new YouTube: Musicians Wanted program.  Sort of interesting.  What is it?  Well, YouTube is trying to help musicians making money from people watching their videos.  Step 1: Upload a ton of videos.  Step 2: Get a lot of people to love them and watch them.  Step 3: Apply to be a Musicians Wanted participant.  

It kind of helps you take your videos and fans to the next level.  Once you're in the program you can make your channel look cool, and they will help to surround your content with ads from companies that might relate.  Then you get money.  You even get your own pop-up ads on all your videos! (God, I hate those things.  Soooo annoying and NO ONE reads them!)  So yeah, that's new with YT.  There's a good chance I'm over simplifying it.  Not really helpful for me, but probably helpful for other people.  Those with real videos and gigs and stuff.

The Revolution is Here...Probably.

Do you ever feel like you're standing in the middle of a meeting where the cotton gin has just been shown for the first time?  Or maybe that's just how big corporations make you feel whenever they reveal something new.  So I started this post last Friday when I got home from Grammy Soundtables: deals dollars and law.  It was this event where different industry people came to talk about just that.  What are deals looking like these days? How do you make money at it?  And I guess there was something legal about it, but it was integrated enough into the other discussions that I missed it completely.  YouTube, Topspin, Rock Band, and DIY artist Zoe Keating.  More to come...

From Baby Band to... Toyota??

What???? I think I might have been on the early side of "breaking news."  Yeah, that's definitely in quotes for a reason.  So a few posts back I wrote about this Bay Area band Pomplamoose and how they do all this cool acoustic stuff and I got sucked into their genius indie music trap through their internet tracker beams.  Well, today I'm watching Hulu and in between HPV commercials I hear their cover of "Mr. Sandman" on a Toyota commercial!  Seriously??  So I google this to find that my ears did not fail me.  Here's a write up about about it in the Examiner.  Dang.  Very jealous, and very impressed.  I've written half a song in the last three months, inspired by ridiculous "scandal" of the latest Bachelor finale. I see you judging... but it's going to be awesome :-)

This is HARD!!

Ugh.  It's hard to learn the internets!  This whole week I've been trying to throw myself into everything web-related to try to figure out what I should be worrying about, and what I should ignore.

Analytics and Whatnot 

Google analytics is a tracker thing that you can add to your page.  It basically shows you how many people are looking at your pages, the average time spent on different pages, and how they found your site.  Kind of creepy-cool.  Maybe that's helpful.  I put it on a few sites so we'll see.  It makes my inner voyeur very happy.  This is the site to find it http://www.google.com/analytics/

But there's soooo much more.  I'm trying to figure out what search engine optimization (SEO) is compared to search engine marketing (SEM). Who needs it and why?  I'll write more about that once it makes sense to me!

iDUH

I even went to a one-hour presentation at Apple yesterday to take an iWeb tutorial class.  It was pretty informative, if only that it gave me a good visual of the things I probably could have easily figured out myself.  You know what amazes me about Apple?  The crazy divide they create by making their stuff so easy and accessible.  I mean, I have to know very, very little to be able to create a website on iWeb and then publish it using their MobileMe thing.  I don't even have to know that code exists!  Awesome, but scary.  I want to know enough that I'm not completely lost when things inevitably aren't working right. But thank you, Apple, for making it easy because I doubt I'll ever be a code wizard--even though the hat and cape would be sooooo cool!!  

Adventures in YouTube - Pomplamoose

Bands on YouTube.  A few days ago I went in search of what baby bands are doing on YouTube.  There's this model people talk about where you do what bands in bars have always done, start with covers.  You make some videos of you covering songs, post them as responses to other videos that people are watching, and get people to look at your stuff after luring them in with the carrot of something familiar.  That's when they start looking around at your page, and start saying "Hey, they've got their own music?  I wonder what it sounds like?"  I felt pretty genius for knowing this.  And then within ten minutes felt like an idiot for falling for my own secret trick!

Pomplamoose.  It means grapefruit in French.  Ugh.... (and so awesome!)

