Media Temple
The new host. Hopefully you didn't swing by herein the last three hours whilst I've been wrestling with moving from GoDaddy over here. If anyone discovers anything funky, would you please let me know? The comments are down there >>>
The new host. Hopefully you didn't swing by herein the last three hours whilst I've been wrestling with moving from GoDaddy over here. If anyone discovers anything funky, would you please let me know? The comments are down there >>>
I'm relocating some stuff this week. I've just bought a year of hosting with Media Temple, which seems to be where all the cool kids are parking their websites, and trying concurrently to transfer all manner of domains and live websites to said host. This should be a lot of fun. I'll probably hose a lot of stuff this week, this website, the new forum, who knows what else. By the way, if you're thinking about registering a domain name, don't go Google Apps to do it. They are a partner with GoDaddy, so just skip the middleman and go straight to GoDaddy. I've had many issues with having the domain and the hosting plan under two different accounts at GoDaddy/Google. Live and learn...
At the end of this tunnel, however, I'll have several new notches in my belt and will be ready to confidently take on your website.
You have a website, right?
'Twas an interesting time. Some backstory:
The Wakarusa festival has been going on for 5 years now (or something like that). They experienced great success at the previous site of the festival in Lawrence, Kansas. The only problem with the site was that it was held at a state park there, which gave local AND federal law enforcement free reign to be a real pain in the ass. Lots of people got busted pretty much every year. It was kind of a bad scene in amidst all the fun and great bands and good beer and 20k or so people that came. We started doing it the second year, which must've been the year that the promoters, both independent and corporate, decided to make a push toward making it a big festival. We'd never even heard of it before we booked it and all of a sudden String Cheese is on there and Wilco. Cool. Wilco was awesome – it was the Ghost is Born tour. Anyway...
Due to such monumental hassles from the law, they finally decided to find a new site. They uprooted the festival and moved it to Arkansas – not their Kansas – to a giant farm out in the Ozarks. The guy that owns the place is named Dewey. He's an all around cool guy and he has a perfect place for holding a giant festival, complete with giant stage and all.
The first thing that I noticed was the lack of beer. Well, not exactly, but the keg beer was Miller High Life, which I can be all about sometimes, but usually not for an entire weekend. That was really the only bummer of the entire festival. The second thing I noticed was how much nicer the weather was than it ever was in Kansas. It was usually brutally hot at the old site, but up in the Ozarks it was cool and clear all weekend. Our set on Thursday night went very well despite some technical mishaps in front of Carbone. I personally kinda like it when his gear malfunctions because he inevitably plays his ass off like he's trying to prove something, so no problem there. The only thing was that for 15 agonizing minutes when we should've been starting our set, there were a couple thousand people watching Tim have a hard time with his gear. For those of you that were at DelFest, yes we need some stage help. We know.
One thing that I really noticed at this festival was the near-perfect timing of the stages. Everything was timed to have traffic move from here to here to here like a ballet. The walk from big stage to big stage was a lot shorter than the mile or so at the old festival site. Camping was right there.
One other thing that I noticed was the huge preponderance of really young, wookie kids. I think that just means that I'm getting older because at one point I remember thinking that most of these kids were probably in middle school when Phish broke up the last time. Young. There were some young kids there, but it didn't have the family vibe like DelFest or High Sierra do. Then I started pondering the sociological aspects of the festival scene in America and it's coincidence with Phish taking a break. The rise of the big corporate-sponsored festival happened more or less when Phish split, which left legions of summertime revelers with no Phish show to follow. Enter the big music festival and presto. I'm not sure about the economics of throwing a large festival like that, it's probably just dicey on a larger scale than a smaller family festival, but I think that corporate sponsorship probably helped to cushion the stress of making sure you brought enough people to the fest to pay the bands. Couple a deep recession leading to corporate festival sponsorship drying up and people having less available income with f-ing Phish going back on the road and I'd say it's probably going to be a rough summer for festival promoters. Langerado already tanked. Bonnaroo this weekend has Bruce Springsteen for a headliner (I can't fathom how the promoters of that one think that spending that much money on an artist like him is going to be worth it), so it should be interesting to see how that goes.
