What a short, productive trip it’s been

So here we are at the end of the 9 week contest, and first off I have to give a big thanks to Ariel and Carla for putting this together and being our cheerleaders. I’ve read dozens of music industry how to books but this is the first time I have been motivated to really take some time to try and apply every principle. It’s a great contest where everyone wins just by participating.

Goals update

I went back and looked over week one and revisited my goals for the contest and did some evaluation on how I did, and some areas I met or exceeded what I wanted to do, and some areas I made little or no progress. Booking was one area that I had big goals that have kind of stalled but I had a lot on my plate the last 2 months (like moving) and I had to keep my focus on keeping the family fed rather than driving around doing a bunch of gigs for little or no money. I have managed to keep booking new paying gigs as a dueling pianist, that wasn’t the goal I had in mind but it was important that I focus on that for the sake of our well-being.

In addition, after the tour that Charles and I did with a band we had to reassess what our live show was going to be like. Should we keep trying to use a band or should we do the best 2-man show that we can until it becomes more feasible to have a regular band? Should we focus on playing rock clubs or should we put our efforts into something like house concerts? The best development is that in October we have a meeting with Nine 12 records in LA who will hopefully help us flesh out some of these questions. There is one more HUGE development in the booking area that I will cover in a minute, something I’m super-excited about so I hope you’ll keep reading.

Sales Funnel

This is covered in the last chapter and something I had in mind from the very beginning. Thankfully there has been A lot of progress in this area. I first got introduced to the sales funnel concept by Greg Rollet at Gen Y Rock Stars and I’m stoked to get this going. When we started the contest we had no one to put in the funnel, now we’ve added hundreds of people to our mailing list and so the sales funnel idea is in full swing now, so we’ll see if this starts generating some sales for us.

Blogging, features, affiliate links

There has been medium progress in this area. I’ve gotten some articles published on other blogs, got a couple of reviews but our online presence outside of our website has not reached the level I would like, especially compared to the amount of work I have put into it. I’ve been out there commenting like crazy, sending out e-mails to bloggers, trying to build relationships but I haven’t really gotten much love from bloggers. Mostly I feel like my efforts in that area have just gone out into the ether and disappeared. I don’t know if I’m taking the wrong approach or maybe our stuff just isn’t capturing people’s ears but I feel like for the time I’ve put into this I should have gotten more back. I’ve done my best to follow the guidelines but maybe I just need to give it more time. Affiliate links are something I’m still excited about but without the connections to other blogs I’m not generating the traffic to make this a worthwhile area for us. Hopefully in the future this will be better, it’s all part of creating the continuum program.

One goal we nailed

One thing we really got figured out was how to incorporate our dueling piano skills and use them in our original act, the last couple nights of our tour we got this nailed and got a ton of e-mails and sold a lot of merch, too bad it took us the whole tour to figure it out.

The idea I’m super-excited about

One thing that’s been missing from all these goals has been purpose. Yeah, I want to make more money doing originals and sell more merch and connect with more fans, but the big question has been, why? What’s the purpose? Money? I make pretty good money playing music already. Fame? I wanted that when I was 25 but now I’m 45 and I could care less about being a celebrity. I looked at my last goal where I said I want to give people something of value.

I was looking a Gigmasters.com trying to find ways to scare up more good paying corporate work for the dueling piano shows when the idea dominos started to fall. We have done a few dueling piano shows for charity in the past and dueling pianos works amazing for charity events because we can set out our tip jars and use the techniques we use to extract money from people at the bars, only at these events we donate our tip money to the charity. We can get good tips at the bars but when it’s for charity, we can really get people to loosen their wallets. Here’s a typical technique we use.

Todd: I’ve got $5 here to play “Friends in Low Places” for the country fans

Charles: Dude, country sucks, if someone gives me $6 I’ll stop this country crap and play some rock and roll like AC/DC or Bon Jovi

an audience member gives $6

Charles: Stop that song! Let’s play some rock -n- roll

He then launches into “You Shook Me All Night Long”

Todd: OK country fans, give me $7 and the country fans will rule the room again and we’ll go back to “Friends in Low Places”

and so on, people keep bidding up their favorite songs. This technique generates a lot of cash, and sometimes some ill will when a person puts in $20 – $30 and end up not hearing their song, but when it’s all for charity, who cares?

