…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!

Wait, what?

Every Birdy Needs A Robot by Stampy

A fan of my weekly UStream shows sent me this fabulous piece of original art a couple days ago and, with permission, I’m posting it here. This is one of the single most impressive chunks of awesome anyone’s ever thrown at me. Not only did Stampy catch my fascination with osprey, my laptop with red case and sticker, my M-Audio keyboard, and even the ugly-ass Exit sign that lived behind me at my New Hampshire gigs, but check out the robot playing bass behind me.

Yup, that’s Prodo-1, my faithful co-host from High Orbit and snarky sidekick from Goodbye Planet Earth.

It’s stuff like this that reminds me why I do what I do. Thank you, Stampy, and all the others that have been sending in photos and art! Birds dream of having fans like you.

I’ve noticed that people are more passive about the way they find music- they don’t browse through record stores, they hear about a band from… somewhere else. If you’ve become interested in a new band, artist, album, or song in the past year, let me know what tipped you off!

Have you ever heard of Richard Cheese? He’s the guy who takes hard rock tunes like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Down With The Sickness” and turns them into cheesy lounge numbers. It’s his shtick, and he’s made a career out of it. Sort of like Weird Al with no creativity.

It’s like he adds a touch of class to dirty, grungy rock music.

Apparently Cheese proved how completely devoid of class he is at the recent New Media Expo in Vegas. To quote some attendees:

When Richard Cheese started his performance he started complaining about the Audio levels, and from what I heard later he had demanded from the organizer that all other prior performers audio levels be at a lower level then his.
Todd Cochrane, Geek News Central
[Video from the event can be found at this link, assuming Cheese hasn't sued him yet.]
[Too late... you'll have to find video on your own, it seems.]

Okay, I can understand wanting the best sound possible at a show. But I played that gig last year and, considering the crowd was apparently smaller this year in a room twice as large, I would’ve focused more on making a connection with the crowd than the levels.

And on that note, connect with the crowd he did:

Cheese began the assault on some of his biggest fans during the opening song..Cheese ripped a device from the hands of one of the concert’s main sponsors…before shutting the camera off and throwing it back. Several minutes later, Cheese spit water on another fan and his camera. The song closed with a lecture about how he hates people who like to capture fleeting moments with any sort of video device.

After the show concluded, Cheese assaulted one last guest who was talking into his own camcorder.
Matt Gunn, Average Samaritan

To me this is about as futile as walking into South Station in a tiger-striped speedo and yelling, “stop staring at me!”

So what’re the lessons here? Your fans have cameras (fans like Langley). Your fans are what matter. Sure, you want to sell a DVD later on, so do I. Your DVD will be a hell of a lot better quality than anything caught on a Palm Centro, and all those YouTube videos are going to be what sells that DVD in the long run.

And the number one lesson to take away from this? If your show is awesome, people might blog about it. If you’re a total prick, everyone WILL blog about it.

Notice: I usually like to leave my comments unmoderated, but blatant flame-baiting and “bring it on” escalation BS will be deleted immediately.