Steve Mills - Life, the Universe and the Digital World

The inevitable social network backlash

I was reading an excellent article over on Justin Thurleys site today about being innovative in order to get publicity for your brand, music, book or whatever creative endeavor you currently pursue. He has a heap of interesting tips, all very useful and well thought out information.

The basic premise of online marketing is to make use of the features of the internet (connectivity, ease of transmission), and the best way to do this by making something that is unique, that stands out from everything else and draws enough attention to get above the noise of everything else.

And this has worked with spectacular results in the recent past, and for some individuals it will work wonders in the future. But I can see that at some stage in the near future, or even right now there will be a tipping point.

The nodes in your network, and those in the larger network will start to burn out. The message won’t be passed as far or as wide. People can only be enthused about so many things at once, and with so much viral content out there , people can only share so much via their social network. There is a chance that your great content will not find an audience if you do not also have some interesting mode of transmission as well as content.

The most interesting time coming up is when the social networking backlash begins, when people start getting sick of having to wade through piles of moderately to minimally useful junk send to them by their “friends”.

Make a Number one Hit - The KLF way

I downloaded an interesting document last week which I have been reading slowly over the past few days. It’s a book from 1988, written by the guys from the 80’s house/hip-hop group the KLF. It’s called then manual, and what it sets out to be is a manual for how to get a number one single.

They wrote it from experience, as it came out just after their big hit “Doctorin’ the Tardis” went to number one. It is a fascinating, tongue in cheek humorous look at the music business, but with a serious cynical insightful side that offers up some great truths and strategies for having a number one.

All through reading it I kept being reminded of how different things were in the late eighties, early nineties to today in the way of music production, and in general what you can do at home. There is a whole section of the book that deals with booking a studio etc that could be avoided with the right computer equipment these days, and the internet has revolutionised the last third of the book that discusses distribution and promotion.

Here are a few passages that I found memorable.

The basic Golden Rules as far as they apply to writing a debut single that can go to Number One in the U.K. Charts are as follows:

Do not attempt the impossible by trying to work the whole thing out before you go into the studio. Working in a studio has to be a fluid and
creative venture but at all times remember at the end of it you are going to have to have a 7? version that fulfils all the criteria
perfectly. Do not try and sit down and write a complete song.

Songs that have been written in such a way and reached Number One can only be done by the true song writing genius and be delivered by artists with such forceful convincing passion that the world HAS TO listen. You know the sort of thing, “Sailing” by Rod Stewart, “Without You” by Nilsson What the Golden Rules can provide you with is a framework that you can slot the component parts into.

The basic process that they outline in the book is as follows :

1. Listen to as much top 40 music as you can, and as much up coming dance music as you can

2. Hire a studio, an engineer and a programmer

3. Loan $20,000 from the bank, tell them that you are a small business owner starting a label

4. Pick some grooves (drum and bass riffs) from the albums, give them to the engineer and programmer, say you want to have something just like that

5. Manage the engineer and programmer through the creation of the track, if they are any good they will take the component parts and mash them together.

6. No matter how cheesy , gimmicky or hook laden the Frankenstein beast you create, just go with it. Push through it and go there.

7. Professionally master the finished product

That’s all I am up to at the moment. Interesting how with the advent of better digital audio workstations and software, the engineer and programmer parts are now the musician. We really do live in a golden age of music if you are into the process that goes into making it. The next stage deals with getting promotional and distribution support for your work.

I will keep you posted on what they have to say…

By the way if you have the time read the wikipedia entry on the KLF. Interesting characters, did some crazy blatant sampling which made them have to burn the whole pressing of one of their early singles. And they also dumped a dead sheep at an awards ceremony once… classy.

HERE THERE BE MONSTERS

Remember those olds sailors maps from antiquity, the kind you would see in a history book or encyclopedia. People of centuries ago had some pretty detailed maps of the areas that they frequently traveled , especially when you take into consideration the tools and mathematics that they used to draw them.

