Indie Band Survival Guide
Watch as I plug something that I think is good:
The Indie Band Survival Guide is one of those “how to work the music business” books that is actually helpful. These guys did a really great job of dealing with all the new stuff that’s happening in this space. And I say this not only because they interviewed me a lot. Anyone who has questions about how I have been able to turn an interest in robots and monkeys into a career as a musician (it still makes me laugh to say that) while barely ever having to leave my house or even put on pants – chances are the answers are in this book.
And currently, there’s a free eBook version being offered in connection with Eventful, you can get it simply by signing up with your email address at IndieGuide.com. Of course, the book can also be “purchased” if you’re into that sort of thing.
Last of the Spring Shows
It’s been a busy couple of months for sure, just a few more shows lined up for this Spring: Houston, Austin, New York City and Toronto. Luckily all this touring is happening before my live DVD/CD package is ready – it would have been a terrible shame to sell a bunch of them at all these shows. Wait, what?
Friday March 13 at 8PM
House of Blues (Houston, TX) with Paul and Storm
Tickets: tinyurl.com/cxdf8s
Sunday March 15 at 7PM
Antone’s (Austin, TX) with Paul and Storm
Tickets: tinyurl.com/ama6l7
(This is not an official part of SXSW, you must buy tickets to attend. Technically that’s true for all these shows I guess.)
Friday March 27 at 8PM
Symphony Space (New York, NY) with Paul and Storm
Tickets: tinyurl.com/dkzjoe
Thursday April 23 at 8 PM
Lula Lounge (Toronto, ON) with Paul and Storm
Tickets: tinyurl.com/czz9sn
Friday April 24 at 7:30 PM
Lula Lounge (Toronto, ON) with Paul and Storm
Tickets: tinyurl.com/bxr6lb
Kutiman Mixes YouTube
I was going to write this long thinky post about what this “means” and how amazing it is to be living in an era of such unprecedented creative opportunities thanks to the internet and the rise of amateur content, but I will leave it at this: in your face, Andrew Keen.
This is the work of Kutiman (via Open Up), an Israeli musician who creates really great music using bits and pieces of lots of YouTube videos. He’s got a whole album’s worth of material online at http://thru-you.com. He has also broken my skull open with the ball-peen hammer of his awesomeness. Here’s the opening track, “The Mother of All Funk Chords.” So amazing, so illegal. What are we going to do with you, future?
SMS to Email List
Poor Scarface has been inundated with questions about how I managed to set it up so that people can add themselves to my mailing list by sending a text message. It was actually pretty easy to do once I found the right site – the trick now is me remembering to stop my set and tell the audience to do it. I remembered in Ann Arbor, but I think probably I forgot in the last couple of shows before that, because I am a big fat dummy.
The trick: I signed up for a free account at Textmarks.com, which lets you choose a unique keyword (I chose JoCo, for obvious reasons). You can then set it up so that when someone texts a message to the Textmarks number (41411) that starts with your keyword, stuff happens. In my case, I set it up so that Textmarks parses the message, grabbing everything after the JoCo, which I assume is the email address. It then composes and posts to my “add this email to my mailing list” URL, passing that text as a parameter. The URL happens to be from the email list tools that are built into Hostbaby (my web host), but it would be pretty easy to do just about anything you want once you get the email into a page on your site – database access or some other further processing. Or if you’ve got some other mailing list management solution, as long as you can add with a URL you can use this method.
There is my secret. Go forth and SPAM.
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