Okay, so I needed a rhyme for that post title. Could’ve been something vulgar, so make do with the Tom Cruise quote and get off my back already.

The important thing is that I now have two little buttons at the bottom of every blog post. See? They’re right there at the bottom. One’s from our favorite new method of saying very little, Twitter, and one’s from our benevolent overlords at Facebook. If you like something I’ve got to say, or if you just want to share it with your friends, please hit the buttons!

Futureproofing: Can’t see the buttons? It probably means both of those services have gone the way of MySpace and AOL. Don’t worry, there are probably other buttons already replacing them. Why are you reading a 6-month-old blog post anyway?

If you weren’t at the 140 Characters Conference in NYC, you probably missed our little chat about the real-time web and the modern music industry. Fortunately, the modern music industry has the real-time web so I can show you what we did!

I’m on the left, next to me is Syd Schwartz from EMI, then Ted Cohen from TAG Strategic, and finally Steve Greenberg from S-Curve Records.

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.