Thoughts, Raves & Outright Beatings

Hey, it sounded like a nice title, right?

As perhaps one of my three regular readers may have noticed, I haven’t been around much in the past week. I was frankly too weak to write anything, let alone anything of any meaningful import.

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You run the risk of one of your friends twittering your Facebook business to the rest of the world:

I have shared friends across a bunch of social networking sites. Fortunately, none of them has revealed who, what, where, why, how and wherewithall going on with me or anyone else, that wasn’t meant to be shared.

There’s a reason why Facebook has some aspects of their user profiles private until connections are made. I don’t care how famous someone is among certain circles (high-techy, or otherwise). I personally think that the relationship callout was uncalled for.

I read in Slashdot this morning that Metallica is considering releasing their next album as a “pay what you want” (i.e. free) download.  This, despite their previous stance as anti-free downloading dashers.

Now, before I launch into my rant, some disclaimers:

1.  I was never a Metallica fan.  Liked “One”.  That was it.

2.  I do have an understanding of their initial stance with Napster, aspects of which I’ve already laid out in this blog post from a few moons ago.

However…

These were the same guys who, back in 2000, shut out 260,000 of their biggest fans from access to THEIR music, then made a huge show of it in front of the San Mateo County Courthouse.   And now these guys want to provide their new CD as donationware or even, er, free.

Excuuuuuuuuuuuuse me?

Now, the argument could be provided that, back in the initial Napster days, Metallica was not choosing to have their songs available on the download service.  It was being done for them, without either their knowledge or their consent.  Fair enough.  However, the way they went about settling their issue, locking over 260,000 users from the Napster services, and essentially treating their biggest fans as criminals was NOT the way to resolve the dilemma.  And in fact, if the reaction to the news from many in the Slashdot community is any indication, this PR nightmare from 8 years ago is going to come back to haunt them.    I’m sure the members of Metallica will see it differently.

In the meantime, according to another commentator over at Slashdot, David Bowie saw all this free download activity coming.  He’s apparently made all these plans on how to distribute his music and make his money should the use of a major record label no longer be necessary.   In his mind, and I agree with him on this, the primary income source of professional musicians and songwriters will end up just as it was before the invention of the phonograph - back in the realm of nightclubs and concert halls, where folks paid to listen to songs being performed, as opposed purchasing recorded versions of them.  For those not expecting to restructure their royalty and payment schemes due to the paradigm shift brought about by the creation of mp3s and the internet, this must be a devastating blow.  For all of a sudden, they are expected to provide free samples, where they didn’t have to before.

The rest of us, however, see nothing but marketing opportunities.

Despite my insistence that I need more time away from my computer, I’ve become hopelessly addicted to Twitter. The fact that my husband now has an account on there as well, along with a couple of friends of mine frankly isn’t helping much. But, oh well. A quick microblogging update is easier than writing an email, sometimes.

Anyway, thanks to the twitterings of some folks I currently follow (lots of high-profile tech dudes in Silicon Valley - see, I’m not strictly about the pop culture, peeps), I made my way to a couple of aggregators that basically does the same thing the folks at Facebook were bitching about a year or so ago; keep track of everything you, or anyone you are interested in, uh, following, on any or all of your online doings from any site, or collection of sites, that shares your activities on it/them. On Facebook, this type of activity aggregator was/is called a mini-feed, and it was condemned by old time Facebook users as an invasion of privacy. Of course, elsewhere, it’s called “sharing”. And as a result, the vanity in yet providing even further content to a breathless and waiting world from all your little sites into one feed becomes all the more evident.

Not that I mind. I mean, I keep a blog, don’t I (actually about 5 of them, two of which I rarely update)? I also have a myspace, a facebook, and a bunch of other pages I’m finding hard to keep track of. I had one old online friend breathlessly tell me that I’m “everywhere”, when he found me on Facebook. Seems like that with a lot of folks, these days. Forget early adoption. This is all about keeping up. But given my attention whore tendencies, one would have expected nothing less. Plus I have stuff to promote. Why not?

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Alot of folks in the MSM and in the blogesphere are pointing, laughing and/or crying over this clip of Mariah Carey on GMA from yesterday morning:

Personally, I don’t think she did all that bad. She made the most of a skipping backing track, acknowledged a bad situation, and saved it to the point where she came out floating like an, ahem, butterfly.

However, woe be to the backup singer who, around 3:05, tried to do a melissima (sp) all up and around her boss. Mariah’s comeback was golden. I’m in MC’s corner on this frankly. I’d be pissed too, if someone whom I hired to help me out tried to steal my shine. Not to mention, it was quite unprofessional.

