You have to put yourself out there. Take some risks. That’s how you end up in the right place at the right time. If you wait for it without being proactive, you’ll have opportunity after opportunity pass you by.
So I’ve got a quick story. Well, at least it will be quick if you read it with the same enthusiasm that it is being written in. Otherwise, it will be long, but still well worth it.
It all started last Tuesday, when my friend Courtney invited Kelly and I to see a magic show, Brian Brushwood. Her friend, Jon, was the stage hand for Brian, so she wanted to see him, and the show was at Albright College, all of 2 minutes from my house. Despite it being climbing night and knowing nothing about Brushwood, we decided to go. It’d be something different, at the very least.
So we went. Ironically, I ended up as one of the randomly selected volunteers from the audience. It’s always comical when someone who doesn’t go to the school gets something… It was fun and the show was enjoyable. Sure, some of it was transparent, but some things were genuinely baffling.
After the show, we hung out with Courtney and Jon and his family for a while. Good people. Fun people. People we had just met.
In our conversation, it came up that I was a musician. Describing my music isn’t always the easiest, so after the attempt, I left them with a few cards. Jon said he’d check it out further and let me know if there was any place for my music within any of Brian’s podcasts.
Now I’ve never done a podcast. I’ve tried to work out streaming details, but it’s hard to get a guitar through a skype type system. But Brian is a podcast fiend. He’s most well known for Scam School, one about scamming free drinks from your friends and things of the like. Then he also has a comedy one on TWiT, NSFWShow. Conveniently, NSFW had a summer music series that their fans wanted them to continue year-round. More conveniently, their regular Tuesday night show was bumped to Wednesday night at Jon’s house.
So on Wednesday I get a text from Jon, inviting me to play on the show that night. The potential for thousands of people to be turned on to my music is kinda hard to pass up, so Kelly and I headed an hour and a half to Jon’s house for dinner and a podcast (keep in mind that this family we had only met the night before).
The whole night was great. Despite some technical difficulties with the podcast, it was a lot of fun and something completely different. Plus, dinner was awesome! Things sounded decent on our end, but apparently it sounded pretty horrific when littered with Skype artifacts. But somehow that was ok.
Because these guys have dedicated fans. Take, for instance, their comedy album, Night Attack. It was being pushed that night and the fans responded well. Well enough to push them to #5 in overall mp3 sales on amazon. These were fans who were gifting the artists with their own album in order to push it to the top. Sure, it’s a cheat on the system, but the point is that these fans are life fans.
So when I was on, people more or less ignored that the sound quality was horrendous. Honestly, I don’t know if I would have, but these guys did. And then they went online and listened to actual recordings. And then they went to amazon and went nuts.
Right now I have no idea what “went nuts” entails, but here’s what I saw the next morning:
Sure, it’s only amazon, but there’s still gotta be some force behind moving up to #5. Even if it were 10-20 sales… The best part is that, at least in the “Easy Listening” genre, I haven’t left the top 100 since. I was up as high as 85 on Sunday, but found that I had dropped to 12 by Monday morning. That pretty well means that I am continuing to have sales even after the live podcast. Which, though there were 1000 people live, they average something like 30,000 downloads on the podcast.
Again, it’s all about being proactive at putting yourself out there. Every sale counts. Every illegal torrent counts. They’re all potential fans. I just took a risk and put myself in front of upwards of 30,000 people – more than I’ve played in front of throughout my cumulative career! Plus I got an awesome dinner! The only downside was that I was tired the next day. Tired. You can only play in front of the same crowd so many times before you end up tired anyway, so why not take some chances?
Also, if you haven't picked up my debut album, Deconstructing the Temporal Lobe, then help keep me in the charts at amazon HERE.
And you can watch the podcast too (warning - I haven't finished watching it yet, but it probably has a good bit of language)