Pianos with purpose

Then it hit me. Pianos with Purpose. I can apply all the lessons I’ve learned about cyberPR and niche marketing and sales funnels, etc.. and put it towards a musical act that focuses all our efforts towards raising money for charity. We have an act that is perfect for fundraising, there is a niche that is wide open, we know how to get hired as dueling pianists already, rather than playing crappy bars and soul-sucking corporate events we can actually give the world something of value. On the more selfish side, we can use that act to promote some of our original material, for instance we have a song about human rights activist Beate Sirota Gordon that is perfect at a charity event. Win-Win. We can sell CD’s and donate some of the proceeds to the charity, which makes the attendees more likely to buy CD’s or join our mailing list. Looking at Gigmasters.com this niche is wide open.

I’m way excited about this idea and now I have the tools to make it happen. It’s still in the formative stages but I can see a situation where we can, get paid, promote our originals, sell CD’s and merch, connect with new fans, travel, have a unique angle that can generate publicity for us but most importantly, we can use all that to give something back to people who are in need and have a more purpose-filled act.

So thanks again to Ariel and Carla and all the other cool people I connected with over the course of this contest, I don’t know if I could have come to this conclusion without the kick in the butt the contest provided.

Before we get started on this week’s lesson about real live social networking I thought I give a quick city driving lesson. Check out that picture, that is what happens when you try to get a truck that big into a San Francisco parking garage. The truck is tough, but the ticket dispenser was tougher this time, only because these fenders are made of fiberglass and not steel. If the fenders had been steel, bye-bye ticket dispenser, and hello to an odd bit of pleasure that comes from destroying something that forces you to pay for parking. Cities in general aren’t made for rigs that big and parking garages are particularly small so they can cram as many cars as possible in there. Oh well, I figured something like this would happen sooner or later, it takes a big rig to haul a big trailer which leaves you driving your big rig to work and to do simple errands when you’re unhooked from the trailer. It’s not always convenient to have this size of a truck, especially in the city but it can handle the bumps and scrapes. I call them ‘character marks’.

Real Live Social Networking

This is my favorite area. It’s why I like playing music in the first place. I love to see people’s immediate reaction, and look them in the eye when we are playing for them. Recently we had a gig where some fans already had our CD and they had played it for their friends and so when we did our set we had a bunch of people we didn’t know singing along to our songs. That is a thrill like no other and you’ll never get that on the internet. It was the first time having that happen for Charlie so he claims he can die happy now. I’ll die happy when I can go into lot’s of cities in lot’s of countries and have that happen.

Rules, Friends and Fraternizing

Let’s be real, one of the main reasons most of us want to make a living playing music is because we want to be our own boss and make our own rules. That’s great but it will never really happen. There will always be a bar manager, promoter, booking agent, not to mention customers to satisfy so you go from having one boss to thousands. Johnny Foley’s pictured here has a few bar managers to answer too and they have a lot of rules. A whole page of rules that they make you sign before you play. Rules about how to dress, what you must say and what you can’t say, no drinking. I’m an Irish guy in an Irish pub and no drinking? ugh. One night a friend from Seattle was in SF and I told her to stop by the pub to hang out. She is a real close friend so when we saw each other it was all hugs and kisses and on my breaks we hung out a lot. After the night I had 2 bar managers tell about the ‘no fraternizing with the customers’ rule. OK, that’s just too far, what am I supposed to do? Hang out in the back room and talk to no one? That’s not me at all, and it’s frankly a ridiculous thing to ask of your performers. We are there to fraternize with your customers, that’s one of the things that will keep them coming back. You know, real live social networking.

Things I’ve been applying from chapter 8

My favorite bit of advice is, ‘to be memorable talk about them‘. This really, really works. I was OK at this before, mainly because I’m usually truly interested in the people I’m meeting, but I’m really seeing the light on how this makes me more memorable to the person I’m talking too. Listening closely and asking yourself how can I be helpful to this person will score you big points in virtually every social situation and people will be much more responsive to you when the time comes to ask them for something. I’ve been working really hard on dropping the I’m just… statements, I’m bad about that but getting better. I need to stop qualifying myself like that and remember that they are probably already somewhat receptive to me and the I’m just…. statements are doing way more harm than good. The how can I help… approach just scored me a ton of new gigs in Vegas because I didn’t approach the agent wanting something from him, I approached him as a partner trying to solve his problem together.

Business cards

I can’t believe I’ve been so lame about business cards and it took this contest to kick me in the ass and finally get some. You’d think that getting asked for business cards on a regular basis at gigs would have been kick in the ass enough but it wasn’t. I can’t believe how many request slips with my phone # scrawled on the back I gave out when getting legit business cards is so easy. I’ve also started asking the audience to drop their business cards in the tip jar to get added to our mailing list. Duh. I should have been doing this for years. This goes all the way back to chapter 1 and one of my initial goals of how to integrate my “day job” of the dueling piano shows with the original shows we’d like to be doing more of. I put this together in about 5 minutes at www.vistaprint.com. All I paid was about 10 bucks to ship them to me.