That girl will probably have to continue her career on YouTube because Ms. Carey will probably make sure she never works as a backing singer in NYC ever again. Can’t say that I blame her.

Update: Apparently, some of the commentators over at A Hot Mess are saying that the vocal melissimas that stomped all over Carey weren’t from an out-of-line backing singer,  but were, in fact, the result of unsynced pre-recorded vocals.    The whole performance looks to have been a technical disaster, to say the least.
*smacks forehead*

Yes, I’m writing about my album, again…sigh…

Many years ago, when I was an admin assistant in the direct marketing department of a small publishing firm, staff had become depleted for a spell, and I had been asked to write press releases for their products until personnel became sufficient enough to take that function over again.   Unfortunately, for me, I really liked writing the press releases, and I was loathed to give it up when it was time to do so.  Even more unfortunately, in hindsight, I really didn’t know what I was doing when writing said releases and the results were so awful that the higher-ups were more than happy to relieve me of said duty.   It didn’t go without a fight, of course.   Nothing with me ever does.

Flash forward to last night:  I’m confronted with an opportunity on my Soundclick page to promote my new CD on one of their partners, myprgenie.com.   They have a service which, for a nominal fee, will take your promotions and send them to any news service you’d like them to be seen in.   And this month, they had a half-price deal for Soundclick members who just want to use one PR list (it’s free if you just want to advertise on their front page).   So, I set myself down and wracked my brain for something relatively news worthy that I could pop into my PR piece.   I initially did some research on myprgenie.com, but the results got me nowhere, because the efforts of other artists were just as bad, if not worse, than my initial stabs at release writing many moons ago.  I did research on about.com on how to write one for a debut CD (I was able to find something “about” it there - get it? nevermind…).  I went to Laura Vier’s site, because I remember seeing her bio there in PDF format, and I got really good ideas from viewing what her press person wrote about her last CD.

So, two hours later, after some sighing, crying, and laughing, I submitted the results to myprgenie.com, along with my credit card number.

It was ready by 6:30 this morning to view on their website:

http://www.myprgenie.com/item/1341/

In an hour, I’ve already gotten an inquiry.  SWEET!

Two hours later, it’s up on Mi2N.

http://mi2n.com/press.php3?press_nb=109112

And I’m in between NightRanger and Kim Ritchey in today’s Music Releases listing. I’m  just stylin’ yo!

http://mi2n.com/category.php3?cat_nb=1&page=1

I don’t know where this is going to go, yet.  This is something I should have done in the beginning of the month.  But I need some self-convincing to get myself out there, get past the old ways I used to promote myself online, and get in to the new.   Hopefully, anyone of any import will like what they hear.  But hey, I could use a bad review too.

Fingers crossed…

I was going back and forth about whether to post of my whereabouts in May or not, just because of this irrational fear that someone may try to find me in such a place (don’t try to figure out what that means), but what the hey?

The hubster and I are going to Ireland for a couple of weeks.  Leave May 5, return May 16th.   Exposition trip, more than a vacation, as we’ll be mostly hanging out in Dublin and exploring possible options in the area. But I’ve planned some fun for us - a pub crawl one night during our first week, a Saturday in Galway, and if we can afford it, a Tuesday in Cork.  I hope.

I don’t know about full-scale blogging, but I’ll definitely be twittering.  Hopefully, should the hotel’s wireless range be strong enough, or even exist to begin with, I’ll be posting some pictures or even a video or two.   We’ll be staying in the Ballsbridge area so expect to see a lot of pictures of South Dublin, if I do get to post them while we’re there (I’m damn well not telling you what hotel we’re staying at! :p )

I’ve already gotten some scant spare change in Euros (one place here charged me $450 for 250 Euros - I eventually discovered I had been ripped. DAMN!), and will probably take my entire paycheck with me when we finally fly out.  

I may even take some CDs (once I get them from Discmakers) and sneakily drop them off at a few coffeeshops while we’re there.  Who knows?

I’m excited and scared.  International traveling isn’t what it used to be.  I don’t care to be mistaken for some terrorist because I carry my Zoom H4 recorder pretty much everywhere I go.  I’m sure one could do worse than travel in Ireland, but I don’t care to end up penniless after two days because I miscalculated my exchange rate in paying for something that ended up costing me MUCH more than expected.  I’m, frankly, stupid like that.

OTOH, I haven’t been to Europe in 17 years.   I’m overdue for another visit.  Even if it’s to a country I’ve never been before.   I’m sure it can’t be too hard to get around in.

Damn, but I’m too set in my ways…wish me luck.