At the end of Pt IV, I said that band leaders could consider not hiring musicians who don’t blog to help promote the music. A few of you didn’t like that idea, suggesting that it’s all about the music, and why should someone have to be a writer in order to play music?
To which my answer is twofold:
- Firstly, I did say ‘it’s not a hard and fast rule’ – you don’t want to, you don’t have to. But…
- Secondly, you don’t have to be a writer to have a blog. You just have to want to tell people about cool stuff that’s going on around you. Some of the best blogs are a collection of really short posts – they’re a little bit of information, and some kind of embedded media. If you feel inspired to elaborate, or to write in the kind of long form article-based way that I do, that’s great, but that’s not why musicians should be blogging.
So, what is a blog?
In this sense, what’s unique and important about a blog is that it’s a space to talk about music and the things that go on around music – not just your music, but obviously including your own music – in a way that invites people to
- Read it
- Listen to or watch whatever you’ve embedded
- Comment
- Subscribe
- Share it
- Click through the links you’ve posted to other things that you’re recommending.
They are all things that happen best in blogs.
Let’s compare blogs to email newsletters
Email newsletters are an awkward beast – people sign up to them to find out what you’re up to, but get easily annoyed if you send out too much info, or too many messages about gigs they can’t get to. Because your emails are landing in their inbox, along with all the other stuff they need to deal with, too many of them and you’ll get unsubscribed… I don’t know many people who’d take kindly to you sending out news about other bands to your mailing list – that would feel like abuse of the service.
The opposite is true of blogs. I love reading blog posts by one artist about another. I love reading posts about what musicians get up to when they’re not making music. I love reading gig stories, seeing photos, bits of video, hearing about shows near me. Music blogs can be wonderful, without the person writing it having to be ‘a writer’.
So why demand it? Because it’s
- Free
- Easy
- Quick
- Friendly
and we need to change the culture. As I’ve said before, we all need to make a hell of a lot more noise about the wonderful music going on around us. The simple fact is that if people like your music, they’ll respect your opinion about other music. So if you get vocal about the music that excites you, and everyone else in ‘the scene’ does too, we all win. The great music gets a push that doesn’t require taking out ads in magazines.
I guarantee that you’ll get more CD/download sales or people coming to your shows from 5 of your peers talking enthusiastically on their blogs about what you do, that you will from taking out a quarter page ad in a music magazine.
So what now? Start a blog. My recommendation is WordPress.com – that way, if you want to move it to your own site at later date, you can export it to a self-hosted wordpress install (that’s what this site is).
But you could also do it on Myspace, or on a Facebook artist page, or Live Journal, or anywhere. It doesn’t really matter (it’s probably best to cut ‘n’ paste it into most of those places, if you can!)
Start by writing a quick post about why you’re starting it, find some people to link to, have some fun. You don’t have to go nuts telling everyone about it until you’re comfortable with it – break yourself in gently. But get in the habit of writing about what you’re doing, and lettin the world know about the other people in your scene who are being interesting. There’s more than enough audience for all of us, so let’s share the love.
In the comments, please post the link to your blog, or to other UK music bloggers you particularly enjoy… Have you ever discovered new music through a blog, or a recommendation on a forum? Where do you find out about gigs and new music these days?