Flower Killers and Poster Killers

flowers, independent music, music publicity, posters, publicizing your music, singer-songwriter

I’m sad today.

I don’t enjoy going around and putting up posters and flyers for gigs. I doubt if anyone does. I’d much rather be home creating new music, or practicing, or, for that matter, watching a movie or reading a book. But until you’re big enough to hire your own publicity department or have a street team, you have to hit the streets yourself. Every band and singer-songwriter just starting out has to do it. So I’m not complaining. It’s like cleaning the house, you don’t like it but you have to do it.

This weekend is the Denver Post Underground Music Showcase. 200 bands playing various venues on S. Broadway in Denver. I have a gig the following weekend. So I figured that was the perfect place to advertise my show. Thousands of lovers of original independent music will be there.

A few months ago I paid a graphics artist to design to generic posters with a blank space where I can just fill in the specifics for each gig. So Wednesday night I got out my sharpies and made up several posters for my gig, then headed down to South Broadway and spent a couple hours putting them up in the showcase area.

Then Thursday night I went to down to the festival. However, I found that every single one of my posters had been torn down. Not a single one was up. They didn’t even last 24 hours.

Who tore them down?

The event organizers? Were they paranoid that I was competing with them? If so, they didn’t read the date on the poster. My gig is a week after the Showcase ends. And it seems laughable that they would feel threatened by little ol’ me. Afterall, I’m not big enough for them to invite me to perform at the Showcase (and probably justifiably so)–at least this year. So surely they wouldn’t they waste their time tearing down my posters. Would they?

Was it other bands or singer-songwriters? I hope not. Most of the folks I have met in the music community here have a cooperative and supportive attitude.

Was it the police? Perhaps there’s an ordinance against putting posters on light poles? If so, boy, they sure acted quick. When I’ve called the police to complain about the lack of enforcement of dangerous drivers running red lights, I’m told they don’t have the “resources” to enforce those laws. Perhaps posters on light poles is a higher law-enforcement priority than running red lights and other illegal activity that threatens public safety? I hope not.

Perhaps it was a random citizen who didn’t like my poster? Perhaps they thought my ugly face was defacing the beautiful dark green metal light pole? Art, of course, is subjective.

Or perhaps it was just someone has a lot of rage inside them, for whatever reasons–justified or not–who took out their anger by ripping down my posters?

I paid Kinko’s $1.50 each to print the posters that nobody will see. And I spent two hours of my life putting them up. So all that money and time is down the drain. But that’s not what bothers me the most.

The day before, I noticed that a flower was missing from my flower bed along the front sidewalk. Someone had ripped it right out the ground, roots and all. It was the only one of its type. I planted it last summer. At the beginning of this summer, it didn’t show much signs of life. I worried that it didn’t survive the winter. But then it produced one beautiful, yellow flower. It survived! Now it’s gone. What kind of person rips flowers up? Perhaps the same type of person who rips music posters down?

So I’m a little depressed today. I guess I’m overly sensitive. But it saddens me to know that there are people in the world who would rip a flower out of someone’s flower bed. And it saddens me to know that there are people who would rip down a poster for a struggling independent musician just trying to reach a few people with his music.

-Rob

Songwriting Lesson Learned: Don’t Care

Uncategorized

For those of you who have been following my blog, you know that I wrote several songs last fall and winter. I’m now trying those songs out at gigs and open mics; taking them for a test drive, so to speak. And tweaking them a little, lyrically and (especially) musically.

At the time, I made a conscious decision to experiment both musically and lyrically. That is, I consciously decided to try new things and not worry about whether the songs would be any good, whether anyone would like them; or even whether I would even ever perform or record them. The idea was to try new songwriting techniques. These songs would be “lab experiments”.

A funny thing happened. These “experiments” turned out to be some of my best songs, according to several friends and fans. In fact, after posting the the song “Misfit” to my myspace demo site, I wrote that I would probably never record or perform it, because it was so unconventional. Several people go on me about that, asking why not? They thought it was one of my best songs.

Based on that experiment, I now posit the following hypotheses about songwriting:

1. The more you concern yourself with writing a “good” song, the less likely the song will be good. In fact, you probably will never even finish writing the song. The less you care how good the song will be, the more likely it will be good.

2. The more you worry about whether people will like the song you’re writing, the less people will like it. On the contrary, the less you care whether anybody will like it, the more likely people will like it. That’s because the song will be honest.

In summary: be playful and experimental, both musically and lyrically, have fun, be emotionally honest, and don’t worry whether the song will be good or if anyone will like it. I don’t know if this will work for other songwriters, but it worked for me.

-Rob

Music Website Design

music websites

I’m redesigning my website (www.robroper.com). So I looked at other websites and made a list of things I like, and things I don’t like, about other music websites.

Things I don’t like:

1. Homepages that take 40 days and 40 nights to load. This is usually due to videos on the homepage, music players, and/or excessive high-resolution photos.

2. A homepage that’s not a homepage; you have to click something to enter. Why can you just bring me to your homepage.

3. Pathetic begging for money and support. Buy my CD! Come to my show! Get on my email list! Now!

4. A cluttered page. Too much stuff on one page.

5. Small fonts that are hard to read. I’m not going to read it if it hurts my eyes.

#5 and #6 frequently go together.

6. Music players that auto-play a song on the homepage.

7. 4 billion cookies. There’s no justification for more than one cookie.

What are the characteristics of a good music website?

The homepage should be simple, uncluttered, readable and fast loading. It should have the most important info up front. There should be links to other pages for everything else.

Music, video players and most photos should be on other pages linked to the homepage.

The site should express your personality. If you are humble and personable, then the site should convey that; it shouldn’t make you out to be self-centered and pretentious. On the other hand, if you are self-centered and pretentious… hey, a lot of fans like that in their heroes. 🙂

For me, I like color and shape, so I like a nice background and a nice color scheme.

And last, but definitely not least, the site code for the site should meet web standards, and you should test your site with 2 or 3 common browsers.

Of course, those are just my personal preferences. I’d be interested in hearing what others like and don’t like about music websites. And I’d love to get feedback on my work-in-progress, www.robroper.com. I’m just an amateur web designer at this point, but it’s fun.

-Rob

Art and Commerce, or No One Owes You Anything

music business, music marketing, performing, songwriting

If you put your heart and soul into creating a work of art, whether it be a song or a painting, do you have the right to demand that people appreciate it, take the time to admire it, maybe even spend money on it?

No.

Nobody owes you anything.

You can create whatever kind of music you want. Nobody’s stopping you. But as soon as you want other people to spend their time and/or money on your work, you’ve now entered the world of commerce. And the rules of commerce now apply.

If I want someone to spend money, or perhaps more valuable, their time listening to my music, I have to offer them something in return. My music must do something for them. Make them laugh, make them cry, make them think, or perhaps just be beautiful and allow them to appreciate beauty.

As common sense as that sounds, it took me awhile to figure that out.

If you’re a performer and/or songwriter, put on your music consumer hat for a minute. If I come to you and say, “Dude! You should buy my CD! You should take time out of your evening and pay the cover charge to come see me play!” What are you thinking? What if my music doesn’t do anything for you? Would you spend your time and money on me just because I’m a nice guy? Just because I spent hundreds of hours, much introspection and soul-searching, to write these songs? Maybe. But that means you’re doing it out of sympathy. Or even worse, pity.

Nobody owes me anything. It’s my–and your–job to figure out how our music can serve people. Then people will spend their time and money on us because they benefit from listening to it. And that’s how it should be.

-Rob