Conversely, it seems like a perfect time to be a club band. It's not that much money to spend to go to a show, especially compared with a vacation or a festival. Ahh, the music biz.
Musical highlights :
Sly and Robbie. The real deal. Matisyahu went on after them, which must've been rough for him.
Split Lip Rayfield, of course. “I drove that car for nearly two years, i even drove it on LSD...”
New Mastersounds. Yes, they are as good as everyone says. Can't lose with british accents, either.
Okay, I'm not a fan of Flash. I'm not sure why except that I think it's kinda like the B3 organ for me. It's great when someone uses it tastefully, but I've heard so many bands/albums misusing the B3 that it's kinda ruined for me.
This guy's got the right idea, however. If my whole aesthetic weren't about clean and direct these days, I'd want to do something like this.
Disclaimer(s) : I will me using the terms “we” and “us” and “our” to refer alternately to my band Railroad Earth, and to my colleagues in the jamband scene without differentiating every time which I'm talking about. You'll just have to figure it out. Hope it's not too confusing.
This began as an email to a Rails developer that I'd been conversing with. He brought up the Digg Trent Reznor interview. After the first bit my response became more like a blog post. So I'm posting.
I think the deal is that noone has come up with a solution that actually benefits the artist that the fans actually appreciate enough to pay for. Trent failed because everyone assumes he's already rich, so why bother. Plus he's trying to sell new music, which people just don't want to pay for anymore. Every record label is failing because nobody trusts record label executives and the stuff they're selling sucks anyway. It's scientifically designed to be disposable, so who's gonna pay for it? The only way forward is to start some kind of populist movement, but most semi-successful musicians just don't have the network or the wherewithal or the motivation or the ideas. I actually linked to that Trent interview when it came out, because I do think he's way ahead of alot of other people that high up in the biz, but he's just trying to sell music with nothing else attached to it. Yeah, the iPhone app is cool, but it still feels kinda piecemeal to me, since he's basically working a brand that's already 20 years old and trying to adapt.
Where we're going to succeed is here : we aren't just selling music. We have a huge fanbase that is rabid about supporting us whenever they can and coming to as many shows as possible and spreading the word about us far and wide because we're where the party is. We're the ultimate grassroots marketing test for web 2.0. Even String Cheese (and their business model) came along before Facebook, etc. Our fans buy our T-shirts and our music because they were probably at the show and they want a piece of that, and if they weren't at the show, they want it for the collection. We draw more people to any given show in any given town than 9 out of 10 people you see on late night TV. But noone knows how to market us because we're older or we're not very good looking so therefore we don't fit into the nice little mold that is the only thing most people in the PR or record label end of the biz know. Therefore, the reason we do 1500 people in Denver (for instance) with virtually no press or airplay at all is word of mouth, because we're where the party is. After the first 3 pages of Tribes, I started to put some pieces together.
Here's where I come in. I am not rich. I am not a label suit. I am not some manager trying to sell your band. I'm not some software geek. I'm just Grubb, the bass player from RRE that knows a lot people up and down and side to side in the jamband world. There is a huge amount of business going on here that hardly anyone pays any attention to unless it happens to be Bonnaroo weekend. As excited as the marketing world is about Twitter and Facebook, nobody over here really seems to get it. They do in a sense, but step number one, their websites – the first exposure to new fans for virtually all of us – look like shit, don't relay information, don't pull people in, don't look professional, don't give anyone a sense of who the band is or why they should be interested. I propose that if we, as a unit, started getting a lot more active about using the means available to us, and applying some dead-simple marketing initiative to our individual and collective web presence, we could start that populist movement this summer and put the last nails in the coffin of the crap-spewing, download-suing dinosaur that is the gasping, wheezing remnants of the major label/print media system.
