Founder of CD Baby, talking about music, business, life.
Check out twistori.com. Click one of the big words on the left, then sit and watch it for a while.
It’s monitoring the public feed of thoughts people post to their twitter account, searching for occurences of “I love”, “I hate”, “I think”, “I feel”, “I wish”, etc.
Anonymous and candid, and really inspiring for lyric writing!
A great book called The Listening Book had this wonderful quote:
Restrictions will set you free
Example:
Someone says, “Write me a piece of music. Anything. No restrictions. Go!”
You’re stumped. The blank page syndrome.
Instead, someone says, “Write me a piece of music using only a flute, saw, and this broken toy piano. You can only use the notes D, E, and B - but never all 3 at the same time. It has to be in 3/4 time, start quiet, get loud, then get quiet by the end. Go!”
Aha! Now you’re cookin’!
One of the most common things I hear my musician friends say is, “We’re looking for a booking agent.” (or manager, label, promoter)
I reply, “Who?”
They say, “Uh… what?”
“Which booking agent are you looking for? What’s their name?”
“But… we don’t know!”
“How do you expect to find someone if you don’t even know their name!”
It’s not hard to find the answer to anything.
What venue do you want to play? Contact them and ask which booking agents they use.
What band do you want to emulate? Contact them and ask who their booking agent is.
Once you find the person’s name, voila - you’re no longer looking for a booking agent. You found them, and it only took a few minutes.
Yes I’m being a smart-ass, but trying to help.
Whenever you find you’re aiming for something you haven’t defined - GET SPECIFIC.
It’s amazing how that one step turns goals from impossible into easy.
EXAMPLES:
This applies to many things. I was working with a programming teacher to be a great Ruby programmer. When I first contacted him he said, “What does great mean to you? How will you know you’re great?” He made me get really specific. (For me it was “I will go through these 4 Ruby books and be able to write programs like the examples. I’ll know how to do anything I need to do off the top of my head, without looking it up first. I’ll be able to code in Ruby as effortlessly as I can in PHP.”) He then made me get even more specific about each of those 3 things, breaking them down into bits (how many chapters in those 4 books? how many per day will you do?).
Once I had named exactly what I wanted, THEN he could help me.
Sound familiar?
I admire people that experiment with their own life.
I got SO inspired after reading this article about marathon runner Dean Karnazes. Some key quotes:
He had pushed himself to the point of death to find out whether he was strong enough to survive. He was.
“Somewhere along the line, we seem to have confused comfort with happiness.”
“The human body is capable of extraordinary feats.”
“Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention to arrive safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: Wow!! What a ride!”
Yesterday, I beamed with excitement after reading this article about memory fanatic Piotr Wozniak. Key quotes:
He pursues extreme anonymity because he wants to avoid random interruptions to a long-running experiment he’s conducting on himself. He’s exploring what it’s like to live in strict obedience to reason. On first encounter, he appears to be one of the happiest people I’ve ever met.
With SuperMemo growing more and more popular, Wozniak felt that his ability to rationally control his life was slipping away. “There were 80 phone calls per day to handle. There was no time for learning, no time for programming, no time for sleep,” he recalls. In 1994, he disappeared for two weeks, leaving no information about where he was. The next year he was gone for 100 days. Each year, he has increased his time away. He doesn’t own a phone. He ignores his email for months at a time. And though he holds a PhD and has published in academic journals, he never attends conferences or scientific meetings.
His days are blocked into distinct periods: a creative period, a reading and studying period, an exercise period, an eating period, a resting period, and then a second creative period. He doesn’t get up at a regular hour and is passionate against alarm clocks.
A checklist Wozniak wrote a few years ago describing how to become a genius: You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to radically improved intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every convention of social life.
Then there’s my hero, Tim Ferriss, of the 4-Hour Workweek book, who tried radical experiments with work-time, outsourcing everything possible, only doing email once a week, keeping all phone calls to one minute or less, and firing 90% of his clients to focus on the most profitable few.
In my own life, for the last two years, I’ve been on an experiment to take all of the “someday I’d like to…” and “I wonder if I could…” things, and start doing them.
In short, I’ve been following the rule of “whatever you’re thinking, go do it”. Turning thought into action. (Also called “see what happens” - which makes everything more fun, less serious.)
What’s amazing is realizing how many things you’re considering doing, but not doing!
It feels great to fanatically eliminate the time between thinking something and doing it. (Hmm… kinda like an improvisational musician, right?)
If I had a record label, would you be signed to it?
I never liked the idea of having a record label, because you’re too deeply invested into something you don’t control.
