The City Veins

As I think I’ve written about before, as part of a band only about 2-5% of your time is spent on actually playing/rehearsing music. The other 95-98% is “business time.” And not business time in the fun way described in the Flight of the Conchords song (though I’ve had that song stuck in my head for the last week). No, I mean the really fun business stuff such as designing web banner graphics then re-sizing them 17 times so that they fit the formats needed by various websites. And making daily trips to the post office to mail CDs to the people who sign up for them (side note: do that now if you have not, the link is on the right of this page). And racking your brain day and night to figure out how to increase your MySpace friends by 100.

The almost universal problem with being in a band is this: we join bands because we love to make and play music, and everyone thinks that their band has music that would/should be enjoyed by the masses. There is a delusional musician fantasy that tells all of us that “if just the right person hears our stuff, we’ll be huge”. In other words, we tend to think that if we take care of the music, the rest will magically work itself out.

That’s only partly true, and (sadly) increasingly less true in this day and age. There’s very few thriving live music scenes left anymore. I was reading about the 60s when The Doors were playing the Whiskey-A-Go-Go in LA. Back then, people used to just hang out there on a regular basis to see what new bands were any good. If you had good music, you built a buzz, like the Doors did.

Maybe it’s like that in some markets still, but more and more you have to bring your own crowd. People don’t take chances on going to music bars to hear a band they’ve never heard of; original music is seen as an annoyance to most bar-goers. Cover bands rake in cash because drunk people like to sing along to stuff they know; but original music is relegated to places where people go specifically to see a particular band. Thus, your music alone doesn’t cut it anymore; you need to bring a crowd; you need to build a following.

That’s the point we’re at. We have this product called “The City Veins,” and we think it’s a great product. The people who’ve tried our product have raved about it. But we need more people to want our product. We’ve got a ton of supply of “The City Veins,” but to be successful we need to build a demand. We’ve built a slight demand and some buzz in the past 3-4 months, but we want more.

So, that’s the mode I’m in - marketing. We’re about to launch a Web advertising campaign and MySpace blitz to drum up some more interest in us. I check out our “buzz indicators” like MySpace visits, number of CDs ordered on a given day, and number of hits to our blog several times a day, sitting on pins and needles as I nervously look to see how popular we are that day.

I never thought when I took up drums at 8 years old that I’d some day be describing my music in terms of basic economics, but in a sick way I’m glad I do. I’ve seen too many incredibly talented bands never make it anywhere because they don’t pay attention to these kinds of things. Likewise, I know of a lot of horrible bands that do very well thanks to smart marketing sense.

One day I want us to achieve so much success that we can just be musicians and make the art that makes us happy. But to get there, we’ve got to go through the “business time.”