This is where the idea for the website/mobile app framework came from. It's not complicated or original. There are competitors already out there. See kyte.com for the iPhone app framework, but they don't get it either. Their product is kinda ugly to my eye, and they're apparently only concerned with selling it to labels for their puppets (Soulja Boy, All American Rejects) to have. A few bands have gone on their own and developed an app (Death Cab, PUSA, Trent), but what bands in this end of the biz have the resources to do that? None apparently, and it's a pity. It's a pity because our fans travel incessantly to see us and lots of them have iPhones now. The Model/Controller end of every app built upon such a framework could stay exactly the same, and the View could stay largely the same for each bands' app. The possibilities are absolutely unlimited for the cool stuff you could put in there that would be of use to a traveling music fan...
Of course, only a relatively small portion of the world has a smartphone at this time, but virtually everyone has internet access. A huge swath of our fans are first exposed to us and our music via our websites. Our (rre's) website is okay, but not too spectacular visually, not too easy to navigate, and the eCommerce part of it is so outdated and difficult to use that it might as well not be there. Somehow we still manage to sell stuff through our website, which is a testament to our fans' determination to help support us. I suspect that many bands have a similar experience. They have merch there, but take a look at a well done eCommerce site, and there's no comparison. They need help. There's no reason to not have a better machine in place. One that's easy to use. One that's easy to find. One that integrates cleanly with the mobile app. I think I found the answer this weekend.
So help me if Seth Godin doesn't write at least 1 post out of 10 that makes me jump up and shout.
Seth's Blog: When the writer becomes the publisher.
Apply this one to the music biz. I guess if you read this blog, you get my drift.
After several months of sifting and searching, I think I've finally honed in on the framework around which I'll be helping anyone and everyone who needs help with their web presence. As my CSS and PHP skillz improve so will this site. This is how it looks now, so take a picture.
And thanks for the encouragement.
So an interesting thing happened yesterday. I have this cool plug-in installed on this blog. It's called StatPress, and it all but lets me look back through your screen at you. It logs all traffic to this blog, IP addresses, referring links, what OS and browser you're using, and what search term you entered into Google to find my blog. If this is creepy to you, you should know that every time you're on the internet you are broadcasting this info with every single click of the mouse. It's not that big of a deal. I don't know who you are, just what ISP you use and in what general area of the world you live. I know that there's a 6 to 1 chance that you're reading this on a computer that has Windows XP on it. I know that you are most likely browsing on Firefox 3, and that if it's not that it's IE7, and if it's not that, then you're probably on an iPhone. Good thing I installed that mobile plug in...
This is all just info that entertains my analytical mind while sitting in a tour bus on the way to DelFest. Usually when I throw up a new post there's a little blip in traffic unless I post a link on Facebook, in which case there's usually a big blip. I try to save those for the really good ones. The ones like “Coolest iPhone App Ever”. The act of titling that post that way was an unwitting example of what the social marketing dorks, I mean cool people, call Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. It didn't occur to me until a few days later when someone in France googled SimpleMindsXpress, and amazingly my blog post was the first one that popped up. On the French Google. The internet is weird.
So, briefly, how Google Works...
Google is constantly scanning more or less the entire internet to add pages to it's humongous database of searchable content. The automated robot that does this scanning is called a “Spider”. The Google Spider is my blogs most frequent visitor. It's already been here 9 times today, and just fetches a blog post at random as far as I can tell. It scans the content toward the top of the blog post and then moves on. It adds that content to it's database and then that post is searchable. Google weights pages that have more links to them as being more important than others that show up with the same search terms with fewer links to them. I once read hyperlinks as being described as the “currency” of the internet. Makes sense if you consider that the more links a particular page has pointed at it, the more wealthy it's likely to be in terms of traffic, especially search traffic. Why this is important to you and your band is that you better put the pertinent info that you want Google to notice toward the top of the page. If you don't have the Page Title/Info/Author metadata correctly filled in (ask your web guy, or better yet, ask me), you're making yourself harder to find.
