Song A Week Retrospective Part1 - Conception

Well it’s been nearly a month since I released the final song from my Song A Week project, so I thought it was time to have a retrospective, to see what I’ve learnt and what (if any) success I’ve had from it. I orginally tried to sum up the entire project into a single blog post but failed to cram a years worth of musical antics into a few paragraphs elequently, so instead I'm going to blog about it in two or three seperate chapters, over the next few weeks and so it gives me great pleasure to present to you, my first chapter explaining the conception of the project!

Code Monkeys
At some point in 2009 I became addicted to a cartoon called Code Monkeys, an original comedy set in the 1980s, which documents the humorous events that take place at a fictitious video games company. If you’re into old video games and you’ve got a sense of humour then I’d highly recommend it. Anyway, after falling in love with this pixelated work of genius I began reading about the show online and discovered that the incredibly catchy theme song was by Jonathan Coulton, and so I went off to his website to download it. The song in question had been released as part of a yearlong project entitled ‘Thing a Week’ for which Coulton wrote and released one new song every week for one year, as soon as I read this my brain started churning, I was thinking stuff like “I probably write a song every week already! Probably more!” and “I could do that standing on my head, and I wouldn’t need to quit my job like he did!” and “I’m having a go at that!” And so my own ‘Song A Week’ project was born.

Preparation
First things first, even though I write and record a lot of songs, I don’t actually release them, they normally sit on my hard drive and then occasionally I round up a selection that sound good together and put them up on my site as an album like I did with ’10 Trafalgar Rd’ and ‘Low Fidelity’. This isn’t that demanding a task and since it didn’t used to happen that often I could get away with a pretty basic website using static html, and no kind of blog or content management system. This had to change if I was going to be releasing new content on a weekly basis and so I redesigned the whole site with Joomla, which meant I had a back end to log into and add new content instantly without having to edit raw code each time.

Secondly I thought it’d be fun to have a podcast, in which I could speak a little about the song each week and then play that week’s song, I did this using Podcast Generator, a simple app that installs to your site and creates the necessary xml that iTunes requires in order to stream your podcast.

Thirdly, I also thought it’d be cool to do a YouTube video for each song as well, I’d maybe talk a bit about the week’s events and creativity and then I’d play the song at the end of the video.

Going Live
I announced my idea to the world via Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace etc. I recorded my first song Hurt Me Bitch, made a little video of me talking about the recording, created a podcast and uploaded the song itself to the site. I set the publishing date so that it wouldn’t show up for download until Friday, 1st January 2010 at 12am.

Sometime after midnight on my mediocre New Years Eve bender in Cambridge I checked my site on my phone, and there it was! My first song in the upcoming series was live!

How to get over a thousand views on YouTube

As an independent musician try to do absolutely everything I can to promote my music online and in the real word, I’m on all the major social networking sites, I blog, Tweet, podcast, post in forums, put out flyers and posters, hassle journalists and bloggers on a weekly basis and also inevitably, I YouTube!

YouTube’s becoming increasingly more important as a tool to promote yourself, a lot of people actually use it to find and listen to music and it’s now the second most widely used search engine in the world. Many people would rather watch a video explaining the answer to their various internet queries; I mean why just read a lasagne recipe when you can actually watch a semi-professional knock one up on YouTube?

So two years ago I created my very own YouTube account and uploaded my first ever video, which was an animation I was quite proud of at the time, having spent five days solid staring at a computer screen drawing it, and in the background was my song Prettyish, which I’m also fairly proud of. Two years later and that video has just under seven hundred views! Seven hundred! That’s at least eight days of hard graft gone into that! When I total up the recording and animation time! Part of me thinks that it was kind of still worth doing, as it’s a bit of extra content for my site and I still think it looks cool, plus it may have exposed me to a few extra people. However, another part of me thinks “For f*cks sake! Someone just filmed an infant biting his brother’s finger and they’ve got over two hundred and fifty million views! At least let me get past the thousand mark!! For the love of God! That’s something like fifty times more views that the first Moon landing! More people would actually watch this than the….” And then I go and have a nice cup of coffee and chill out for five minutes.



The outcome of this is that it’s long been an ambition of mine to try and get a YouTube video with over a thousand views, and not just because it’s been online for four years and has accidentally turned up in the search results of someone who’s searching for a lasagne recipe or Chocolate Rain. So far I’ve tried making music videos, tutorials and even comedy sketches that in my opinion should appeal to the lowest common denominators that chose to watch Thomas’s finger biting frenzy several million times. At the peak of all this I was actually making a low budget ten minute show, which was rammed with my friends who kindly made themselves look like idiots in front of a camera to help me out, competitions with cash prizes, theme music, title screens, live music and all sorts!


