Alex Brubaker

I'm finally making it back to the MMC blogs. Again, this is a series on my experiences at the Millennium Music Conference in Harrisburg, PA a couple weeks ago. If you missed the first two, here are the links:
MMC15 - Part 1
MMC15 - Part 2

This post will cover the second session that I attended:

Music Industry Entrepreneurship - Dr. E. Michael Harrington, Lawrence Gelburd, Jason Spiewak, Jeff Snyder

This was a panel on how to approach music from an entrepreneurial standpoint. Since there were 4 minds contributing to this, I'll just use initials to denote who made which point (since there are 2 JS's, Jeff Snyder will just be Jeff). Also, as was the case with the previous posts, my commentary will be after their bullets, un-initialed.

• Balance analysis w/action - L.G.
• Looking at your record sales, number of facebook friends, and email stats is only half of the battle. The point of analyzing is to figure out what actions benefit you the most. Act accordingly. I've found that posting to this blog every few days helps build traffic on here, my website, and my reverbnation page. However, using the rest of the data, I can see at what times of day that works best and then act accordingly.
• Blogging
• Has to be relevant (no credit)
• When I'm reading anything, if it's not relevant to anything I do, then I have very little interest in it. Many people reading this or who may be reading this either have an interest in my music personally or are musicians themselves, so things like this I feel are relevant to the reader. Unfortunately, unless you're getting tons of traffic on one type of post and none on another, you've gotta have your readers help to tell you what's relevant to them. That being said, if you've made it this far, does anyone have any request for things they'd like me to write about?
• Crowd sourcing (no credit)
• Crowd sourcing is basically getting reader involvement. I feel like you first need to have a relevant blog before you can have people who care enough to ask you to write on something specific, but after that it would make sense that things would perpetuate themselves.
• Troll youtube for live performances of yourself - J.S.
• 46% of all youtube videos have > 500 views - Jeff
• I've trolled and trolled and trolled, but there's next to nothing. C'mon guys, take some videos of me playing! Doing little videos at home is one thing that's up there on the list of things to do, but I haven't quite gotten around to it yet. It does seem like youtube is the place to be these days, however. Andy Mckee's success is largely thanks to youtube. Unfortunately, so is Justin Bieber's, but that's a whole different set of blogs.
• Volunteer - get yourself in the door (no credit)
• This is largely what I've been doing. Paid gigs are often times gigs you get from people seeing free shows. One of the speakers was saying that he got his university job by volunteering a few hours a week. When everything is so reliant upon who you know, what better way to meet someone than by something that benefits them and costs them nothing. Sure, it may seem like shortchanging yourself, but occasionally you get some sort of break from those actions.
• Don't make excuses for your music - J.S.
• Play it w/conviction - L.G.
• If you don't believe in your music, who will? I'm definitely better about this now, but at first I would just rip myself apart for every mistake that I would make. When you show discouragement on stage or after a set, you and your music lose credibility. No one notices your mistakes 99% of the time, so just play them off, with confidence.
• Portray confidence in your website - M.H.
• Draw people in by making yourself sound good on your website. Saying that you sound like someone, but aren't as good isn't going to make me want to see you. You've got to set yourself apart by saying that you sound like this person, but also do x, y, and z. Essentially it's about having that 30 second elevator pitch to sell yourself.
• Make 3 goals for the next 2 years - L.G.
• Have 3 strategies for each goal - L.G.
• Have 3 things that you can have other people do for you for each strategy - L.G.
• This is like engineering "milestones" and how we like to do project planning. I'll have a later post (after the last MMC post), and actually try to come up with these for myself.
• Treat everyone as a potential friend - M.H.
• For me, someone who really has no faith in humanity, this is tough. Any type of entertainment requires a bit of handshaking and baby kissing in order to have good public appeal. Eminem would be a good figure to contrast this point, but I highly doubt that I'll be rubbing shoulders with the same crowd that he appeals to. I think for the most part I do a decent job at talking to people, but I can always do things better.

So this was sort of a long one. There is a ton covered in this, so if you've made it this far, I'd love to hear any thoughts on what was said. The next MMC blog is like 3 pages of notes, so it'll probably be a few pages. Maybe by the end of the week, I'll be done?

-Alex