Here’s a really interesting infographic I came across this morning that highlights some recent trends in the social media world. Apparently the older crowd (50+) are warming up to social media and users in this demographic have skyrocketed over the past few months.
Phew! I’ve finally made it to the last week of the “Music Success in Nine Weeks” blogging challenge. It’s been a long and arduous journey, but I definitely learned and reinforced a lot of great advice that I can take with me and use to help the artists I work with on a daily basis.
As I was, you might be excited and satisfied with the early results of your hard work (new fans, a couple extra sales, nice comments on Facebook, etc). However, if you want to sustain your music career, you can’t stop after the first few months and just assume new people will magically find your website and purchase your old music. You have to keep up the hustle!
My pedal board
I know, I know. Some guitar players are going to look at the title of this post and go “HA! So-and-so artist didn’t know how to correctly order his guitar pedals, yet his guitar tone is iconic and awesome!”
However, what these skeptics may fail to realize is that there are DOZENS of factors that go into creating an awesome guitar tone. A good guitar amp, a killer axe, good technique, durable cables, posture, setting the action low, good intonation, playing style, and many more. I like to argue that the guitarist’s playing style is the biggest factor in determining guitar tone. You can have all the greatest gear in the world, but if you can’t pluck the strings, it’s all useless.
The piece of the guitar tone puzzle that I will be discussing here is the best order for your guitar pedals in the signal chain.
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you are already aware that I’m a huge advocate in bands and musicians having official websites. There are tons of advantages to having your own domain. I recently came across some comments on a post over at Digital Music News, where Constantine Roussos outlined sixteen very interesting and insightful reasons why every band should have their own website.
This band reached out to me through the contact form on my blog, and their music was so much different than anything I have reviewed thus far… so naturally I had to blog it.
Hungry Dinos is a “whisper rock” band based in San Fransisco, CA. If you are looking for the ultimate chill-out music, seriously look no further. I had this thing playing in the background at work the other day, and I don’t think I’ve ever been more productive. Hungry Dinos has a sound that is very familiar to popular indie artist Doveman, in that all the vocal melodies are completely whispered.
Week 8 in Ariel’s book focuses on real life networking, which is probably one of the most frequent things you will do as a human being. I was terrified of networking at first, but as with anything, practice and repetition has made it much easier for me. Reaching out to people online and offline is essential to any career, let alone music. Effective networking and connecting with people can open all kinds of interesting doors and introduce many new and exciting opportunities.
After nearly a decade (if my memory serves me right), MySpace is has finally decided to re-design the layout and appearance of its user and musician profile pages. Good news, right? Sort of. They definitely look more organized and MUCH easier to navigate, which is a plus. The downside, however, is that the backend has been re-organized as well, so you basically have to re-learn where everything is, which is exactly what I was looking forward to this morning. Joy.
Aside from the new look and feel, MySpace is still pretty much exactly the same. I do like that you can make the page look halfway decent now without having to create crazy templates and hacks. If you downloaded my free MySpace template from a few weeks ago, I highly recommend that you delete it, and upgrade to the new layout instead. It will save you tons of time and headaches (well, maybe not tons of headaches, as it is still MySpace we’re talking about here).
Any opinions about the new layout? I’m really not sure what to make of it yet, or if I should switch over some of my artists…what do you think? Speak up with a comment below.
I saw this on Reddit the other day, and I really, really, REALLY want somebody to manufacture this. It is definitely one of the coolest record players I have ever seen.
Little did I know, though, is that there have been numerous attempts at the portable record player in the past, but it has yet to really catch on. Check out some videos below of some other portable record players…
When I first heard these guys, I had one of those moments where the music totally reminded me of another band, but I still for the life of me cannot figure out what band it is!!! It’s driving me nuts, if anybody can read my subconscious I’d really appreciate it.
Edit: I think I figured it out…maybe… — Against Me!? Don’t the vocals sound very similar on some songs?
Anyways, Earwig hails from Columbus, Ohio, and writes some damn catchy indie/alt rock. I was instantly hooked into the album after hearing the Pinball Wizard-like intro to “Trees”, and listened to the entire album from start to finish without being distracted or bored once. They have some pretty interesting song titles, too, ranging from Sleepyhead (ehem, Passion Pit guys, come on!) to Lovesong Cockroach to Rumplestiltskin.
Today, I came across this very interesting emerging social network called Hibe, that seems to function in a way that is much similar to how we function in our real life social networks. With Facebook and most popular social networks, we have all of our friends lumped into one giant category, and everything you post about can be seen by everybody. In real life, you have groups of people that you hang out with and act differently around (work, family, friends, etc), and this is how Hibe functions.
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