I had a great time tonight listening to some great songwriters talk about the Art of Songwriting at the Bitter End Cafe in New York City. In fact, I made a short video with my cell phone camara, (not high quality for video or sound- which really does not do justice to the music - but is presented here more for flavor) of Tina Shafer, the host of the show (which happens every month at the Bitter End)
There were several performers at the show tonight including Kyle Pass, Derek James, Tina Shafer (of course), Deena Goodman, Kevin Bents and Peter Zizzo.
The performace was wonderful - it poured and poured and the streets were flooded yet the Bitter End was packed.
When I came in to The Bitter End tonight one of the artists was already performing on stage (see above) and I made my way to the back and ordered a beer and sat down. Soon, I was reunited with my friends from the Art of Living Course - which is how I came to know Tina Shafer in the first place. It was kinda nice that Tina brought up the Art of Living during the performance.
If I were a musician, I might have much more to say about each artist - but I can say all of them were professional and at peak form; many well known within their own circles, having fully arrived within those circles. In a way , being here tonight mirrors my life that, of late, has crossed paths with more influencials (those who have enough relationships to effect social and political change) than I expected to have in my life in some shape or form.
What struck me, from an internet standpoint, is how each artist was represented on Search Engines - and how much work here could be done. For example, Peter Zizzo, as accomplished as he is, is almost invisible (it's references to his work that show up - but little actually about him). In every case, it's fair to say that most of the artists at the performance tonight have not utilized the power of search to promote themselves, as a brand, as much as they could have.
In an earlier post about Whitney Biennial I mentioned that the artist of today is a Brand and measuring an artist's brand is only real way to measure artists now since the rest is really subjective (it does not matter if we're talking about a visual artist or a performing artist). I know some will disagree with me since performing artists can be acccessed on technique (as can visual artists, for that matter, or writers) - but what defines an artist is subjective - once can accept it or not. So what is left is Branding - and that's what people see and know.
To see if I could detect "BUZZ" and visibility for each of the artists that performed tonight I put them into BlogPulse Trend Search.
Derek James had the most visibility in the Blogosphere with Tina and Kyle almost invisible - not that they need that kind of publicity - yet it's tempting to wonder if artists truly understand how to exploit the reach of the internet to promote their own Brand -the same way they promote themselves on a TV, Radio or Print Medium.
Same thing with the other 3 artists -
Kevin Bents is invisible in the Blogosphere - where he did not need to be. The PR firms should be doing more for all these artists - yet they don't know how to do it on the internet either - the medium is so new - hardly anyone has realized the full potential of it.
The other day I mentioned the Tmobile SideKick III viral ad that I thought B.L. Ochman was behind - but it turned out she had nothing to do with it (but wish she had). Two weeks ago, in NYC, someone was robbed of their new Tmobile Sidekick - it made all the newspapers for about a day.
"A woman in NY accidentally left her Sidekick in a cab. Someone found it and was dumb enough to use it. The Sidekick knows all. The woman who lost it got a new one and immediately had the person's picture, AIM handle and numbers she called.
A friend of hers posted a lot of info about the theives. Read more about the Stolen Sidekick."
This one event - which was done to create awareness for the launch of the SideKick III was done with no money (so to speak) yet got onto every major news outlet.
While most artists could not take advantage of that situation - the concept is the same - there's enormous power to promote your brand that is hardly been touched.
What would the artists use the publicity for? To sell their CD's of course, without a record company to interfear - they can go direct to the consumer, just at ESTY.com is going direct to consumer for visual artists and I wrote about it here - Un-Raveling - Artists selling directly - cut out the dealer - it's all unraveling.
In my Blog, I have experiemented with posting about Cassie, Ashlee Simpson, Clay Aiken, Dark Chocolate, and other subjects where there is a significant amount of Buzz. Yet I found something interesting.
Artists like Cassie, on the other hand, appear to be hyped somewhat, as my posts about them generate little actual traffic to my blog, while my posts about Ashlee Simpson's nose job appears to generate a great deal of traffic, even a month after the post was written.
Clay Aiken's Fan base is very strong and grassroots. In short, Ashlee Simpson and Clay Aiken have a real Fan Base, while Cassie...I really don't know - maybe it's more hype by Tony Mottola than real popularity.
But if Tony Mottola could pull of "creating an artist" - if that's really true - it just proves that the Kingmakers of the Music Industry are great "StoryTellers", which is just what Seth Godin was saying all along - Marketers tell a story and that's what Artists do - tell their own story as a Brand. The better your "story" is, the more accepted you are.
To sum up, this evening at the Bitter End was great - and I could not resist using the Art of Songwriting as way to promote extending an artist's brand through the internet (it's not just having a site - its' much more than that).
Time to go to bed.
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