Quote Of The Day:
“Scotty, beam us up”
Captain Kirk from the series “Star Trek”
Before all you Trekkies come down on me, I did my research and this was the actual phrase used in the Star Trek series of the late 60’s. The phrase that everyone is used to hearing is “Beam me up Scotty”, but that was actually used only on a bumper sticker followed by “there’s no intelligent life down here”. (Pretty funny when you think about it.)
The reason I’ve chosen this particular quote today is to use it as a metaphor for all the current and wonderful technology we now have at our fingertips in this ever changing industry we call music.
A few weeks ago, I was lamenting to a dear friend and incredible musician about there not being any piano/voice gigs around anymore. I love singing with my big band, but I also love the more intimate piano/voice gigs where I could choose a loungier repetoire and use a different set of vocal chops than what I do with my full on horn band. His response was “let’s do a piano/voice concert from your music room and invite people to watch it over the internet”. I was stunned. “You can actually do that?” I asked. He said “yup” and this past Monday, we did. It was a fun, interactive performance between our lounge duo and all the people who registered to get the link to the performance who I initially contacted through my computer address book, facebook fan pages, and this blog. I started doing a bit of research and found out that this is a burgeoning way to reach an established audience, gain more fans and possibly make some money by doing it – all from the comfort of your own home, hotel room on the road, or venue of your choice.
With a small investment, you can buy streaming softwear that will enable you to do this. There is usually a monthly fee associated with it, but it might be a good thing to use as a marketing tool for building an audience or awareness of your band, songwriting, vocal abilities, whatever you want to share with your fans, established and new. You will want to experiment with technology a little to get a decent looking webcam for the broadcast and figure out how to make the sound be the best it can be for live streaming. I used my MacBook Pro camera and a usb Snowball microphone to pick up the room sound through the p.a. system where the vocal and piano were coming from. It was a very effective first time foray into internet broadcasting once we used the right softwear. Note: it is very important to do a streaming test hours before your scheduled performance to be sure you are indeed able to broadcast and that you are being received. (Believe me, I found out the hard way on this point when the test worked the day before and not the day of due to a server glitch – very stressful).
For all you social media savvy artists you could be playing concerts from your living room and have hundreds of people register to see your performance just by posting what you will be doing on facebook, twitter, etc. Jake, my redheaded sistah from anothah mothah” in Farmer’s Daughter, enlightened me to stageit.com where you can set up your performance to make money for yourself or a charity. You set the concert date and price and get to keep a large percentage of the gross from the ticket sales. You will need to do some leg-work to get people there by posting reminders and updates, but you are probably used to that kind of frequent communication already. What a great way to enhance your revenue stream while you are recording, rehearsing, or home on a break from touring.
This may be old news to a lot of you out there, but I was so blown away by all this technology and potential to get out there to the big world I had to share my latest adventure with you. So, “Scotty, beam us up” so that we may find our way into the screens and hearts of all the people out there we are ever so grateful to call our fans.
Until next time… Breathe and Happy Singing!
Angela
ps, we are within the one month countdown to launching The 5 Point Singing System online… stay tuned!
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