making great first impressions as a musician matters

I've had a couple of different experiences recently with small business owners that brought to mind that age-old adage of "first impressions count".

Do it right, and you might have a customer for life. Do it wrong, and not only will you lose a potential customer (and more importantly a relationship), but you may very well create an anti-evangelist depending on how badly you screw it up.

This ties in with digital music and online promotion in a very big way. Think of all of the different ways that you interact with folks online. Are you staying conscious of the fact that everything you write will most likely stay in the realms of the internet forever (shouts to archive.org), but also that each post, tweet, update and blog you write can affect your relationship with potential fans of your music?

Case in point: I follow a music blog that I respect very much from a knowledge-gain standpoint, but the first time I made the effort to comment and interact, the blog owner ripped me a new one with a righteous tirade discounting all of the points I had made to a particular post. I wasn't irked so much that his opinions differed from mine, because that's life. What irked me was the manner in which he responded to me.

Fast forward a few months --- this music blog owner posted a link and information to some new music of his that is being released. I'm not vindictive, so I took a listen. The album was that good; it was a brilliant piece of electronic music.

But do you know what I remember more than how much I enjoyed the music? I remember being ripped on my first contact point with the artist. He not only lost a sale, he also lost someone who would have helped to promote his music to a wide network of music lovers, for free. Something to remember -- that first impressions you make as a musician go beyond your video, your music and your image, they show something of who you are as a person. That's going to be a key factor in building a fan-base.

peace!

Connecting emotionally with digital downloads

I'm curious to see how the mindset of new music fans (and by new I mean young people who have known nothing but digital downloads and digital music) is as far as connecting with the music. And to be specific, I don't mean to stir the troubling debate about downloading free or illegal music versus paying for it, but simply the merit of downloading and consuming music digitally.

At 34 years of age, and being a music nut as far back as I can remember to jamming the Jackson 5 album on cassette on a boombox in 1984, I came up on cassettes, compact discs and vinyl.

This topic popped in my mind as I was thinking about how close I am to finishing my often -delayed studio build, and how I will finally have access to my vinyl collection. Specifically, other than getting back to sampling records and making beats on the fly, I also am excited about encoding hip hop albums. This in itself may out me as a nerd, but it brings me to my point about this drop: I get more satisfaction and enjoyment out of listening to digital mp3s on the iPod from music that I have ripped from vinyl or compact disc than from music purchased directly from digital retailers. I still enjoy albums that I have bought digitally, but not nearly as much. In fact, at times when given a choice, I will skip over albums I bought digitally and go back to cuts I've encoded.

So the real question is this; do I feel a connection with the music because it was a physical object that I had to manipulate in order to hear the music, or do I feel a connection with the memories of the purchase experience - going to the store, meeting with friends, or listening to that album the first time. Do folks get the same connection streaming cuts on the internet, or from albums they've downloaded? I'm really curious. How about you? and does age and your 'generation' factor into it?

Resonant Filter interview with James Bernard

tip: there's a great interview with Propellerhead's specialist guru James Bernard over at Resonant Filter (and if you're not following that great blog, you should be!)