So if I were to have a label, my decision on who to sign wouldn’t be decided just by the quality of the music. There are plenty of people with great music but destructive work-habits or an unsustainable approach to their career.
To confidently invest in an artist (as a label), I’d want to see:
And so you see why I’ll never have a label. Who could possibly fit this list? Garth Brooks? Dave Grohl?
I haven’t talked to any labels about this yet, but I wonder what their perspective would be. I’m friends with Jac Holzman who discovered the Doors and obviously didn’t regret it, despite Jim Morrison being the opposite of everything on my list. I should ask him. (Jac, not Jim.)
Anything you’d add to the list? (I’m assuming there are many things you’d subtract.)
How would microcredit work for musicians?
Just asking that question of myself and the world at the same time. Please add your thoughts in the comments, here, and I’ll post a 2nd post about this soon.
Please see…
… then give your thoughts, here!
“You can either be proactive or reactive when it comes to how you respond to certain things. When you are reactive, you blame other people and circumstances for obstacles or problems. Being proactive means taking responsibility for every aspect of your life.”
Steven Cravis made a comment on this blog saying, “We can’t do anything about things beyond our control so we might as well keep on focusing energy forward on the next thing we can create.”
It reminded me of a good metaphor from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (click that link to read the Wikipedia summary - the book itself is quite tedious).
The author says to imagine a circle that contains ALL the things you care about:
Inside of it, imagine a circle that contains ALL the things you can affect (do something about):
Your goal is to either expand your ability to do something about the things you care about…
… or shrink your circle of concern (stop caring about some things) so that you don’t care too much about things you can’t do anything about.
It’s an interesting metaphor I’ve thought of often, though usually for his final comment at the end of the section. I don’t have the book here but it was something like:
“Some dangerous individuals’ circle of influence is actually bigger than their circle of concern. They are affecting more than they care about, often unintentionally hurting others in their path.”
I’ve felt like that a lot over the last 6 years. I employ 85 people at CD Baby. I’ve never even met half of them. Clients I don’t know get hurt because I never replied to an email I never saw. I started hiring the services of a small company, then changed plans, and found out that my change-of-plans sent them into default on a bank loan, practically destroying their company. Etc.
I’m dangerous. I’m trying to be more cautious. I really do think of everything from the other person’s point of view, but man it’s hard to take every affected person into consideration for every decision.
I spoke at a conference last weekend, where a woman in the audience was SO mad about piracy that she was physically shaking, red in the face, tears in her eyes, fuming spitting livid, asking how we can stop this rampant piracy.
I didn’t answer her concern well, but I said “More people are killed by pigs than sharks each year, but because shark attacks are more newsworthy, they seem more prevalent. Piracy gets all the attention, but I don’t think most of you in this room have lost more than $30 to piracy.” (I got a big “Booo” from the audience for this.) “Obscurity is your real enemy. Fight obscurity until you’re a household name, then piracy will be more of a problem than obscurity. Until then, worry about pigs, not sharks.”
The woman got so furious about this that she screamed at me with tears in her eyes, “I HATE YOUR POINT OF VIEW, BUDDY!” (and some other angry things I forget.) From her point of view, piracy was Enemy #1 and anybody ignoring this massive threat was hurting us all.
Driving away from the event, of course I figured out what I wish I would have said in that moment:
The thing separating us from where we are and where we need to be is not piracy.
It’s always something more internal, whether writing, communicating, producing, networking, promoting, or taking a wildly different approach to marketing.
Putting so much attention and energy into fighting piracy (as if, when solved, you’ll suddenly start selling 10 times more) - is misguided effort, distracting you from what you really need to be improving.
That’s the real reason I often tell musicians not to worry about piracy. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. But energy spent worrying about it is energy better spent working on what you know you really need to do.
A guy writing a book asked me for 5 tips for musicians, today. Here are the 5 I gave off the top of my head:
Ah, it’s great to be a beginner again.
I’m starting some new companies to help musicians. Getting back to the core of what I love doing : helping my fellow musicians in ways that big companies don’t find worth it.
I’m learning piano - boogie piano, specifically, but I have to start with just doing my scale fingerings that I haven’t practiced in 18 years.
Great contrast from the complexity of running a company with 85 employees and 200,000 clients. Just practicing my scales with a metronome.
I sold my house, furnished! Now everything I own fits in my car. Once I read my queue of 50 books and give them to friends, everything I own should fit in 2 suitcases.
It’s fun to be back at square one.
Confidence is needed to shake off previous expertise.
Excitement comes from being in over your head.
Next comes Mandarin and surfing lessons.
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