What really stood out for me though is the areas that weren’t quite as well mapped, or completely unexplored. In these areas, they had pictures of huge grotesque creatures, and dire warnings of what would happen to people if they crossed those waters. “Here there be monsters” “Death for those who enter” etc. etc.

The unknown always has an element of fear, and doing something new, or something that means a lot to you is an intense experience. We are so used to the everyday monotony of work routine, of being on a schedule and told what to do that we don’t quite know how to deal with these different, new experiences.
When we start something new, the voices of doubt and dismay are never far away. There is something inside that says “This is new, scary and different. I am going to come up with 50 reasons why you should stop”

Well you know what… that voice can go and get stuffed.

The manager at one of the places that I am consulting at has a good statement on the wall of his workstation. It reads something like ” As soon as a new way of doing things starts, the pull of the old ways of doing things begin. In the beginning, enthusiasm is enough to override this force, but in the longer term, a more sustainable source of motivation must be found”

We think that all great adventures are fun, are glamorous and exciting and should “feel good” the whole time. But while I agree that adventures should be REWARDING, I also see that the greatest adventures have their scary times, the boring times, the patience trying frustrating times. They have times where you don’t know what you are going to step in when you take that next step towards your goal.

It is my mission for the next few months to break this pattern of thought. To stop looking for the monsters in the uncharted waters, and just keep my ship sailing on course, until I reach new land.
Once I get there, the realise that a) There really weren’t any monsters and b) The journey was well worth it.

I have made some personal inroads with certain projects this year. I have gone into full time consulting, co-founded a businesses that is starting to do things (slowly) and worked on some interesting IT and marketing projects. General entrepreneur stuff, which has been a long time personal goal and has given me a sense of satisfaction.

But, alas, these have all been business goals, and left me with precious little time for working on other things. I want to create and promote music that people will enjoy, that will make them think, that will make them groove. Psychedelic trance/rock/electro/mystical/world music. Music that takes people on a journey.

Till next time…

Lets All Talk About The Same Thing

I am having a little bit of a change of direction for this site going forward, with more of a concentrated effort to showcase my work as a writer of fiction, non fiction and free thought. As I have said here over the past few weeks, there are enough blogs out there about people making money online, internet marketing and blogging in general. All are fine topics, and there are some pearls of wisdom to be found in the other 100000000 sites out there that talk about there subjects.
BUT, 95% of internet marketing is marketing in the pure sense. What they are marketing to you is products that allow you to market the concept of marketing to others. If that sentence doesn’t make a lot sense, the reason lies purely in the reality of the situation, and not my grammar. It is a pure caste made of air, a house of cards, the emperors’ new clothes. People telling others how to basically sell nothing. MLM pyramid schemes, get rich quick sales pages, too good too be true offers. Not for me thanks…

With latest Google page rank fiasco, I don’t really see the point of building a business who can have its profits halved, quartered or decimated completely by a giant corporation. That is not building an asset or a legacy. It’s a ticking time bomb, being fuelled by the time you put into it.

Sure if you love it, then do it. But do what you love, express the ideas that are in your head, the ideas that are yours alone because you thought of them. Create, don’t chorus with every other opinion or business plan or genre that you feel everyone wants to hear.

What I will share with you are ideas of how people can make money from their creative works, from their songs, novels, short stories, designs, graphics, games and un-categorisable projects. I will also detail my journey from unknown writer to hopefully known writer. I know that inside every blogger out there flogging some useless affiliate program (Hey that’s a new word… flogger : someone who writes purely for the commercial aspect online to sell ads) is a novel, or a screenplay, or a killer new bit of software just bursting to get out.

That is the revolYOUtion, letting that creative bit of you out, and making the systems of the internet and the commercial world work for you, not mindlessly selling your talented self after 10 cents of adsense dollars every day trying to make it rich, writing content that every other person is hashing out pursuing the same goals.

I think that I have made my point.