Greetings from San Francisco where I am doing a 2 week run at Johnny Foley’s Mad Pianos. Cool spot in downtown SF so if you’re in the area over Labor Day weekend or the week after, stop in and say hi. I love traveling like this where I get to go and hang out in a city long enough to really vibe with it. I have my home, my RV, parked here, the family is here, I have a job here so it’s like living here, but I’m still enough of a tourist to get a thrill when I drive across the Golden Gate bridge every night on my way to the show. Plus it’s a chance to connect with a whole bunch of new people, potential fans and get their e-mail address. We have been all about the e-mail list building since the beginning of this contest and I’m happy with the results. We have added hundreds of people to our mailing list since we started MSi9W and we are adding at least a few people every day, and at our shows we’ve made much more of a point get people’s e-mails.

The e-mail pitch at our shows

At shows before we play one of our giveaway songs from our website, we pitch to them by saying something like ‘we want everybody here to get something of ours so after the set hit us with an e-mail and we’ll make sure you get the song you’re about to hear.’ Then we play one of our songs that gets the best response so it’s pretty effective at getting people interested enough to give us an e-mail.

The rest of chapter 7

Some of the rest of the pointers in chapter 7 are either things that we have been doing habitually for a while or some things that we’ve needed to put a lot more effort into. Bribing with free songs? Done. Added most of our friends? Done. List building at our live shows? Done. We haven’t list traded with any other bands because we don’t know any other bands with a mailing list that we could trade with. I’d love to trade, it’s an awesome idea, but we’re the only one’s we know doing it, other than the people I’ve met here. Any MSi9W bloggers wanna trade?

Where we’ve been dropping the ball

Regular communication. We’ve been blowing it in this area, although, the way we’re living right now we’re thrilled to have a stable internet connection for an hour so we haven’t had regular communication with anybody at all, not just our mailing list. Our spot in SF has really good internet and we’re going to be here for a couple weeks so we’ll take advantage of that.

I’m still a little confused about which chapter I’m writing about, new version? updated version? so I’m going to write about blogging ’cause I like it so much. I know I’m behind a couple of weeks but I haven’t been a slacker. Since August 8th I’ve been been across 9 states, played a bunch of shows, took the contents of a 5 bedroom house and sold most of it and packed about half a garage worth of it in storage and the other half of it in our RV, saw a stunning version of ‘Othello’ in Idaho, saw a soft spot in my dad I never knew was there, took the most refreshing mile long swim, taught my daughter how to ride a bike, and threw a 40th birthday party for my wife.

You should see my schedule next week, recording sessions, auditions, plus I’ll be at the Orchid Lounge at Mandalay Bay this upcoming Friday and Saturday (August 27 & 28) if you’re in Las Vegas, but I want to have at least one blog post on the subject of blogging.

The Social Media I’ve Been Looking For

I love blogging because it’s something that allows you to meet people with common interests as opposed others social media which are better designed for keeping up with who you already know. Plus I’m surprised at how many people are actually reading the thing. At one show I sat down to talk to a guy and he had his iPhone out and my blog was in the window. I’ve managed to get some guest posts at other sites which does a lot to drive traffic back to this site, in fact, it’s the best thing yet in terms of site visits. Charlie has been finding some success with blogging too, bearnamedcharlie gets a lot of readers when he posts some new stuff according to Google analytics.

It’s hard to write a blog about blogging so in the interest of good blogging, I’ll keep it short, but I do have a bunch of blog posts coming up about our tour thus far, moving into the RV, upcoming gigs, recording sessions so rather than blog about blogging I’d better take advantage of this internet connection.

I hate for this post to be short but…

My wife and I are currently driving the vehicle pictured here from Michigan to Seattle, and internet service is kinda sketchy. Here’s something cool though, every rest stop in Iowa has wi-fi, so you can pull over and whip out your computer and do some stuff and move on. They should have that in every state. Especially South Dakota. I feel totally cut off from civilization there. One cool thing, we were driving SD through right as bikers everywhere were converging on Sturgis for the big motorcycle rally they have there. saw some amazing bikes on the road.

I really want to  take some more time on the subject of e-mail lists and newletters because it’s something we’ve been focusing on. We’re not anywhere near having TRUE fan base of 1,000 or more but we’re working on it, it’s where we’re putting most of our music marketing efforts.

