What do I do in a day some times? Beats me! Just kidding, starting to get in the responses for the comic book issue of QRD, which means I need to go ahead & knock out this next label owner issue.
I’m debating sending messages to all of my MySpace friends about how to stay in touch these days. I’m not sure if it’s worth the time it will take to do it (probably 30 minutes a day over 80 days, so that’s 40 hours!), but I suppose what else am I doing with my time? The one program that I have normally used to help me figure out who to send messages to doesn’t seem to work anymore with the new version of MySpace (update it seems the program can work during low traffic times on MySpace (meaning the middle of the night)) so it kinda makes me not want to bother with things. If I could get that too work, I could probably eliminate half of the messages I have to send (e.g. none of the profiles with over 20,000 friends, no one that hasn’t logged in for three years, no rappers, no “models”).
While I’m speaking of MySpace, I hear that Bandcamp (which seems one of the possible next waves of popular music sites) is starting to charge for free downloads if the band gets over 200 free downloads of a release in a month. Does anyone know anything about that? Seems kinda shitty on one hand & understandable on the other.
Darren Hayman (Hefner, etc) has this recent video post about money & music & fan-funding.
In general I agree with him, but meanwhile I’m looking into starting to do Kickstarter campaigns not associated directly with music. My first attempt will be for bottle openers mainly to test the demand (if people donate $300, there are bottle openers, other wise there are not). I don’t know that I would care to try to use fan funding to attempt to finance anything I wasn’t willing to blow the same money on myself. I mean, I would love to do the Chinese or Pacific rim tours I occasionally get asked to do but would need $10,000 to properly make happen & even then I doubt the money would recoup. While I know the experience of a month touring in China is not currently worth $10,000 to me, I think it would be equally bogus to try to get that money from the fans/friends/family that might give it to me because it isn’t worth $10,000 to me. I’ve invested more money & time than anyone in my career & I think that’s how it should be for the most part. If I got a cultural grant to go on an asiatic tour (or even a proper american one for that matter!) I would do it, but the idea of asking fans for their money that they work hard for sometimes seems a bit silly. I’ve got enough savings from when I was working my day job 60 hours a week that even if Silber & all my other artistic outlets absolutely fail, that I can maintain my below poverty level life style for about five more years. My hope is that by then things will have cleared up as far as both, “Do people want their to be professional musicians & artists?” & “Do I have what it takes to make money doing what I want to do?” It’s a funny spot I’m in, but I am so much better off than most people I know, that I really hate how much the blog probably comes off as me complaining.
The Armored Troopers VOTOMS show that I’ve been raving about so much got most of its episodes pulled off of YouTube today (the link in the blog from a few weeks ago says it’s taken down as copyright infringing (which of course it is, but out of print 25 year old cartoons somehow feel sharable)). I’d finished watching the main series & have a couple episodes to go in the sequels & then I’ll probably give it a big spoiler filled write-up on Finally Checking It Out.
Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m helping a woman (who might be Uma Thurman disguised as Tina Fey) to escape from someone/something (conspiracy story style) & we’re driving a white car that says on the back that it’s a Ford Crown Victoria but looks more like a Toyota Camry. We’re at a gas station & we can’t use a credit card to get gas or we’ll be tracked & we’re pretty much out of cash. I’m relatively sure from the surroundings that we’re just off the interstate south of Charleston, West Virginia. Which doesn’t do a lot for giving me ideas on how to scrounge up some quick cash, but I think if we just sleep in the car overnight an idea might come.
I’m talking to Jayson Elliot (Permission Magazine (my favorite mag in 1995)) & we’re talking about Clive Barker & he hands the phone over to his mom as a Clive Barker expert & I’m arguing that Clive Barker has been managing his time resources poorly because he should’ve focused on short stories like the Books of Blood instead of going into his thousand page novels, that for the most part those novels could’ve been compressed into five 20-page short stories containing the major scenes that he is so good at writing rather than needing so much connective tissue explaining how you get from one scene to the next.
if fans wanted to support you, they’d buy the CDs to begin with and thus you wouldn’t need something like kickstart. not you specifically. which is why things like kickstart works great for people with 1000s of fans to begin with but not so great for people with only 100′s and 20 of them families and friends.
I bet you’d get more responses from people if you were trying to raise money for grad school though.
Well, I think the thing with how Kickstarter really works is somehow people’s relatives feel better giving $100 through that than just handing it over. Public Enemy’s Kickstarter campaign failed & I would think they are in the 1000s of fans category even today. But Kickstarter rejected my pre-selling keychains campaign. Which is funny to me.
I think I could learn more in grade school than grad school at this point.
that’s where you learn to make friends and connections so you’re probably right. although you’d probably also stop being one of dem dere creative types as a result
True enough. If I had social skills, why would I need to make art?
dinner party conversations.