I got a request for advice from fellow musician Dan Russo and asked if I could post the exchange here. Hopefully this will help some of my other musician friends who follow my blog…

…I have always been super-impressed with your musical skills but I’m more impressed with your focus and determination and, I dare say, manipulation of the interwebs to your whim. I was wondering if you had any suggestions, insights, or advice. Does playing more matter? Does reaching out more matter? Which of your many outreaches works the best?

Honestly, nothing has mattered more to me than cultivating a relationship with my fans. I can do what I do primarily because my fans go above and beyond the call of duty.

This means a few practical things:

• Put yourself on sites that your fans will frequent- Facebook, Ping, Rock Climbing Numismatists Monthly Forums, whatever. Be present where your fans and potential fans are.
• Make sure comments from all these sites are emailed to you. You don’t need to visit every site you’re on to maintain a relationship. If your Livejournal-based fans communicate with you via LJ comment rather than emailing you directly, you’ll still get the comment in your email box if you tell LJ to send them to you.
• Aggregate wherever possible. I use a WP-to-LJ plugin and a WP-to-Twitter plugin for my blog, artistdata.com to cross-post my blog and calendar to Myspace and other sites, and a Notes app on Facebook to pull blog posts to my fan page. This way, I make a single blog post on my own website and it shows up almost everywhere (and all over Google, too). There are only a few sites where my fans are concentrated that I can’t cross-post, so I have to copy-paste my updates there whenever I can.

As for advice about playing more… yeah, I don’t know about that. I finally got an agent last week and I’m going to see how much an increased tour calendar helps. Hopefully that answers your question a bit!

Those of us that live for The New face a challenge that never changes: When is it the right time? I’m a fan of all things technological and it’s difficult- sometimes outright painful -to come to terms with a new development while the majority of the population still doesn’t “get it”. The trick is to equip your Robot Army with the Cutting Edge, then implement it when the rest of the world is ready.

Example 1: Virtual Reality

Remember Virtual Reality? If you weren’t around to witness the 90′s, just read the Wikipedia article. Otherwise, you’re well aware of the big hype that kinda went nowhere. VR hit pop culture like the Hula Hoop, from Nintendo’s migraine-seeding Virtual Boy to Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Man to the thank-God-it-was-never-widely-adopted Quicktime VR. All this at a time when the hottest Power Mac sported a whopping 110 MHz processor and could hold up to 264 MB of RAM.

Here we are in 2011. High-resolution LCD screens are so ubiquitous we’re turning iPods into digital watches with them, yet you can’t find VR goggles in the gaming peripherals at Best Buy. CPU’s, memory, and graphics technology have improved to the point where fully-rendered 3D games exist on your iPhone. Broadband internet now makes it possible for dizzyingly complex render files to travel across the world in milliseconds.

Shit, we actually invented Virtual Reality the way it was hyped up 20 years ago. For real. Virtual people, virtual objects, virtual sex, prims, and rock and roll. And the majority of the public couldn’t give a shit. Why? Because the hype happened 20 years too early. We saw the potential on the horizon and had our party before the birthday boy actually arrived. Now that he’s here, we’re all sick of cake and booze. Virtual Reality happened at the wrong time and now it’s merely a toy that lonely geeks and marketers play with.

And most of the marketers have already left.

Example 2: Podcasting

If only there was a way to listen to new music, talk shows, fiction, and all that cool radio stuff without having to schedule a time to sit in front of the magical talking antenna-box. Imagine it’s 2005 and Apple’s iPod has been out for 4 years. Everyone had one by 2003. Yes, everyone. Don’t argue with me, Steve is watching.

More importantly, blogs existed and circulated via something called RSS. By 2005 RSS had been around for six years and most people today still don’t even know what it is. Then someone (maybe Adam Curry) decided to test if an audio file could ride on that RSS feed. MP3′s started floating around college campuses five or ten years before iPods did. All three of these technologies had been invented, circulated, and field-tested for years. Unlike VR, they had no sex appeal. Stephen King didn’t write any short stories of crazed men killing people through blog feeds (at least, not that I know of anyway). Duke Nukem wasn’t reprogrammed and brought to video arcades as an XML stream.

I won’t say Apple started it (hi, Steve, I love you), but it certainly hit the public consciousness when iTunes added a little extra icon on the left side of the screen. Suddenly there’s a feeding frenzy: Podcasting companies open, rise, fall, and dissolve faster than sand castles. Companies throw marketing budgets at podcasting with a fervor rivaling a squid orgy. The RIAA sends out CDL’s to anyone who even thinks about the possibility of maybe considering the merits of planning to play big-label music on their own little show.

And because of that last part, guys like me suddenly have a career. Thank you.

Now it’s six years later and anyone with an iPod knows what a podcast is. NPR re-broadcasts all their content this way, formerly unknown authors are now well-known among the podcast-listening public. Some of us musicians are earning most of our living through podcasting. And we didn’t even need Pierce Brosnan and Jeff Fahey in rubber suits to pull it off.

Is It The Right Time?