Two years on, and I’ve finally cracked it! I now have a YouTube clip with over one thousand views, and this is how I did it.

One Saturday afternoon I purchased some shoes, and they were slightly uncomfortable, they were quite stiff and they needed a little bit of wearing in, I knew that after a few months of wearing them they’d feel better but I’m impatient and I wanted them to be comfortable straight away. So I headed over to YouTube and searched for some videos about stretching shoes, and I came across a woman called Michelle who had a great idea about putting bags of water into your shoes and then putting them in the freezer. What a bloody good idea! Then I noticed her view stats, her video had over four million views, and then I remembered reading somewhere about making interesting video replies to other people’s videos in order to expose yourself to their viewers, light bulbs were going off all over my lethargic little brain, so I hurriedly got to work!
I filmed my shoe stretching antics, added some music and creative editing and then I uploaded the video, I then added it as a reply to Michelle’s video! Michelle never actually accepted it as a video reply, but due to the fact that I named it “RE: Stretch Shoes With Ice” it started to appear right under her video in the search results for this very specific topic and several months later I have nearly two thousand views and I’ve now added a little annotation to the video to let people know that I make music as well as stretch shoes, so hopefully I’ll be able to get some of that lovely shoe stretching traffic over to Aidy.com :-)



Well, there you have it, the feel good story of the year, I set myself a realistic and attainable goal and I kept plugging away and knocked this virtual curve ball out park! Stay tuned for more of my marketing expoits!

Finally On BBC Radio

Well, I finally got to play on a BBC radio station, BBC Radio Cambridgeshire to be more specific, and it wasn't due to sending CDs, or uploading MP3s, it was all down to a new DJ going by the name of Tom Simkins who found my music on the world wide internet, liked it and got in touch. Tom was great, he let us play three songs live in the studio and even played Not Your Day from a CD I bought along too, and then to top it all off he presented us with a trophy indicating that we were the last ever band to play on Thursday's Audio Files show, as it's now being re-vamped and moved to a Friday.

This was possibly one of the greatest days ever, and here's a picture of the trophy, which is now taking pride place on the left speaker in my little recording room.

You can listen to the show here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00b6rcj/BBC_Introducing_in_Cambridgeshire_30_09_2010/

BBC Introducing (Sorted)

I emailed the BBC again today with regards to the uploader still not working on the BBC Introducing page and I actually got a decent reply with some nice simple instructions on how to get your account working if you're having problems. I carried these out myself and my account is once again up and running, so I can now get stuff to the BBC without the cost of material items and postage!

Just submitted the following 3 tracks:
Pain In My Heart
Garden Leave
Race Cars

I already have a lovely confirmation email saying that they've got Pain In My Heart, and these are the steps to carry out if you're having problems with your account:

1. Visit bbc.co.uk/music/introducing/uploader and make sure you are not already signed in - click "Sign Out" in the top right hand corner of the page.

2. Now click the blue Sign In button, and enter your username and your password.

3. You'll then be asked to update your BBC membership account to our new BBC iD system. This should only take a minute, and afterwards you'll be taken back to the BBC Introducing uploader page.

4. You should now see a link on the right hand side of the page which says "Your Artist Profile". Click this button or just copy this URL into your browser http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/introducing/artists/profile/edit

5. You should now be looking at your artist profile. You might find the info boxes on the page are blank - if so, please fill them back in. After making changes, click Update at the bottom of the page.

6. Once you've done that, it will take you to the Track Upload page. Here you can select an MP3 and upload it to us. You should then get a confirmation email within 15 mins or so.

Music Success In Nine Weeks #6

Well, we're coming to a close now with the old MSI9W challenge thing but it's been interesting, and I've definitely learnt a few things about online marketing that I wasn't previously aware of such as the value of a mailing list, which I now have along with incentives for people to join. For the first time ever I actually went round the room after a gig this weekend and asked people if they'd like to join my mailing list in return for a CD, and low and behold people were only too happy to do so, and one's actually unsubscribed yet!

Another useful tip was the use of Google Reader, which I'm now getting pretty addicted too and it's how I now start my mornings before leaving for work, it's like the ultimate newspaper that caters just for me ;-) Here's a handy hint too, why not pop a little star next to the articles you comment on, that way if you filter by your starred articles you can see where you've been spending most of your time "interacting" within the blogosphere, and this should act as a fairly good indicator as to who may be more likely to write about your own musical antics.

Podsafe has also worked out to be a great little resource, and I've been played on a couple of shows already, I have the feeling that podcasters tend to mainly look at the new uploads on this site though, so if you have a multiple song you want to upload then don't put them all on there at once, ration them out slowly in order to make sure you have something on there that's amongst the new stuff for as long as possible.

