There is no greater threat to one’s career than playing to an audience that doesn’t want to hear you. A room full of strangers is much preferable to a room full of people that think you suck. It’s part of human nature to be vocal about that which we dislike, much more so than that which we love.

To put it simply, you’ll tell a couple of friends about something you really love, but you’ll tell the whole world about something that annoys you.

It’s like playing rap music in a country bar… If all you see is a crowd of wallets, you’re going to get beer bottles thrown at you. Before you start rapping, those people are just bystanders. Once you’ve given them a dose of something they don’t want, they become a negative PR force actively working against you.

This is the reason I do not sign people up for my email list that didn’t ask for it. I’ll send invites- ONCE -but if they don’t want my emails, I don’t want to send to them. My blacklist is almost as big as my mailing list. Why? Because each person I send an email to is remotely interested in my music. If they’re not, the last thing I want to do is annoy them!

Lately I’ve been receiving auto-DM invites to a music site via Twitter. One invite? Sure. Identical invites from many different people with no way to opt-out? Now I’m never going to sign up for that service. In fact, I’m writing a blog post about it because they’ve ticked me off. I am now a negative PR force working against them, all because they wouldn’t let me opt out.

The lesson? Don’t play rap to a country crowd. No audience is worse than the wrong audience.

The weather is at that point again where we straddle the line between ski season and bike season. Yesterday it was 60° (15c) in my town, easily warm enough to go for a bike ride. Even with all the skiing I’ve done this winter, I never really realized how much I wanted to just get OUT.

We do tend to trap ourselves, don’t we? We build walls of technology so that we can make ingenious little windows like Facebook and Twitter and look out at the world.

Yesterday I was riding through the world at 25-30mph (40-50 kph) on my electric bike, the Myxercycle. It looked a lot bigger than it has for the past 5 months. Here I am, Monday morning, typing into my little window again, but at least now I know the front door leads to a warmer world again. Forget the economy, things are looking brighter simply because I can bike again.

Well, at the very least, they wrote about me and my friend C.C. Chapman. This is pretty sweet, so please check it out. Here’s a clip from the article:

Photo by Angela Rowlings

“In a field as competitive as entertainment, what matters most is how well you connect with your fans,” said Ebel, who moved to Boston from Nashville, Tenn., a year ago. “The technological tools we have give us the power to not just talk to but to listen to more people on a more meaningful level. If I stopped listening to my fans, they’d stop listening to me.”
Ryan Foley, The Boston Herald

You can read the article in full at a ridiculously long URL that I’ll just say is here.

Yesterday I started to cry in my studio as I produced the new song for Matthew Ebel dot net subscribers. I’m not typically an emotional guy, but for some reason the subject matter combined with the lyrics combined with the way the arrangement was unfolding… well I just couldn’t help myself. I was a little surprised. I don’t cry. I’m an American Ebel male and emotions just don’t do that to me, but there I was sitting in my chair wiping off my cheeks.

Whenever something strange like that happens, I turn to the most trusted source in mass groupthink: Twitter. Fortunately, as it turns out, this kind of thing happens all the time:

Once or twice I’ve even cried while performing an original. When singing with a choir, I’ve made puddles
-carlalynnehall

I’ve done it once or twice when composing. It is usually the really simple parts that get me the most, though.
-Firr

It’s supposed to happen that way, I think. Writing & listening, both should be affected at times. Looking forward to hearing it.
-JimFarley

So who knows? Maybe this song will be fantastic. Or maybe it just means that one of my own songs has impacted me the way some of my others have impacted some fans. I can’t count how many emails I’ve received telling me that I Will Wait For You or Tennessee Never Cried brought someone to tears. Maybe it’s just my turn.

All I know is it felt really good.

Every morning I roll out of my bunk, shove caffeine down my craw, and find five to ten new Twitter followers in my inbox. Typically, I don’t have a clue who these people are or how they found me, but I check all of them out.

If I don’t know them, though, the first thing I look for is their follower-to-following ratio. I’ve noticed lately that the ratio is a big part of my decision whether or not I follow them back. I don’t really have a set rule on this yet, but sometimes it’s obvious; if someone’s following 1,000 people and only has 52 followers, I don’t even bother reading their short bio.

So what is the Golden Ratio for Twitter? I’m sure I’m not the only one that considers the Ratio, but I don’t yet have any set logic for following someone back. Do you? Assuming you don’t know the person (maybe you’ve just heard of them through blogs or whatnot), what makes you decide to follow someone on Twitter?

And, most importantly, when will I be able to change the twitter logo to an osprey? I think it’d look a hell of a lot cooler.

UPDATE: And yes, I find it amusing that all the early commenters so far found this post because my blog auto-tweets to my followers.