So anyway, yesterday some marketing guy in South Carolina went and googled up “coolest buiness related iPhone apps (sic)”. Somehow, misspelling business made my blog post show up in the top ten list of results. I didn't misspell business in my blog post. I don't know. But anyway, this guy hops on Twitter and links to my blog post. I get on StatPress a couple hours later and notice a spike in traffic to that post. So I dig a little deeper and notice the referring link to this guy's Twitter update, and the beauty and utility of SEO becomes a factor in my life for the first time. I've only been blogging since February, and I'm writing this most for my own edification and partly for my friends and associates. After yesterdays incident it occurred to me that I should probably put my email address on here somewhere. So I did. And now my brain is humming along about how and why SEO is an important thing to you and me. Oh, and trying not to put an obnoxious amount of hyperlinks into this post.
Now how can I get this other Johnny Grubb to let me in the top ten. Is that Carly Simon I hear?
So, I've been dealing with these dudes, ScratchMedia. They doing some design work on the new RRE forum. I like them and the design a lot. It'll go live sometime in the next couple of days here.
Stay tuned.
I was always more of a Miles Davis man. I guess what I'm comparing it to is perhaps if someone were a Coltrane man. I'm not sure why you need to pick one or the other, hell you could like them both as much as you want, it's just that Miles' style always spoke to me so much more. His was so understated whereas the style that Coltrane made famous was one that seems to be embraced and expounded upon by many many legions of jambands, rock bands, jazz fusion bands, etc. Anyone that really liked a long jam with sheets and sheets of notes from the soloist. Not that Miles wasn't into big long jams either, but the period of his that is my favorite is somewhere between 1958 and 1965...
1958 actually saw him in a marvelous quartet with the aforementioned Mr. John Coltrane. Personally this is my favorite period of either artist. My all time favorite jazz record is one called “Relaxin with the Miles Davis Quintet”. There's a tune on there called “You're My Everything” that is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard. The piano player, Red Garland, starts the tune after Miles calls it (this is one of the four albums that Miles cut on the same day, there's lots of rough edges which is part of what I love about it. They keep a lot of the studio chatter on the master). Miles cuts him off and tells him to play it completely differently, which Red does with hardly a pause. It's heartbreaking. Coltrane's solo still gives me goosebumps after listening to this album for almost 15 years now.
Another amazing Coltrane solo is his from “Blue on Green” from Kind of Blue. I'm not a guy who ever sat around and really got off on other people's solos, but these two are very much worth checking out if you don't already own the recordings.
1965 saw Miles putting together his second “great” quintet. This is the one with a young Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter on the bass, Wayne Shorter on the sax and an 18 year old Tony Williams on the kit. My personal favorite tune of theirs is called “Madness” from the album Nefertiti. Miles was starting to get more than a little out there by this point. He was breaking down the traditional walls of form that he'd begun taking out with Kind of Blue. The level of talent and drive of this quintet took it way beyond where he was able to go with Cannonball and Bill Evans. I'm not really sure there is a form to the tune Madness, but it's worth a listen. I never consciously realized this in college, or even until recently, but Tony Williams doesn't touch a damn thing on his kit except the ride cymbal for the entire tune. If any jazz student out there wants to know what it sounds like to “swing”, start here. Most of the tune after the head is Tony's ride and Ron Carter's bass, swinging like a wrecking ball. The solos are nice, but what really kills me about how powerful this tune is is all the space, and how ballsy it is to leave so much of it there. Believe me, leaving space is way harder than filling it up, but it always leaves the listener more satisfied. Hearing this tune again this morning for the first time in a while reminds me of that and makes me wonder if I'm not in the wrong band sometimes...