Anyhow, I'm gonna sign out now as I'm pretty short on time as write this, it's Thursday, which means I'm gonna have get my latest Song A Week song out for tomorrow!

Music Success In Nine Weeks #5

It's been a little while since my last "Music Success" blog entry, but it's been a busy month, with a couple of festival appearances, my Song A Week project and my day job, but I haven't been neglecting my online marketing, and I've still been going through Ariel's various tips and tactics!

I actually sent out my first ever email newsletter today, I've been very slowly building up a mailing list by asking friends and people at gigs to join and I've even had a few people join from the from my site since I've started offering an exclusive MP3 as an incentive, still not in triple figures, but I'm getting there.

Web 2.0

With regards to Week 4, I'm fairly IT literate so I already have a Twitter account and I know how to use it, I also have a Blog, which you're currently reading and I am aware of what an RSS feed is, I have several on my site. The idea of using FlickR as a way of gaining more on-line exposure is pretty cool though, and I've now created myself a profile and I've uploaded some of my better music related pics to get the ball rolling. I've also joined Podsafe, which is a great site and I've already had airplay on one podcast as a result!

I'm now also an avid user of Google Reader and Technorati, which I've been using in conjunction with one another. I'm searching out blogs that interest me and blogs that write about similar artists to myself and I normally spend half an hour or so before going to work, just scanning the latest articles, and leaving the odd comments. It's actually quite addictive, like a magazine that caters just to me and my personal interests! But hopefully after a while, when I start to contact a few of them they may have some idea of who I am and be slightly more willing to deal with me. I actually no this kind of relationship should work fine, as I do write the odd review for a couple of smaller music blogs.

Right, I'm tired and I need sleep, it's been a long day! I'll post another entry soon, and hopefully I'll be a little bit closer to a triple figured mailing list and a couple of honourable mentions somewhere out there in the blogosphere!

Oh yeah, I also started using SoundCloud recently, it's a great site, and I've used it to create playlist to go with my Song A Week project.

BBC Introducing

I've tried on numerous occasions over the past decade or so to get a song played on Radio 1, but unfortunately without success. I've sent stuff to most of the DJs there, including John Peel a few months before his untimely death and the closest I got was when Steve Lamacq put me on the BBC site along with a short review, which I can now recite off by heart due to the amount of bios and press releases I've copy and pasted it in to.

Anyway, I'm now in my early thirties and still hammering away at the doors of the BBC, pleading and begging for one of their DJs play me on one of the national stations, and as a result I've also been using the BBC Introducing site to do this. The concept of this site is pretty cool, it gives you the ability to upload up to 3 tracks every 30 days, these tracks are listened to by your local BBC radio station (Cambridge in my case) and if they like any of them, they play them, and if they play them there's also a chance they'll get forwarded to the big boys at Radio 1. This is a great idea in theory as it probably filters the workload for the likes of Huw Stephens and his chums, and it's good for the environment and my wallet, since I don't need to knock up any CDs or purchase any padded envelopes etc...

However, after using BBC Introducing for about a year, I've only managed to get a total of 3 tracks to them, as doesn't actually appear to work the vast majority of the time. The first time I ever used it I received three emails, one for each uploaded track, telling me that they had uploaded with success, then I got three more emails telling, one per track, as each one of my carefully selected songs was listened to by my local BBC Producer. Cool! I was quite happy with this, the tracks didn't get played but that's cool, I waited for a while and then uploaded another three carefully selected songs. This time I didn't get the emails to say they'd been received, so I emailed support. Support told me the BBC Introducing emails had been problematic but everything was working okay so not to worry if I hadn't received anything.

I continued to upload within the given time scales and nothing ever seemed to get anywhere, and I never got any notification emails, even months later, so I emailed once again just to check that my tracks were uploading okay, they assured me they were and even emailed me a list of the last 3 tracks I'd uploaded. The list they emailed me contained the first three tracks I'd uploaded nearly a year ago! I emailed them once again and got no reply, so I'm now back to browsing through the BBC site for postal addresses, buying padded envelopes and burning CDs.

In conclusion it seems fairly hit and miss as to what's actually going on with this site, and I imagine it's not really top of BBCs priority to get it fixed by the sounds of it, I still use it now and again, just in case it's started working again, but I never receive any confirmation emails that would lead me to believe that it's working again. If you have music that you'd like to get into the hands of a BBC Radio DJ, by all means have a punt at BBC Introducing, but send out physical CDs too as it seems fairly unreliable, which is a shame as it's a great idea in theory.