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There are two challenges to making art: creating it and getting it to
the people. While commercial success may not define the greatness of a
work, I suspect that if a film screens in the forest and nobody is
there to see it that it may not have screened at all. What follows
concerns some of the journey in getting my work out there, particularly
on the Web.
In 2003 I produced a CD of my music, North. I wrote, recorded and
mastered the songs on a small budget and pressed a lot of copies. With
an army-of-one marketing department – me -- I planned to give some away
and sell the rest at gigs and other events. Over the next two years I
handed out about five hundred discs. I submitted the CD for review on
various Web sites and magazines, receiving uniformly positive notices.
I placed it on Amazon and also CD Baby; through CD Baby I got on to
iTunes and a half-dozen other digital download sites. I figured giving
away a bunch and being easily findable on the web was a reasonable
marketing tactic, sheer word of mouth and easy availability would at
least sell a few CD’s.
But it didn’t happen that way. I did all of the things my budget
allowed but the results were not inspiring. I could usually count on
selling some CD’s at gigs, but there was not much movement on the Web.
At one point I took out an ad in a national music magazine with a
circulation of around 100,000. I stuck a piece of monitor software on
my Web site to keep track of visitors and my traffic did not rise in
any noticeable way while the pricey ad was running. I was not so much
frustrated as baffled. How could so much shameless self-promotion yield
such small results? A guy who had gone to business school told me that
for every subscriber a major national magazine acquires the publisher
spends upwards of twenty dollars in advertising. I started to perceive
that getting it to the people was harder than I had thought.
About a year ago a publicist named Lanie Zipoy urged me to get on
MySpace. She told me that was where new musicians were getting famous.
I went there, I got an account and uploaded a few songs. I didn’t like
some things about it – it was trendy, pre-formatted and cluttered with
aggressive advertising. The feature that bugged me most was the whole
friend thing. It seemed indulgent to ask my friends to sign up so their
pictures could hang on my page like trophies. I also couldn’t figure
out how people were supposed to learn about my… space. I checked out
some of the other MySpace pages and saw that thousands of people were
hitting bands I had never heard of. I waited awhile for everyone else
at MySpace to find me, and when they didn’t I stopped checking the
site.
A few months ago Robert, a smart, geeky guy down the hall in my
building suggested a book on networks called Linked by Albert-Laszlo
Barabasi. I read it and was fascinated. The book is a great read about
the shape and properties of networks, be they social, physical,
biological or digital. It explains how the World Wide Web is
constructed of links, nodes and hubs and provides anecdotal and graphic
illustrations of how it all works. It made me wonder about my web page,
my CD and MySpace. I suspected that I was being distracted by the
surface of MySpace and not keyed in to the function of it.
I thought of an experiment. I had put a bunch of 8mm home movies from
my family’s archive onto a holiday DVD. I took a 2-minute clip of me
playing with an organ grinder’s monkey when I was two and recorded some
circus music to accompany it. I plumped up the MySpace page, updating
the songs on the jukebox, adding a bunch of photos and putting up some
short blog entries. MySpace has a selection of web content buckets into
which one may dump media that can be digitized – photos, video, sound
and text. The various areas on a MySpace page can accommodate HTML, so
you can program the sections like a regular Web page. There are various
free MySpace editors available on the Web that will assist the neophyte
MySpacer in this process. I spent a couple of evenings loading up the
page with content in each of the buckets. Then I uploaded my monkey
movie, having cut it together in Final Cut Pro and exported it as a
compressed Quicktime movie. MySpace provided simple instructions for
video format and the upload. As a final touch, I found a couple of
other interesting videos on MySpace and added them to my favorites
list. Instant triple feature!
I e-mailed out a notice to everyone on my list that might give it a
click. I’ll confess to some anxiety while getting the list together.
There I was, a grown man, sending out a mass e-mail promoting me and
some monkey I didn’t even know in an attempt to get a little attention
from the viewing public. I murmured an affirmation, hit the send button
and then I, and my computer, went to sleep.
When I checked in the following day I had gotten a number of visits.
One of the most useful features of MySpace is that it keeps score.
Every visit ticks up the counter; there is a count kept of the number
of plays that each song and video gets for each viewing of a photo and
each peek at the blog. This means that I can track the activity on the
site simply by checking in, and so can everybody else. I saw that
visits rose rapidly in the 24 hours after sending the e-mail notice.