Analytics

Our Reverbnation Band Equity Graph. The big uptick starts right about the time we started the contest

We’ve done a lot of the analytic stuff, the “who is your fan?” stuff and it’s leading us to new ways to think about how to engage potential fans. I’ve been reading more and more about house concerts, where we would actually go to someone’s house and play for them, and this seems like a great thing for us to pursue based on the data. A lot of our potential fan base is at home a lot of the time so that seems like a good place for us to go and engage them. By being willing to show up to their house and play for them we can build really strong relationships with them and also, we can ask people to take 45 minutes or so to sit and listen to us, as opposed to trying to fight for people’s attention in a bar, everybody wins. I’ve been booking some club shows this month and it has been kind of a nightmare, I’m really interested in shifting our thinking about where our live show needs to happen. Plus it happens smaller scale, no live band and huge PA, with higher impact on your potential fans. This seems like a way to go for us right now. The plan is to test out the idea this October when we’re kicking around California.

The Newsletter

We’ll use our mailing list to see if some of our California people can host a house concert in October and hopefully those shows will turn into more e-mails and more house concerts. We also have some gigs in Vegas in late August coming up and that is a great place to gather e-mails from people from all over, and there will surely be a bunch a California people on that list.

Last weeks successes

We got our very first review! Wildy’s World is a way cool website I’ve read for a while, he reviewed Audio Bacon and it wasn’t a rave but the review was really fair and the points he made were valid and well-taken. I appreciated the fact that he obviously spent some time listening to it and that his criticism was constructive.

Goodbye Seattle

Other than that we’re getting ready to say goodbye to a gig I’ve held for the last 6 years and it’s definitely bittersweet. I’m really psyched to move into a new adventure in life, but there are a ton of people that I will miss and that’s kinda sad. Chopstix is a really great place and it was a privilege to be able to make music for people there night after night. So many nights I laughed my ass off, and many nights made some really great music with some tremendously talented people, and hung out with some truly cool friends. Charlie and I forged our musical partnership at Chopstix so Roaming Royalty owes it’s existence to that place. Saturday will surely be a party, my head already hurts thinking about it.

Last Weeks Successes

Charles got back from his gig on the cruise ship where he was an e-mail gathering machine. Over 75 new e-mails got added to our list, people from all over who had built a one-on-one analog connection with Charles while they were on the ship together, and thankfully we now have a better idea of  how to take that relationship forward.

Updated website

Got our website updated which was last weeks task. Actually neither of us had to do a thing, I went to odesk.com and outsourced the job. It wasn’t totally smooth but once the initial bumps were over it worked out great. In addition, I wrote a blog post about the whole experience and it got guest-posted over at Gen Y Rockstars. So I was able to get my website done for about $40, and I was able to use the experience to leverage OPA, Other People’s Audience and potentially drive a little traffic back to our new and improved site. If want to know more about outsourcing hit me up in the comments or by e-mail. I hired Iryna, here’s a copy of her listing if you’d like to go to odesk.com and hire her.

A Short Rant

I’m sure everyone has heard the saying “75% of success is just showing up” or some variation. I have good news for the people who will finish this contest, when you pass the finish line you have already done what 75% of your fellow artists are unwilling to do. Here’s my rant.

I’ve been booking some shows for us on the road in new cities we’ve never been too and I’m coming across an interesting booking practice that is new to me, but I’ve had to do this a couple of times now. Here’s the deal, Roaming Royalty gets ‘dibs’ on the night but the club wants 3 other bands and it’s up to us to flesh out the bill. They will give us some contact names, cause we don’t know any bands in Bozeman Montana, but we have to contact them and set it all up.
I initially didn’t think this was going to be all that hard because there’s a gozillion bands right? All I hear from the few bookers who actually talk to me is that they are overwhelmed with bands wanting shows so it’s s slam dunk right? Think again. In one spot I’ve contacted up to 20 bands, booking agents, fans, anyone who could help flesh out a show and I got 1 two way conversation going with a band who politely and promptly said they had that date filled. Not one other response. I’m offering a legit show on a Saturday night and I can’t can’t even get someone to take 30 seconds and type “Sorry we’re booked that night.” or whatever? Unreal.

One band out of the blue e-mailed me to try to get on the show, they weren’t like us at all, guitars up to elevendy and Cookie Monster vocals, but hit them back and said sure just ’cause I needed someone. Never heard back from them again, when initially, they hit me up. WTF?

