Social Madness!!!

Social media is a wonderful resource to get your talents and career a big jump start. It is so easy to become networked with musicians no matter where you are at. Plus, it is a great way to advertise your gigs for FREE!! For example.....

MySpace, Facebook, and Blogger are the three social networks that I am signed up for. Blogger is new to me yet, so I have yet to probably see the great benefits of blogging yet. MySpace and Facebook is a different story. MySpace is great for the fact that I basically have my musical background/resume posted for people to see. I am still working on getting a demo, once I get that done I imagine I will use it more and get more traffic flowing through my myspace page.

Facebook... oh the joys of Facebook. I started using it as a way to keep in contact with friends that I went with to a Catholic Youth Conference called Stuebenville in the Rockies. Then later on I formed my own jazz quintet and I realized how easy it is to advertise with Facebook. So I created a group for my band and was able to invite hundreds of people to my gigs. Of course I went in knowing probably 97% or more of the people weren't going to come. Either way people were aware and I can honestly say that whenever we played the jazz club Touch of Europe in Sioux Falls, SD we probably packed the place 9 times out of 10. You always have your regulars, and then someone that just came down to check it out, but normally I would see at least 5 people I invited off facebook, and they would come down and bring a bunch of friends. Easily filling up the jazz club.

Plus, now so many musicians are using facebook which is awesome. A lot of my instructors have signed up and almost every college student I know has it. Making it nice and easy to keep in contact with people that can really help you out in your career. What I find great now is that many influential musicians/drummers are signed up. Now I am facebook friends with Peter Erskine (Weather Report, Steely Dan, Stan Kenton, Diana Krall, so many more), Zoro the drummer (Lenny Kravitz, educator), and a few others. Which is awesome. Now if they are ever in town or I am close to where they are at, I can message them to see if I can catch a private drum lesson with them. I have done that before when Chad Wackerman came to Sioux Falls for a concert. I figured he would be in town for a full day or more so I simply sent him an e-mail asking for a private lesson, and the next thing I know is that I am in taking a private lesson from the former drummer of Frank Zappa! That wasn't through facebook, but I can imagine doing the same thing through facebook. Probably making it easier. I feel I got lucky with Chad, but now I feel little things like that could happen more often.

Now with Social Media in general. I began realizing the benefits of it for my career already, but after a talk given by Whitney Shaw, I realized more how big of a help social media can be. Twitter sounds like something we should all get. She explained it really well, but I probably won't understand it completely until I began using it. Other things I realized is that I really need to get a demo done soon! I can't wait to get some of my original work up, but I now struggle with the copright issue. I definately don't want to put it up for someone else to rip my ideas and get it copyrighted before I do. Not fun....

The one thing I don't like about social media is... WHEN DOES IT STOP. There is always something new coming out that is better than the previous thing. When do you draw the line and say, 2 or 3 social networks is enough. Or should a musician be really ambitious and sign up for anything that comes up to help promote his/her work. Social networking takes time, so there has to be a way to find balance between social media, creating your own art, and life in general.

Last summer, I kind of began to question social networking and if it is really necessary for my career. I was able to meet and talk with Mike Stern when he came into town with the Yellowjackets and he doesn't even have a cell phone! He has a home phone and that is it, but he is never short of work. It is an "Old School" approach that works for him.

All of this being said, I believe social networking is great if used in moderation and with a plan. Don't just waste time when you are logged into myspace or facebook when being used for your career, keep it simple. We artists have too much to work on rather than spending time on social media all day.