Everyone is so focused on getting a standing ovation, it’s interesting to think what it would take to get boo’d off stage every once and a while.
Maybe once every couple years.
What would push it over the edge?
Would it be bad singing? Adding chorus after chorus after chorus to the same song? Giving a provocative speech? Picking your nose through your hit song while you’re suppose to be singing? Writing a song on the fly about the awful city you’re in?
And I would argue that if you got boo’d off stage once every couple years, more people will come to the gigs. Because if you’re willing to get boo’d off stage, that tells everyone that the possibilities are endless with you.
People will hand over money for that. Maybe THIS will be the show that it happens???
Think about you. Think about your show. Think about getting boo’d.
So many ideas. So many things to do. So many great ideas that would benefit you and the world around you.
Artists never seem to have a shortage of the ‘what’, never a shortage of ideas.
With so much ‘what’ floating around all the time I’ve lost interest. I’m tired of hearing about my ideas and your ideas. Every artist has a huge what.
And your what is great…but when?
When are you going to do this idea and that idea and that other new idea?
So artists fumble around when asked when. Because ‘when’ puts you on the hook.
When someone asks about ‘what’ you can be as specifically general as you want: “I’m working on putting together this amazing concept album about a pack of spotted unicorns that take over the fashion district in London”.
Great!
When will it be done so can I hear it?
If you say Tuesday: I can come back around and ask you on Tuesday because that’s when you said it would be all set.
But you won’t say Tuesday, you’ll say “I mean, it’ll be done when it’s done. I’ll get to finishing it when the spirit moves. I just gotta wait for a little more inspiration…yadda yadda yadda…”
Discipline yourself to have less whats and more whens.
p.s. When and why have a great relationship. As your why grows, the when gets sooner. Or maybe doesn’t necessarily get sooner but gets more focused and clear even if it’s not sooner.
p.p.s. “I’m tired of hearing about my ideas and your ideas.”- Let me be more specific here. I’m tired of hearing my ideas and your ideas if there is not a direct turn to why, when and how.
(So I actually love hearing about ideas…both mine and yours)
It would be one thing if we had a lack of ideas, but I just don’t observe that to be the case.
If you’re reading this blog you’re most likely a creative of some type (probably a musician of some sort), and creatives have stock piles of ideas, dreams, things to do one day. I’ve never met an artist with no ideas at all. But I’ve met tons with lots.
Amplification is used so more people can hear the voice.
The voice being amplified is the one that the audience wants to be amplified.
The audience wants that voice to be amplified because they are eager to hear what the voice has to sing and say.
So it’s important that the person sings and says things into the microphone on purpose…because a microphone is a powerful instrument. A powerful piece of technology that allows MORE people to hear you.
Do you have something to say that warrants using a microphone?
In five years or ten or twenty years you’ll have a child old enough to understand a little bit about the world.
Enough for you to play them Hey Jude for the first time and they either fall in love or roll their eyes.
Along with Hey Jude you’ll show them your music too. The best songs you ever worked on, some that never got released, some you wrote for your high school sweetheart.
And you’ll tell the stories of how the songs came to be, the funny or weird things that happened when you were tracking them in the studio.
This will be magical.
You know what you will not show them?
You will not pull out your old catalog of Tweets or Instagram posts and show them “See, this one got 500 likes!…And this one got 525!!!….and THIS one almost got 600!!!!!!”
You won’t show them the magic of Hey Jude and then show them the really awesome Likes and Follows you had once.
Your music is a body of work you can (almost) always be proud of. Both now and when you show your kid.
Keep making great music. I hope you get the Likes and the Follows too, but keep making great music.
So leading a project, a business, a band, you can either work against that i.e. trying to get people to work hardest on a project that isn’t theirs…Or you can work on trying to let your project be their project too.
Because then you don’t need to try so hard to get them to work their hardest.
If more than one person believes it’s their own project, that means there is more than one person giving their absolute best for the project. And that’s better than it just being MY project (and discovering the loneliness that lies there).
But we forget that.
We often expect people to do things FOR us because ‘its their job to do this for me’: book a show, promote a record, play a session, etc.
But what if instead of trying to get someone to DO something for you out of duty, you could entice them to BELIEVE and thereby do something WITH you out of that belief?
Duty and obligation vs belief and community.
Yes, there is probably a time for all of those, but you get to decide what you spend your time building upon.
We can sense if the publicity we’re encountering is before or after the thing (the music) has been released.
And 99.9% of the time in the music biz, the publicity comes before the music. And it’s crickets after it’s out.
It’s because when the music isn’t out yet, the artist PR reps can control the narrative!
Duh.
Once the music is out you can’t position and hype hype hype and tell everyone how good it’s GOING to be. Once the music is out anyone who actually cares becomes aware of how good it IS.
The albums we hear about after they come out, those are usually the good ones.
But if you don’t hear anything after an album comes out, then you know that everything you heard about it before it came out was spoon fed to the outlets straight from the artists camp. It was all smoke. No follow through.
The music is the thing. So what if you have a great review on whatever blog. If there isn’t a link to the music so I can find out for myself, then I know it’s just noise, and you’re hiding behind pre-release publicity.
We all just want to hear a song we need to hear again.
If you have it, or a batch of them, then the release date will serve as the start date for publicity and promo, not the end date.