So answer e-mails, show up, on time, be cool to people and you’re already miles ahead of what else is going on out there. Rant over.

Social Media

Love some it (rss feeds), others not so much (facebook). Maybe I’m just old but I miss MySpace, I could use MySpace and back in the day it really seemed to work, and it’s still useful for some things. Most bookers still ask if you have a MySpace page.

Commoncraft

If you were to choose one thing to focus on from this lesson it would be the commoncraft videos. Even if you think you know this stuff it’s good to take a minute and remind yourself why it’s cool and useful. And I’ll bet almost everyone will find one area that they were semi-familiar with before, but now have a new appreciation for it.

facebook

Never been a fan. Clunky to use, so much stuff is proprietary to facebook, applications are glitchy at best, the layout is boring and unchangeable. We were able to add a few hundred facebook fans pretty quickly with a little campaigning to our friends but once they clicked ‘like’, that was it, it just ended up being a quick ego stroke with no happy ending. I’m still not entirely sure when I’m engaging people as myself or as my band. Gotta admit though, there’s probably more people hanging out there than at any other place on the web. A necessary evil I guess, but likely doomed to end up like MySpace.

Blogs – the coolest thing in the world

A facebook page works best as information about a person, that’s why it’s good for keeping up with people you’re already connected with. It’s hard to approach someone you have no prior contact with on facebook. A blog is like a facebook page for an idea rather than a person, and so it’s much easier to actually make new friends on blogs. “You like under-water volley ball? Me Too!” it’s way easier to approach someone and strike up new friendships when you have a shared interest.

I love blogs I’ve got my toolbar filled with rss feeds from blogs about all kinds of stuff, music, travel, swimming, martial arts, the Science Channel, and I love going and hanging around, commenting, guest posting and discussing stuff I like. Get Chris Bracco’s book How to Really get Your Music on Blogs and check out his blog, it’s good.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on the non-music blogs because I figure being one of the only musicians hanging around the RV blog increases my chances of placing some music there, and they’re actually eager to have it, plus some of them have thousands of readers.

Flickr and Photbucket

Love ‘em. Need to do more with ‘em.

Twitter

I’m coming around with Twitter. My epiphany came when I started following some of the non-music people I’m interested in, Richard Dawkins, Michio Kaku, Neal DeGrasse-Tyson, Christopher Hitchens to name a few. And I really  like the people I follow like Greg Rollet who read the web for me and Tweet out the good stuff. I’m going to give it some more time.

Last Weeks successes and frustrations

By far the coolest thing I did last week was commit a paltry $35 a month to sponsor little Riya here. She is from Bangladesh and hopefully the little bit of cash that means nothing to me and my girls will make a difference for her. Right after this post there is a link if you’d like to sponsor a child too, it’s super easy and it’s legit. Along with the good feeling that comes with helping people, I got a hard lesson learned about our website. This weeks lesson is about website optimization and I needed this lesson last week ’cause our website failed us big time this week. what does that have to do with Riya here? read on.

So what happened was……

One of the morning radio shows here in Seattle was doing a sponsorship drive for World Vision, my wife and I and talked about sponsoring but hadn’t followed through so when Bob Rivers, the host of the show, said he would play your band on the air if you sponsored a child, that was that last incentive we needed. So I went to the website, sponsored Riya and then called the radio station and they were kind enough to put me on the air to talk about the band. Thank God for last weeks lesson ’cause I was so prepared.

Bob: “What are you guys called and what do you do?”

Me:” Bob, we’re Roaming Royalty, we play piano-powered power pop that sounds like Billy Joel fronting Muse.”  Yes. You just got PITCHED.

Bob: “Alright let’s take a listen, is this your music?”

and I hear……a dance mix of one of our songs that I had just posted, so I say “yeah that’s a dance mix of one of our songs” and what else am I supposed to say on the air? “No wait! play this other song, that’s really what we sound like.” That just makes me look like a jack ass that doesn’t have his shit together, which sadly, I was.

Lesson learned

If our website were optimized it would have a player with our best song front and center, the first and easiest thing for a new visitor to see and play. Somewhere nearby this player would be our pitch. If that had been the case, I wouldn’t have squandered a couple minutes airtime on a top rated morning show in Seattle, a huge radio market. AArrghh.

How we’re going to fix it

This is pretty much what I want to do

This one is perfect. It has a cool pic that represents who he is, he has his pitch right in the forefront, he has a player with presumably his best song and his e-mail right below that. I want this.