I’ve ditched cable TV and watch all the same programming I used to via HD broadcast, iTunes, and web streams. I only torrent shows when their producers are too stupid to give me a legitimate means of buying them directly- but I still get the shows I want. Is it the right time for everyone to do this? Maybe, I’d give it another 2 years before everyone’s got a Mac Mini replacing their cable box.

I’ve stopped listening to commercial radio and find much better quality music with far fewer commercials via Pandora Radio and, of course, Podcasting. Is it the right time for everyone else to get their music digitally? Absolutely. The variety is much wider, the barrier to entry much lower. Services like Pandora and some podcasts ensure that musicians get paid every time their songs are played. Radio doesn’t do that, yet they run 1 minute of commercials for every 2 minutes of music.

I live on a spaceship somewhere just outside the Earth’s atmosphere and live on a diet of squid meat and quinoa. Is it time for everyone else to follow me? Hell no, will someone please send up a steak and some ice cream? It’s definitely the right time for that.

The New Music Seminar has named Matthew Ebel one of the top 100 “Artists on the Verge”. Their list is compiled based on analytics both online and traditional, including music sales (physical and digital), ticket sales, frequency of gigs, touring history, merchandise sales, media (both online and print), social media activity, online buzz and more.

Unlike a lot of “Top” lists, the Artist on the Verge Project is a closed process and solicitations are never accepted or considered. It’s NOT an open contest for artists to submit their music and NMS does not charge artists to enter or to be selected. Even being considered for this list is strictly invite-only.

To quote the NMS website:

The New Music Seminar recognizes these 100 Artists On the Verge as the strongest among the hundreds of thousands of artists in the field

You can see the entire Top 100 list here.

For reference, you should probably read my previous article about being quoted in Rolling Stone first.

If the other article was about being excited, this one’s about serious business. I have mentioned Pandora Radio more than a few times on Twitter and some might say I’m even becoming a fanboy. They may be right, but it’s not just because Pandora’s the flave of the month. I think Tim Westergren’s little project might just be the revolution we all thought podcasting would be.

The problem with modern music is that we’re running out of tastemakers. Commercial radio is aptly named- these days you’ll hear more car dealership ads than actual music. The tunes they do play tend to be limited to either the 20 newest songs off the Major Label Factory Floor or #1 hits from years gone by. Where the heck do people who want music discover new music?

Enter the robots.

Widespread adoption and integration aside, the one thing that could save the music industry are the robots. Specifically, Westergren’s Music Genome Project. Here’s a quote of mine that the guy from Rolling Stone didn’t print:

As long as the cold, dispassionate robots are the ones picking the playlist, the system will continue to work.

The beauty of the system is in its lack of control. Commercial radio playlists are largely controlled by a single office at Clear Channel or one of their few remaining competitors. Services like iLike and the countless indie music sites rely on users to select their own playlists- meaning if you’re not already on their radar, you’re not likely to end up there by accident. File sharing suffers the same limitation: only those that know about you are looking for you.
Read More…

Welcome, Rolling Stone readers and Pandora fans! In case you haven’t caught the Feb. 17 issue yet, RS ran an article on “Pandora’s Digital Kingdom”, all about the cutting-edge internet radio service that’s been making me happy for years now.

“Pandora is the first true music meritocracy,” says independent musician Matthew Ebel (an artist likely to pop up on a Ben Folds Five station). “The fact that there is no fat guy in a ponytail and suit in Chicago determining what 20 songs they are going to play is a huge thing.”
Rolling Stone

Now I know I should be super-excited about my name appearing in Rolling Stone- even if only in a brief line like that. And believe me, I am. I went out and picked up this issue before getting my morning coffee, if that gives you an idea of how jazzed up I am about it. In this day and age of new media (especially when a guy like me has championed podcasting, blogging, and the like for five years now), should I really be that thrilled over getting a tiny blurb in an old-school print mag? I don’t care, I’m pretty hamn dappy about it.

Truth be told, however, I was more excited to wake up and find a tweet from C.C. Chapman about finding the quote. Having my name printed once in four columns of text in an industry mag is one thing, but having someone with an alarmingly large retweet community mention it? That is far more relevant.

In any case, I encourage you to read the article. My involvement may be small, but the article really nails the direction I think music is heading. One of these days I’d like to meet Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora Radio, and shake his hand. If you want to read the full story, though, you’ll have to buy the issue or subscribe to Rolling Stone online, sadly- they don’t give this stuff away for free.

Update: I go into a bit more detail about Pandora itself here.

If this isn’t your first time here then you’ve obviously noticed a dramatic facelift to this place. After two and a half weeks of staring at a screen, I am finally done updating the site!

That means I’ll probably have broken a LOT of stuff. Seriously. If you encounter anything amiss, PLEASE send me an email via the Contact page or a short message via Twitter. I’ll fix things up as soon as I can!

In the mean time, I’m uploading stuff to the new and improved Matthew Ebel Store. Yup, now you’ll be able to get downloads, CD’s, shirts, and more directly from this site! Lossless audio compression, here we come…