So I’m running a business here. It’s not a profitable business – over the last 12 months, I seem to have posted a net loss of about $1200, once you figure in the expense of music lessons – but it’s a business. And businesses are supposed to have annual reports. Conveniently enough, I wrote a column last April, called “The Grunt Work”, in which I said this about the musical ditch-digging: “So I’m promising you that by this time next year, I’m going to have made a serious dent in all of it. I’ll be playing twice as often as I am now, with half of the gigs long-format foot-traffic situations; I’ll have an iTunes presence, and a MySpace presence, and I’ll be on Internet radio.” So how’m I doing? Answer: eh.
First of all, “this time next year” was in April, which means I’m four months late with my annual report. I’ll need to talk to my comptroller about that, after I figure out what a comptroller is and find out whether I have one. I’ve been advised that it’s not common to have a sixteen-month fiscal year, and it probably won’t become common until the Earth begins to take significantly longer to make its way around the Sun – say, in a billion years or so. So even before we begin our review, I’m in the doghouse.
Let’s take things one at a time. First of all, gigs. In the sixteen months before my pronouncement, I had 11 gigs. Since then, I’ve had 23, and about 10 of these gigs were what I would describe as long-form foot-traffic gigs. So I’ve hit my goals, but I’ll tell you, it doesn’t feel like I did it on purpose. When I look at my gig archive, I see a bunch of things that fell in my lap, which I don’t have any confidence will continue, and a small stream of steady gigs which isn’t nearly enough to sustain the momentum. So my fear is that my success here may simply have been an accident; but nonetheless, I’m obligated to give myself a good score.
MySpace was an easy one, kind of. The problem is, I loathe MySpace with every fiber of my not-inconsiderable being. My goal, on MySpace, was to squash every single dimension of the MySpace pages that it was possible to squash, and have a simple, clean page that points people to my own Web site, which I humbly believe beats the pants off anything those MySpace clowns can provide. And I succeeded, at least for a while; revisiting the page yesterday morning (http://www.myspace.com/sambayer), I saw that they had a new popup music player which needed to be trounced, and a couple links needed to be updated. So I’ll give myself a gold star for this one as well.
iTunes? This one should have been easy. My CDs have been on cdbaby.com for months now, but I have no links to them from my Web site, because I’ve been wringing my hands about my CD page. I’m finally, finally fixing that, but it’s taken forever, and the additional problem is that my live CD, “Thirds”, is not in any condition to be digitized and sold individually, because the CD is an uncut live show. And editing that has been a pain, but it’s been done for months now, and it’s still sitting on my desk. One ding for me.
Internet radio? Well, I’ve taken some steps. All my MP3s are now available for free download, and they’re all licensed with a Creative Commons license, and I’m all dressed up with no place to go, basically: I haven’t let the Interworld know of my genius. Two dings for me.
All in all, it’s not a terrible scorecard. Not great, but not terrible. The fundamental lesson is that I need to do a better job at the two things I hate the most: booking and publicity. I know that those are my two failings; I’ve known it for years. All I can say is, I’m working on it. What about next year? Oddly enough, my goals haven’t changed. I still want to be playing as much as I am, with as many long gigs, and I still want to be on Internet radio, and iTunes. If I can do those things, I’ll be a happy man. Or, at least, not quite as grumpy as I usually am.