They do these "videosongs"where they have these super low budget, but really well done videos of the two band members--a couple (GAG... and adorable!!)-- singing and playing their stuff.  They did this indie cover of "Telephone," and they did it really well.  So I was like, "Hey, that's really cool.  I wonder what other stuff they have."  TONS of covers.  And a lot of really good ones.

And then I noticed there was a note to check out their own music on a myspace page.  So I was like, "Hey, that's cool, they've got their own music.  I wonder what it sounds like?"

DOH!

They got me.  Good work, internet.

Music on the Street

Okay, so this isn't exactly a post about ways of getting your music out there, but it is a post about people doing fun things with music.  Specially, playing music on the street.  For me, street music is really powerful.  I'm out somewhere, minding my own business when all of a sudden I'm tractor beamed into a group of other strangers to watch music.

LURED IN BY STITCHCRAFT

This happened to me a few today as I was leaving the Green Festival.  I walk out the door, a little sad about walking away without a good supply of fair trade chocolate when I'm zapped by the beam of a group of 3 musicians powered by two kids on bikes.  That probably makes no sense.  Let me try to explain that again. There was a singer/guitarist in a cute green dress accompanied by two percussion guys (one playing the telephone pole with a what looked to be a wire hanger).  The amps/mics/speakers were powered by two girls biking to the rhythm.  Awesome.  Band name is Stitchcraft and they do this Rock the Bike thing with a bunch of other musicians.  I tried to walk away and get on home, but I couldn't.  The pull was too strong.  So I took out a video camera and took this video... My favorite moment is the comic relief at the end when the old man charges the camera.  Good times with strangers.

DIRTY BLUEGRASS (THE BEST KIND) AND GOSPEL

A few months back this happened to me with a band called Fruition.  I was walking down Haight and did the same thing.  Disturbed traffic a little bit crossing the street.  They were awesome.  And then a couple weeks ago when I was walking home from class I walked passed the SFSU Gospel Choir singing in the crosswalk near campus.  I think they were just waiting for cars to pass, but once they realized they had attracted a little audience they kept on singing.  So I grabbed this.

SO LONELY

I tried this a couple of times, singing in random places.  I brought a guitar to a farmers market and a few people sat down and ate lunch nearby.  I've played some music at various MUNI stations a couple of times.  Always a healthy mix of awkward and kind of fun.

So actually, I completely take back what I wrote in the first sentence.  This is absolutely a post about getting music out there.  Maybe not for record deals, but for sharing.  In three separate instances, I've come home being a fan of someone I would never have heard of.  So maybe next time I'll try to make it more legit.  Maybe make a sign so people can look stuff up later.  Maybe think up a good gimmick to make it exciting for those who aren't into music.  Maybe I'll wear my "I Love Muni" t-shirt.  That'll get people riled.

What's this all about??

So... I'm trying to do something in a way that's kind of the opposite of how you're supposed to do it.

I've got some music.  I like to write songs.  And some people like them.  I like them too, but kind of in the way that I'm wary of turning them into polished pieces.  Everything I've done that gets a polishing seems to sound terrible.  So I'm happy enough with my low-fi's for now.  My favorite ones are the ones I've written with my friend Sia.  He's a pretty kick-ass guitarist and comes up with crazy compositions, and then I write songs on top.  I love our stuff but we're cheap and in different cities, so us relying on crappy mics and email is what we're doing right now.  For a while now I've been slowly, slowly chipping away at this music stuff, and am relatively content with it being a hobby.

HOWEVER, the problem is that every time I go see shows where fabulous women are up on a stage singing and laughing, I get sooo inspired and soooooo jealous (Julieta Venegas, Gillian Welch, Regina Spektor-- I'm talking to YOU!)  So yeah, some times I want to suck it up and make a go of it.  And most of the time I just want to sing my songs and have a few people hear them and like them.

That's where this comes in...

This blog is going to document my online music homemaking.  I'll write about the cool things that I find other people doing, find some fun resources for people in my situation, play some songs for ya, and have an overall good time.  (Oh and I'll try now to get so hung up on finding cool skins for blogger and myspace!!  No promises.)

Here goes nothing...