Work was pretty intense in 2019, I didn't get to do much else, so when resolution season for this year rolled around I wanted to make sure I carved out some time for hobbying.
And the designated hobby is music. My plan is to make one piece of music per month. And because I'm the opposite of a completer-finisher I gave myself the additional rule that I have to put that piece of music out in public. It has to be available for public listening and purchasing. That means something has to be finished.
That's led me down all sorts of interesting rabbit holes because making music public is different.
And on with the music
First, the actual music. The point here is not for it to be brilliant. It's for it to be done. I'm thinking of it as a bit like blogging. I'm going to make stuff quickly, put it out in the world and see what I learn from it. Consequently I set myself a strict constraint for making the first piece. I wrote it on the M1 one Friday evening, while driving to Derbyshire. (I wasn't driving). I did it all on a Volca Sample and then added a bit of delay and did some mixing in Ableton Live.
To further prevent myself procrastinating I vowed not to tinker too much with mixing and mastering. So once it was all in the right order I just uploaded it to Landr for mastering and did whatever they said.
The finished track is well minimal. Very little happens. But I like to tell myself it fails to happen in a slightly charming way. You decide. I've decided that the 'record company' is Specialist Equipment, the band/artist will be called Elite Panic and the first track is called Shaky Debut. Here it is on bandcamp/soundcloud/spotify.
Right now I have 2 monthly listeners on Spotify. And they're both me. Add me to your playlists!
And on with the promotion
As well as making the music I also want to understand more about how the modern music business works. So I'm keen to try different promotional ideas and for this month I've been playing with instagram. This has been fascinating. I spent £28.20 on promoting this post to a UK audience, 13-65, interested in electronic dance music. Instagram make this very easy to do (once you get past the data-doubt of connecting things to your Facebook page). The audience I reached looked like this:
Instagram clearly have a lot of kids they can serve you.
All that resulted in 778 likes, 5 bookmarks, 0 comments, 0 follows, 0 visits to bandcamp, 0 sales. That's a lot of barren likes. Interesting!
Next month I'm going to try something more old fashioned. I'm going to put an ad in The Wire.
Anyway.