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The best news is, that they’re blogging. About all things chamber music, and particularly brass chamber music. So keep an eye out and make sure to subscribe to the blog.
]]>The best news is, that they’re blogging. About all things chamber music, and particularly brass chamber music. So keep an eye out and make sure to subscribe to the blog.
]]>Ask over at RobsHouse.net - someone that gets it. Points 1 and 2 struck a chord with me in particular (and this was written over a year ago).
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- Personal blog site. As a musician, I would like a site where I can write small articles, announcements, open letters etc., and not have to worry about the technical aspects of linking and publishing. I would like to decide whether users can comment on my entries, and have the power to unpublish them if I need to.
- There are few (if any) popular and modern forums for classical musicians. This is odd, since horn players alone can debate a topic such as mouthpieces or fingerings for ages. I would like to see a site with active forums for musicians.
The criteria are simple, and are as follows:
I don’t think that this is a lot to ask. A professional artist who is using the web to promote their work should be prepared to pay the minimal domain name and hosting charges that come with that. We are only talking AL30 - AL40 a year here, not exactly big money.
The great thing about the web of course is that it is dead simple for anyone to publish anything with minimal expertise or money. However, when a site is an important part of your professional life it has to rise above the average self-published look and feel. If the Fine Arts Brass Ensemble had a home page address of www.get-free-web.com/members/finearts/webspace then you probably wouldn’t think they were particularly special. Image is an important part of promoting musicians, and your domain name should be a integral part of your image.
When looking at requests that come in for our free service, I always try and be as fair as possible. I don’t want to turn away people that do not fulfill the criteria, and I always take the time to look at the sites and offer a few simple pieces of advice. The advice invariably starts with recommendations to remove any advertising on the site and to spend a small amount of money on a proper domain name.
]]>They are building a community around their message board, and the site is a constantly fluctuating reflection of their personality. It really is fun to go and spend a few minutes looking around. Go check it out.
I’ve been lucky enough to see these guys perform a couple of times—and work with some of their members in the past—and their site truly is a reflection of the excitement and personality you get at one of their recitals or concerts. If only more chamber ensembles put in the time and effort to create sites like this!
]]>This offering from trumpet player Adam Dickson certainly clattered my funny bone. It is well worth checking out, mostly for a good laugh rather than info on his next recital (which happens to be in Michigan, USA).
For those without the time to download the movie (28MB), it is basically a spoof of a Hollywood type film trailer, complete with booming American voice over and Hans Zimmer inspired score. It describes the battle between the rise of avant garde music (played by various frightening and underhand characters, including one wrapped up in tin foil) and the traditional classical composers (portrayed by Adam and his trumpet). The climax of the piece contains a dramatic rendition of the trumpet solo from the opening of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an exhibition. It’s very funny stuff.
In this age of digital marketing this kind of material has become very relevant, even in the classical music industry it would appear. And although I’ve never seen this type of approach before, it is one that I would certainly not rule out using in the future.
Companies such as Ford, Virgin, and Starbucks have all used viral marketing campaigns for web movies, often with great success.
]]>It’s quite a cute introduction to the blogosphere (or is that blog -osphere/blog0-sphere?), but one thing that Scheinin does describe very clearly is the potential for this kind of writing to infect the industry.
Suddenly, a whole new world of writing about classical music has cropped up. Not everyone agrees, but some plotters of this revolution predict the blog- osphere will create an entry point for new listeners, because blog writing often is informal, energetic, underground-ish—without the deadening preachiness that infects much classical music writing, driving people away.
A conservative estimate recently put the number of classical music blogs at approximately 45. Now, in the blogosphere that I originate from, that number would probably read more like 45,000; which means I am certainly one of the ‘plotters of this revolution’ that predicts a large increase in the number of classical music blogs.
I also believe that a large number of these blogs will be on websites born from the promotional needs of artists.
I wonder how the current blogosphere will react to that? Helen Radice, for example, is a British harp player who writes the popular blog twang twang twang. From what I can glean from her site, being a semi regular reader, she does not blog with the intent of increasing her professional profile and gaining more work. Perhaps she is even offended by that notion. However, I wonder how many of the people that read her blog have decided, purely on the basis of her writing, that they would attend one of her recitals or concerts? Or even more pertinently, how many fixers/agents/managers have considered her to be more marketable because of her popular blog?
If that’s not the case yet, it almost certainly will be soon. Helen writes so passionately and personally—hence the success of her blog and the community around it—that she is building an audience for her work without even the merest twang of a string. The question is, how long will it take the industry to realise this?
