The exchange was short, but I felt it needed to become a full-on blog post. To give you a little context, I have about 3,000 Twitter followers, she’s got 1.3 Million. I just broke 1,000 fans on Facebook, she’s got six times that. So when I say that Zoe Keating is 100% independent and has never been on a major label or part of some slick industry power team, it doesn’t mean she’s at my level, still trying to grow the fan base enough to survive. She has gone forth, become fruitful, and even multiplied.

And yet, there’s this:

@matthewebel: Since touring is my weakest link, I’ll be watching you as you do this process. I really want to get out on the road again.

@zoecello: Yeah, I think its the missing piece in most DIY careers. I don’t know any booking agents.

I’ve said it many times on stage, in interviews, and when talking to music start-ups and record label people: Booking is the only thing independent musicians are getting no help with, and the last thing we need are venue suggestions and how-to advice. If Zoe Keating’s having a difficult go at it, God help those of us with 1/450th the follower base.

Who out there will step up to the plate and fill this need?

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.

[flickr align="left" class="alignleft" hspace="10"]photo:3062952888(square)[/flickr]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.

[tags]Matthew Ebel, piano rock, twitter[/tags]

I was self-employed for 365 consecutive days in 2007. As a result, I hugged my parents and grandparents more often than I had for the previous two years. I found out I’m going to be an uncle sometime in 2008.

I released a new album in 2007 that paid for itself from the pre-orders alone. Fans in Germany, the Netherlands, China, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, and the US have already bought copies. My fans released another album on my behalf seven months earlier. They also launched their own website at matthewebel.net and created their own music videos.

I discovered UStream, Second Life, and Twitter in 2007. Half my fan base has never seen me perform in person, and most of that half thinks I’m a bird. UStream.tv put my face and my music in front of viewers around the globe. Twitter has found me beds to sleep in, gathered crowds for badly publicized gigs, solved technological mishaps, and made working alone a lot less lonely.

I visited Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, California, Tennessee, New York, and New Jersey all in the name of the music business. More travel than I saw in the previous five years.

Touring has paid my bills in 2007. So has Coca-Cola, the Mommycast, crayon, Porter Novelli, Justin Kownacki, Joseph Jaffe, The US Postal Service, The Podcast & New Media Expo, Jeff Pulver, and a whole lot of music fans.

Chase Home Finance paid my bills for two and a half months in 2007, even though I wasn’t working there anymore.

I got my first mutual fund, my first IRA, my first business bank accounts, my own health insurance, and printed my first business checks with those useless stubs for people’s records.

Or, to summarize, 2008 is going to have a damn difficult time outclassing 2007.

[tags]Matthew Ebel, piano rock, 2007, 2008, Goodbye Planet Earth, Virtual Hot Wings, matthewebel.net, UStream, Twitter, Second Life, Hali Heron, Hali of Firpine, Touring, podcasting, Chase Home Finance[/tags]