1. Get our pitch and a player with our best song in the upper right hand corner
2. Redo the color scheme
3. Make an intro video
4. Make it so the player doesn’t stop when people look at the different pages in the site
5. Possibly swap out the Reverbnation player for the Bandcamp player

To fix all this stuff I’m going to try something I’ve been wanting to do for a while; outsource the job. I’ve been hearing about how easy it is to outsource these kind of jobs for like 5 bucks an hour and I have a friend who is doing it so we’re going to hook up and see if we can get this thing fixed that way.

Fixing the e-mail gathering process

I got handed this at the bar the other night. You don’t get an easier e-mail than that, someone just comes up and hands it to you. So I mentioned to this person how I would enter this and there would be a confirmation e-mail that you have to click to actually be on the list. I also added that 3 free songs would be part of the deal for the click-thru. I’m using Reverbnation Fanreach for e-mail management and I had a brainstorm that I could pull up our Reverbnation page on my iPhone and whenever I’m talking to someone I can whip out the phone and get their e-mail right then. Then I noticed that there are a few other services out there for e-mail management so I went on a bit of a quest to see which one is right. I enlisted the aide of a fan to help me out with this and I plugged her e-mail into the different services and then had her send me over what she got in her inbox. Fanbridge had some great features but for the end user to get to their download, they had to go through a few pages and enter a lot of information, including phone number. she was pretty non-plussed by that and I agree. Bandcamp kicks ass at e-mail gathering and delivering a download, but then it doesn’t do anything else, you have to extract your e-mails and put them into something else. Aweber is better because it gathers the e-mails, auto responds, you can divide your list up, but it doesn’t handle your download and it costs money, not that much but it still costs you.  For the one’s we looked at Reverbnation was a clear winner, it gathers, handles downloads, auto responds, it services your list and it’s only $6 a month for all the cool features, however I have one more problem to solve.

Click-thru

Reverbnation has most of the features I want, the sign-up is easy, the downloads are easy, they have a slick looking auto-responder and I can gather e-mails with my phone. So I’ve been gathering e-mails at work like crazy but for some reason almost no one has clicked thru to confirm and officially get added to the list. Even in the case from the previous paragraph where she sought me out and asked me to add her to the list, yet she still didn’t click-thru once I did. I don’t get it. Maybe a lot of times the confirmation e-mails are heading straight to a spam folder, or maybe the subject line isn’t clear about what this e-mail is and it gets deleted, or maybe people are just humoring me and have no intention of clicking-thru. I just know of the dozen or so e-mails I gathered last week at work, only one clicked-thru to confirm, and some of those were from people who asked me to be on the list.

update on last week goals

I’ve been scoping out some DJ blogs and I’m formulating a plan to give away a piece of gear as a prize in a remix contest. Part of it is just going to the blogs and hanging out and seeing who’s active so I’m in that phase right now. Home Drunk Videos is on hold until we build a bigger mailing list because that is going to be crucial to making that work, so for the immediate future it’s; get the website optimized by outsourcing, keep hanging out at other blogs and build some relationships, and gathering as many Seattle e-mails as I can in person before we leave. Lastly, Charles (the other half of the band) is back from his cruise ship gig so I’m excited to get him involved in this contest.

Last weeks successes

I’m a chronic list maker so last weeks task was right up alley. Some good stuff that happened last week; I had my first ever guest blog post at GenY Rockstars, Charles sold 6 cd’s this week on the cruise ship he’s working on, we added 4 people to our mailing list, we made the down payment on our RV/truck that we’re going to be moving into, had several people look at the house, and sold a ton of our stuff on craigslist. In addition, I took my first swim of the year across Green Lake, posted my first tweet, went kayaking with my daughter and finished a remix of a song. I didn’t make the dream book like I mentioned last week but this blog has become the dream book. I ran into some walls with booking, this is a problem I really want to solve, I can’t seem to cut through the clutter that bookers get in their inbox. Hopefully this weeks task will be a step towards that.

Crafting the perfect 15 second pitch

I’ve been seeing these posters all over my neighborhood and after reading chapter 2 I feel bad for these guys because of how wrong they got it. I don’t know how much these guys spent on printing but it must have been a lot, like I said, I’m seeing these posters everywhere. Too bad, ’cause after  so much exposure I still have no idea what they sound like and frankly no interest. I can’t even tell you the name of the band. They couldn’t even commit to their already totally vague description by tagging it with ‘sort of’? OK, I have a good cautionary example for this weeks task.

