“Our guys on the Safari team even had special toilet paper made up with a Chrome logo on every sheet.”
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Let's all take a deep breath and get some perspective.
It's about time somebody told me about this site.
Bollocks!! Do not buy a domain from Yahoo.
I just want to make sure that shows up in the description of search results, if there are any. Now a parable...
Many years ago it occured to me that if I didn't go and buy JohnnyGrubb.com, then I was stupid. I had no idea how to make websites and no need for one whatsoever, but I did know enough to know that if I didn't buy my own friggin name then someday I might regret it. So, in March 2006, I bought my own name for 5 years. Doesn't that sound weird? Yahoo gave me a great deal, or so I thought then.
I soon started getting lots of emails exhorting me to host a website with them. Come on, it's only $15 a month and we'll help you make the website. It seemed like a good deal (it wasn't), so I did it- for about 6 months or so. At some point I got a new Wachovia check card and didn't update my info with Yahoo and they shut me off. Apparently when they shut me off, they also shut off access to my domain. I didn't find this out until yesterday. I'd kept an eye on it over the years to make sure that some Chinese company hadn't stolen it from me, and according to the records, I still owned it. Registered with Yahoo. Cool.
So, yesterday, as I was switching this website over to the new host (didn't even notice, did ya?), I got it into my head to try and point JohnnyGrubb.com over this way also. I'm thinking that perhaps JG will be the more personal website – the one that deals more with music – and that this (ibD) will be the business (that's presuming there's business, I know).
This is when I discover that even though I own JG, Yahoo won't let me in so I can transfer it, or even point it where I want it to go. So now it's time for a lesson that I learned the hard way over the last few days...
We'll skip the possibly fraudulent fiasco that is Yahoo Domains for now, and talk about what happens when you buy and host a domain/website. If you're a musician and you only buy a domain so that nobody else can buy it out from underneath you, it stays parked wherever you bought it. You can then go forward and decide to host a website with the company where it's registered, or you can wait and maybe host a website somewhere else. If you decide to host somewhere else, then you have to do some configuring. That domain that you bought is parked on a computer somewhere, and what you have to do is tell that computer to resolve any incoming requests made for johnnyGrubb.com, for example, into the proper numerical IP address for the website. That computer is called a “nameserver”, since its job on this earth is to take the english web address and translate it into a numerical IP address. If you want to host the website somewhere else you have to login to your Domain Control Panel, they all have 'em, and tell that domain to point to your webhosts' nameserver. This website, for example, is hosted at Media Temple, with a nameserver address of something like ns1.mediatemple.net. I had to login over at GoDaddy and tell them that, since that's where the domain name is registered. When you come here MediaTemple's nameserver gets the request and turns it into a number that the rest of their system can understand. It's kinda complicated at first. That's why it's good idea to buy the domain from the same place you're gonna host it, if you like things to be tidy.
I just found this all out. The hard way.
Since Yahoo wouldn't let me in to JohnnyGrubb.com's domain control panel, I couldn't point my name to my new web host. Bummer. So I had to shell out another $10 to re-register my domain with Yahoo just so I could get in there and point it in the right direction. Jerks. Like I said, my registration for that domain name wasn't supposed to expire until 2012, but I figured that $10 is probably better than me spending until 2012 trying to get someone at Yahoo on the line. They don't even have a customer service email. What kinda shit is that? I even dug up the email welcoming me to Yahoo domains and clicked on the link to my domain control panel, which promptly told me “oh you must have decided to let your overpriced, crappy webhosting service lapse because we can't let you in there. Sorry chump.”
Long story short. If you're a casual user buy your domain at GoDaddy. They're at least reputable enough and I had good experiences with their customer service during my period of hosting over there. DO NOT buy a domain from Yahoo.
Better yet, ask me. I'm getting the hang of this stuff.
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.