Musicians must apparently use the following things.

Myspace
Facebook
Twitter
Drugs
Alcohol
Women

So the best way to do all of this and still have time to actually make music is by linking them. For example, you consume alcohol, drug and then use the women. Note that this is not undertaken by me, but I hear on the grape vine that there are certain heart throbs in the music scene that swear by such an approach. But of course these are more than likely just rumours. Cough.

More seriously promotion seems to be the most important thing in music, mailing lists, Facebook fan pages and twitter updates. I can hear you saying, you’re a hippocrite mark, Mr I write a self indulgent blog, however this time I’m not being negative. Its just the basics of being a bottom of the barrel scum bag musician these days. We can’t all be Jandek. Everybody has heard the stories about people becoming famous by putting their music on myspace, but I think it’s more like this: a&r rep walks down the street, sees the only musician in town and signs him. In this story Myspace is the proverbial street. The problem is that now this town is bursting with millions of kids looking for some easy fame, now enter the Idol tv shows and it gets even worse. The bottom line is the bottom line and if you don’t have dollar signs all over you nobody will touch you, this goes for all levels of music, if you’re a local nobody you can get shows at pubs as long as people want to sink piss to your shit. With the big guys it’s still all about numbers, tickets, cd’s and merch. Let’s think about music as if it were like choosing the colours to paint your house. I’m going to assume that the majority of houses are painted neutral colours. Everybody likes them, beige or White Walls etc etc etc, calming blues, peaceful greens and all that bullshit. So this is what music has largely come to, a consumer targeted product designed to maximise profits.

Don’t get me wrong there is really good music out there, it just doesn’t get rammed down your throat, most of these people are struggling just to break even. So now coming full circle, I am back to my point. The Internet and promotion, how can we not be appreciative of it, it makes it easier for us to find real art and also share our own work. We might not find fame, and for a lot of us thats not what we are looking for, but we can share our work, and have some satisfaction as we slave away at our day jobs that somebody might just be listening to one of our songs.

So yeah, after much pressure from, my accountant friends Mark and Ricky and after much thought, I am going to try and use this twitter and Facebook thing to promote, oh and also to babble opinionated bullshit.

The problem now come to motivation as when I am faced with the choice of making music and promoting music, making music always wins.

I think I got a bit off topic there.

Farewell