Fan Surveying

This was the most enjoyable part of perfect pitch task. It was really good to get the perspective of the people who’ve heard us a bit, live and recorded. We know who we think we sound like, but what artists would our friends compare us too? The results were pleasing and not terribly surprising, 100% of people we asked mentioned Billy Joel, not surprising as Charles is a huge Billy Joel fan, and about 90% of people mentioned Muse who I often tell people is my favorite band. Some other names that came up seemed like they were based on one particular song rather than our overall sound, Maroon 5, New Order, Gavin DeGraw, U2, I can hear those influences but the Billy Joel meets Muse comparison seems to run through a lot of our stuff. It’s hard to compare yourself to your heroes ’cause I feel like I don’t want to compare myself to Muse until were close to being as good as they are, which we are not, but I hear it in the music and obviously others do too.

Some other pitches

The other pitch I really liked was “Piano-powered power pop” it looks good on the page and it’s a pretty apt description, the problem is saying it out loud, if I’m in a noisy club it just sounds like “ppppppp”, even in an elevator where it’s quiet it’s kind of hard to say understandably. I kind of like “piano rock” but that seems too broad, “modern piano rock” seems a little better “alternative piano rock”…not bad but I don’t love it. “Imagine Billy Joel as the frontman for Muse” might be a little mundane, but I think with that pitch a broad section of people can zero in on what we sound like, and I think we will deliver that sound.

Other stuff we’re working on

Here is a picture of the studio I used to own:

Here is a picture of the massively scaled down studio we’ll be playing live and recording with while we’re living on the road:

and part of that gear is going to go or be traded in for smaller gear. I found a cool new blog called Tour Small which is discussing exactly what we’re trying to do, tour as small as possible. I’m going to try to drop a gust post on it before too long. So with this scaled down setup a dance mix seems like a natural thing to do so check out this trance-y remix of one of our songs.

Other ideas I have for the coming weeks

Dance remix contest

The studio and the dance mix gave me an idea, I have some additional gear that I was going to get rid of, some decent stuff, mic preamp, mixer, audio interface for laptop, I thought I could put all the loops that make up the dance remix into a .zip file and go to some DJ blogs and have a remix contest and the winner gets a mic preamp, or mixer, or software or something. Seems like a good way to get some remixes and get the music out there.

Home Drunk Videos

The other idea is based an exercise we did to define your fans and what they’re like and what they do. We laughed that a lot of our fans were probably at home drinking like we were, so we wrote a song called “Home Drunk Videos” and we based the lyrics to the first verse on a video that involved copious drinking, me, a dog, and Charles singing “Don’t Stop Believin’” and that’s all I can say. We thought it would be great to have people send us links to videos of them being drunk at home, and we would post them on our website and have people vote on the best one and we will write the second and third verses based on the winners. These are the kind of ideas we have when were brainstorming but never follow through with so I’m determined to try to make these ideas happen. Right now we’re up against the lack of a mailing list, lack of any name recognition to DJ’s, lack of activity on our web site, but we’ll see what we can make happen.

Week One – Mentally preparing and goal setting

This is the first post in Ariel Hyatt’s blog challenge based on her highly recommended book Music Success in 9 Weeks. Maybe at the end of 9 weeks I’ll have someone else looking at this blog besides me and Charles. I’ll be archiving the whole thing in 1 page if you click the MSi9W Blog tab you can follow the progress uninterrupted. Thankfully this first task should be pretty easy because I’ve used some of the techniques Ariel talks about in Chapter 1 to achieve other goals. Here’s what I’ve done in the past to reach goals and I’ll use many of the same techniques during this contest.

The Dream book

In mid – August my family and I will be moving out of our family home in Seattle and into a Raptor 5th wheel trailer and we are going to live on the road and go out and see the country. The reasons behind this decision are the subject of a whole other blog, but one of the main reasons I wanted to do this was to have the freedom to be able to pursue my music on the road. What I want to do with our band is build up a loyal fanbase 1 fan at a time and do that by playing in front of as many people in as many towns as we can. I want to do this while maintaining the other thing in life I’m passionate about, my family. Making these 2 ideas come together took no small amount of dreaming and planning but we did it and I owe a lot of to my Dream Book.

It’s a 3 ring binder I got a Fred Meyer and to keep me motivated I cut out and glued pictures on the front of the book of all the places I want to visit while me and the family are on the road. It’s kind of a crap picture but if you could see clearly you’d see pics of the Grand Canyon, Burning Man, Mt Rushmore, Chaco canyon, Shakespeare in Ashland Oregon, a poster for Coachella music fest, New England in fall, NYC, and there’s more on the inside. Also on the inside are things like all the receipts from remodeling the kitchen which was part of getting the house ready for sale, and spreadsheets of how much it will cost a family of 5 to live on the road in a 5th wheel trailer.