The visits continued over the weekend (I sent the e-mail on a Friday)
and then rose again on Monday. I got decent traffic over the week, and
by the following Monday things settled down to a steady trickle, by
then I had gotten about 250 visits - much better than the ad in the
magazine. The site encourages interaction; all of the places for
content allow for viewer comments. Some of the feedback can be edited,
or can at least be made private, and you may block users you don’t like
from posting. You may also let a thousand flowers bloom and allow the
public say any crazy thing they want about you.
The “friends” aspect of MySpace that had bugged me at first started to
make more sense. Only friends can leave comments, and to become a
friend one must submit a request to the holder of the MySpace page
(you) and then be approved. My friends list is not so large, but one of
my new visitors had a highly prestigious friends list. I learned that
many of the prominent MySpacers grant friend status to anyone who makes
a request. I’m not saying I know Tom Waits or Jim Jarmusch personally
(at least I think it’s him), but they both approved my friend request,
which is truly special to me. Once someone is on your friends list,
that list is easily clickable by a visitor, which allows one to easily
explore interests and affinities. MySpace and other social networking
sites such as YouTube encourage this networking. It makes for rabid
cross-referencing, useful if you are trying to get something you made
out into the world.
While I choose to use my own name for my page, many people use a
pseudonym for a handle. This has its uses; the most common being that
your name is already in use by another member. Some young people I know
go anonymous for safety reasons. Wearing this sort of mask can also be
useful artistically or for purposes of reportage. There are quite a few
pages belonging to the deceased, and for the most part I’m happy to
find the likes of Mozart and Moog there in the system with me as they
seem to be maintained by loving fans or family. I’m still not sure of
my own feelings regarding anonymous mass publication from an ethical
standpoint, though as a practical matter I believe that if someone
seriously wishes to find the real owner of a page, he will.
There are some things that may be viewed as negatives. MySpace is
democratically, flagrantly commercial. Flashing ads and tacky
animations populate about a third of the screen most of the time and
you don’t get to see the good parts until the ads have loaded. I
suspect that objectification of women sells product, because plenty of
the ads specialize in that. Upon sending my e-mail notice, teenage
nieces and nephews almost immediately contacted me and I feared for
their moral well being when I saw the promiscuous number of friends
they displayed on their own MySpace pages, or maybe I was just jealous.
This is also a medium for the well off and literally connected;
although the service itself is free, it’s just no fun without a current
computer and a fast hook up. It has a bit of a bad reputation as a
time-waster and a bandwidth pig and is easy for businesses to block;
several of my friends who do their fast Internet cruising at work were
unable to access MySpace, although YouTube (where I also posted the
clip) seemed to be less of a problem. Naturally I’m outraged that they
couldn’t watch me and my monkey on company time.
Yes, it’s trendy, yes it’s commercial, yes your content is probably
logged into a central database for some as yet unimagined exploitation,
and no, you don’t have control of whether or not your host will
abruptly kick you off the site or limit your speech in some way. The
way I see it, they own the hard drive, so it’s best to not get too
attached. And regarding the thing I was bellyaching about at the
beginning of this article, about not selling many CDs on the web?
MySpace has not upped my sales so far, but it’s given me some new ideas
to try.
As a place to expose your stuff to gain a few more eyeballs, it appears
to be useful. I’ve had my own HTML / Flash Web site for some years and
that is definitely a lot more effort to grow and maintain than either
MySpace or YouTube. I’ll be keeping my regular Web page but it’s much
simpler to get interactive things going with these new tools. MySpace
establishes a common, navigable framework for displaying your audio,
text and video content. Its two ideas are to encourage links between
its members and to make everyone a member. I think it and things like
it may even be a watershed moment in the evolution of communication -
perhaps it is to marketing what that first release of Final Cut Pro was
to video -- it brings a previously complex undertaking (in this case
networking) to the masses. It’s free, it’s pretty easy to use, and all
of those running tallies of how many people have seen your page might
just make you think a little more like a marketer when you’re not busy
making your next project.
That’s my experience so far. If you want to check out the page, go to
www.MySpace.com/carmenborgiamusic. Heck, link out and wander around
the whole area. Don’t forget to be my friend, and if you ask nicely
I’ll be your friend too.
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Carmen Borgia is the head of audio services for
DuArt Film & Video
in New York City. He oversees a post production sound department that
provides mixing, sound design, restoration, transfer and printmastering.
His department caters to independent projects in all formats from mono
optical up to digital 5.1. Visit Carmen's personal Web site at:
www.carmenborgia.com
Editor’s note: If anyone has any questions or comments, please
submit them to cborgia@duart.com.
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