When in the course of your bands business, it becomes necessary to cast off your old, crappy website and the confusing, unnavigable interface which you present to the world as your first impression, and to assume the powers of PHP, CSS, XML, RoR, and other technologies not yet invented in the pursuit of a highly compelling online experience, a more meaningful dialogue with your fanbase, and the glorious rewards of possibly higher merch sales, a decent respect to the opinions of webmasters everywhere requires that I should declare the causes which impel me to dream of a better way....
Ever heard of it? It stands for Software as a Service, and it's a little sector of the software/tech business that everyone is keeping an eye on right now. One of the leading vendors of this service right now is a company called SalesForce.com. My brother in law is actually their director of recruiting for the midwest region. What SaaS does is remove the need to buy software for your business. It moves the important stuff to the “cloud”, which is another name for the internet, and charges a monthly fee for the service. It's the same concept as Gmail, except that enterprise software is big, big business. Software companies don't just make a bundle when they sell it, they make a bigger bundle from selling the support contracts that every business inevitably needs to keep their company moving along.
So, SaaS removes the expense of buying, and instead rents you the software, along with the support, for however long you want it. I'm not in the market right now, so I don't know how long the contracts last, but the point is that companies probably won't continue to buy enterprise software if this model works out like SalesForce.com hopes it will. So far it's working like gangbusters. They're projecting about $1.3B in revenue for 2010.
The correlating service in the music business would be something like Napster, I guess. You pay a monthly fee and you get access to their whole database of music. Services like these haven't taken off for crap, mostly because iTunes already owns the market and it's still just too easy to rip music off for free. iTunes has proven such a success because they really do make it super easy to get what you want, the prices are reasonable, and they don't even insist on that DRM crap anymore (which was only there in the first place because the majors insisted on it).
What if a band with a pre-established fanbase wanted to try this out on their own? What if there were very regularly updated music, video, whatever on a site dedicated to the band, and the only place you could get that stuff was from that website? What if it were super simple for anyone to use, and super affordable for anyone to join? In other words, what if it were worth it?
Would people try it?
Would bands try it?
If the other option is to put out another CD that you can only buy at the merch table, or maybe online somewhere and even then only if you're already looking for it, I think this could be a way forward for a really motivated band.
This is a table I found that shows relative current interest in different computer programming languages. This was put together by measuring the book sales of books covering a specific language as compared to their sales from the year before. The size of the box tells their relative market share, and the color their relative market traction. You'll notice the really bright green one at the top, up 965%, is for Objective-C. Mac OS X applications, and iPhone applications are written in this language. I have personally contributed at least 2 purchases to that square over the last year...
So, if you're in a band and you don't have a website, you're not really a band, right? If you own a business and you don't have a website, your business doesn't really exist, right? If you ran a festival, could you see how you could get by without having a website?
The iPhone, and the mobile platform in general, is going to be the means by which info is spread, by which content is delivered, by which people are entertained and kept in the loop. The portable website, but better. Can we all agree on that much?
It wears you out. All the stories about how road eventually grinds good musicians into dust may be partially true. I'd suspect that it has more to do with drugs and alcohol on the road grinding musicians into dust. I don't have that problem, so mainly it just wears me out.
Exhaustion is a state that usually lends itself to some good playing, at least for me. Last night I was so tired I think my brain went into some kind of alpha dream state during the second set. That's when I do my best thinking when I have the energy, but not last night. Just laying down with the roots...
I started running about this time last year. I hadn't exercised regularly since college, where they gave you gym access along with your tuition. I spent the rest of my 20s gaining about 2 or 3 pounds a year, and not really doing much in the way of taking care of myself. It had occurred to me that the only exercise I was really ever going to be able to afford was running, but I hate running. I kept up this hope that some day I was going to be able to at least join a YMCA with a pool or something, as that was much more my speed.
I had a big winter last year, with the birth of my baby boy right in the middle of it. I had the same realization that I had had in college 11 years earlier – that one simple little thing that I could that would make me feel better was to start getting some regular exercise again. So I dug my running shoes out of the closet, as I had tried this before, and got started. The first mile isn't as hard as the second mile. And it must've taken me six months of plugging away at just running those two miles without stopping, but once I got over the hump, I really got over the hump.
My short run around where I live is right at 4 miles long, and I try to do that every other day when the weather allows. I start getting really antsy if I go more than a week. Without a shadow of a doubt, I'm in the best shape I've ever been in. I lost the pounds and then some, and haven't really relapsed at all as far as bad eating habits. My wife Michelle is a veg, so it's easy when I'm home, but I've managed to keep at it on the road with greater and greater success. I got up yesterday at 7:30 and went for about 3.5 with my buddy Matt, and then did another 3 or so here in Charleston. As you can tell, this is about nothing in particular, but if you hate running as bad as I did, there's a very good chance that you could love it as much as I do now...
Let me just say this, and I was a big PC defender/Mac smack-talker for many years. The adjustment period, when I bought my Mac last summer, was about an hour long. I just had to get used to closing windows in the left side of the screen instead of the right. Since the adjustment period has ended, and working on this thing has become sort of an extension of my arms, I gotta tell you – Macs just stay out of your way. It's that simple. I don't fight with it. i don't have to reboot or reinstall. I don't even have to think about it. When I got my iPhone a year and a half ago, I knew that this was a tool that would allow the most unorganized person to have a ball getting their shit together. That person is me. I'm pretty sure if i take the time to plot out some sort of productivity index for my life, it's going to start showing some serious upward movement around July of 08.
I know you know this already, but can we keep this off the Earthboard until I figure out what this is going to be about? I'm self conscious enough already. Danke...