My music dream book

Having all that stuff in one place kept me focused, plus it made it feel like my big goal was already happening and helped me to see where I was at with regard to all the individual goals that it took to get us to this point. So I’m going to apply the same strategy with regard to my music goals, first I need to go get another book, talk about an easy goal to get you started, you cant dumb it down much further than a trip to Fred Meyer. On it I’ll paste some pics to represent the areas I want to work on.

Area 1: Booking

This is the biggest area I want to work on. We’re literally betting the house being able to make something happen in this area. Fortunately for both Charles and I our “Day Job” is being dueling pianists. I don’t know how many readers will have seen a dueling piano show but this job comes with some big advantages; there are dueling piano bars all over the country and not that many pianists so getting booked into these rooms is a phone call away in most cases, so this allows us to come into a city and immediately make money playing music. The downside is that dueling piano shows, while fun, are not friendly to original music, so the goal is not just about getting bookings it’s about getting the right bookings. So the booking goals would look like this:

1. Start getting more bookings as an original act
2. Start guerrilla gigging as soon as possible
   
3. Start getting enough people at those bookings to make some $$$ by getting them in a sales funnel
4. Start getting enough buzz to get better nights and good opening slots
5. Start getting second and third stage bookings at as many festivals as possible
6. Start getting enough buzz to play first stage and good spots on the second stage at festivals

I could continue to break each of these down to smaller goals but right now I want to focus on the number 1 goal of getting in the door at some places that are right for our original music. I wrote an article about my booking adventures on the home page and it’s a way different game since I booked my last tour about 15 years ago. As for a time frame? I’d like to see us building an audience and a club circuit base in 2011 and see us doing the festival circuit in 2012. Oh, and I want to squeeze some trips to Europe or Japan in there too.

Area 2: Using dueling piano shows as lead generation for Roaming Royalty

Our mailing list is pathetic, our shows for the original act are virtually non-existent, and we’re happy to sell, well, anything, ever. The most F’d up thing about this is that Charles and I are out performing music 4 -5 nights a week, we should have so many leads it’s not even funny, our original band should have an automatic fanbase seeing as how we fill up a club on a nightly basis with people wanting to see us play music. Every night we have people come up to us and tell us how great we are and how much fun they had, the problem is, they had fun singing along to “Sweet Caroline” and “Piano Man” or they laughed at some of the goofy comedy bits we do in the show and these have nothing much to do with what we offer as an original band. There’s got to be an effective way to marry these things together and have the audience member who loves us while singing along to “Livn’ on a Prayer” become a paying customer for our album or original show.

The ManBandVan

I want get and build a van that will be sleeping quarters, a recording setup, and will also allow us to do guerrilla style live shows, as in, park the van somewhere open the doors plug in a couple of mics and keyboards and, boom, instant show. I just need an empty plain white utility van, like a FedEx van, and I can build and outfit the rest. I want to have a van purchased before the year is over, and I want to have a solid idea of how long it will take to build out. For some reason we’ve been calling it the ManBandVan (you have to say it fast like it’s one word).

$ale$

I’d like to up our sales. In fact we have nowhere to go but up. Generating a sale would be a thrill, generating multiple sales would make me thrilled beyond belief, and to have multiple sales of multiple products, I’d just about die from pleasure. Here’s what I’d like to see:

1. Have “Audio Bacon” turn a profit. roughly $2000 to go, that’s about 250 iTunes downloads or CD sales, that’s not too many.
2. Have some other cool products to offer, ideas so far; online dueling piano lessons, cool original shirt designs by a fashion designer friend, designer packaging of music, for instance we saw a band that packaged a CD single about video games in old time Atari video cartridges, we want to implement more ideas like that.
3. Really get our affiliate links happening once we have people coming to our site.
4. Get on a feature page at at least one of the bigger music sites, iTunes, eMusic, Lala, etc…
5. Get as many blog features as possible
6. Hopefully the above ideas will drive people into our sales funnel
7. Oh yeah, streamline the sales funnel so it, you know, works.

Zen stuff

This is more intangible but in the big picture I want everyone who connects to us live, or our website, or our music, I want them to feel like they got something of value. I want to feel like I’m making valuable things so it doesn’t feel like ‘sales’ when I’m asking for that e-mail address. I want to make music that I believe in strongly enough to overcome my fears and truly want to share it with everyone because I feel it has value.
OK. Week one. There’s what I’ll be working on.

todd