So how will the classical music blogosphere react to bloggers that are in it only, as it were, for the money. Well, anyone with experience in blogging for business can help out with that one.
If the blog is sincere, personal, and passionate then it can be as successful as any other ‘personal’ site. People who are blogging solely as a means to an end, will be routed out as quickly as Mazda and McDonalds have been in the corporate blogosphere.
]]>In Thereas never been a better time for the business, Drew summarises many of my own feelings about the way in which musicians approach their business and its promotion.
The one crucial element missing from the way classical music views itself and how it functions in the larger sense of culture and entertainment is a sense of entrepreneurialism.
In my opinion, what this boils down to in many cases, is the feeling that as artists we should just be allowed to get on with the art. There’s a strong sense that musicians at the top of their field, or organisations with a long history of high standards should somehow be above having to develop effective marketing and promotional campaigns. Even within organisations that have a forward thinking and proactive management, there is often a problem selling these ideas to the finely toned professionals who make up their orchestra or chamber ensemble.
It is the nature of professional musicians to be concerned with one thing: artistic standards. That is a requirement of their lives from the time they begin studying to when they retire, and it is difficult to break that mindset. However, in today’s climate a more ruthless, business orientated outlook is required—particularly for smaller ensembles and individuals—and the response of artists themselves is vital in driving the industry forward.
Drew cites the tuba soloist Patrick Sheridan, as an example of an artist who has found a way to “sell himself and the overall experience to potential consumers.”
Patrick took the time to examine the experience he provided, not just from the artistic listening viewpoint but from an entertainment anmusicians look to promote themselves. Partly because that is exactly what I am trying to do here at Artist Logs, and partly because I still earn some of my living as a freelance musician, and that’s something I never want to stop doing.
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So why does Google love blogging so much? The answer to that lies in two words. The first is content, and the second is links.
Blogs get updated—well most of them do. Some get updated dozens of times a day, and that means one thing… Fresh content, and lots of it. One particular fellow who updates dozens of times a day is called Robert. Try a search for Robert on Google, and take a look at the No. 1 result. Robert de Niro perhaps? Robert Redford? Ahh… Robert Burns?
Er… no actually. It’s a guy called Robert Scoble, a software evangelist at Microsoft, and a daily blogger.
(Ed - Actually, Robert Scoble’s Google result varies between 1—3, but you get the point.)web. Without them there would be no such thing. Think about that for a minute.
The reason they are so special to Google is because Google counts a link in to a site, as a vote for that site, and therefore ranks it higher in their results pages. Blogs get a lot of incoming links because of the community they attract. A community is attracted by regularly updated content.
In June last year, some ’search engine optimisation’ (SEO) professionals launched the SEO Challenge, a contest to see who could get the No. 1 result in Google for the (previously unlinked) phrase
Nigritude Ultramarine.
All the top SEO people began using their ‘methods’ and ‘tricks’ for achieving high ranks in Google, with the hope of gaining untold respect and some nice shiny prizes. However, with just a few days of the contest still to run, blogger Anil Dash joined the fray and promptly wiped the floor with everyone else.
Anil has been writing on his blog since mid 1999 and has thousands of entries, thousands of incoming links, and thousands of readers.
All he had to do was write a little piece about the contest and get his mates to link to it. Anil has a lot of mates, and with their help he proved that popular and regular content will shine through everything else in Google.
]]>However, as time has gone on, the list of feeds that I am subscribed to has grown rather a lot. I am seriously suffering from feed overload.
My guess is that anyone working on the web experiences the same problem. The days of sitting and leisurely checking my morning feeds over a quick slice of toast and a coffee are long gone. There’s just too much to get your head around. Bill Burnham recently wrote about Saving RSS in which he raises some serious side effects of these issues, and how methods for solving them may develop.
However, the point I want to make here is purely to do with today’s RSS culture, and with the all important factor of getting your content read. When I am sifting through bloglines—particularly after an extended period of leave—sites that do not provide a full RSS feed have probably 80% less chance of being read than one that delivers their content to me in full.
Basically, I’ve got better things to do than open new windows to load a post, particulalrly if it’s not one of my ‘favoured’ sites. Unless the title is sufficiently intriguing to pique my interest, it may as well have not come into my bloglines. Small extracts or summaries are a start, but not much better in my opinion.
People: Full RSS feeds.
Bandwidth is your only excuse; and if you can’t stretch to more, be aware of the potential dangers and reassess your budget.
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