Digital Renaissance

The following three steps might be the most important ones, but probably less obvious, to take when you are an upcoming artist. When making music finishing a song might feel like the ultimate end. But if you don’t have a music label or any other kind of administrative body that’s taking care of planning how to shout your existence out, how to get gigs and all other activities surrounding your musical existence, it’s important that you make some planing, listening and learning on your own. Finishing a song means you have some more work to do.

1 – Plan
Set up many goals you want to reach. Separate short from long. Make many small to-dos that will help you reach your goals. Don’t add things you most likely won’t be able to achieve. Be realistic. It’s a good feeling to get something done and it will encourage and provide you with energy to move on in your process.

A great tool for sorting out your thoughts and make a roadmap out of them is Mindmeister. It’s a web based mindmap tool with great functions for organizing ideas and goals. It’s perfect for sorting out who to send music to and where to play live. You can share a map with members of your band or crew and let everybody work on the document. You can add comments, links etc to each node/note. If you are writing lyrics or longer manifestos together with somebody else Google Docs is perfect for sharing and saving documents.

2 – Listen
You might be a genius, but even the best musicians in the world needs feedback to develop. Directions you take with your music matters and it’s a good idea to get advice from people. Don’t be shy. At the end of the day you probably want others to like what you create. So it’s a good idea to share your work while it is in progress and really listen to what others have to say. If they all think it’s perfect you will at least gain confidence.

SoundCloud is a great tool that is under development and currently in beta testing (let me know if you want to try). With SoundCloud you can upload songs and let friends and/or the public comment generally or at exact time points. The interface is super nice and your friends will be inspired to comment on your work. Also, the rumor says they have great ideas coming up to integrate the music you share in other places of your web presence and with tools offline.

3 – Follow-up
It’s one thing to spread and listen but it’s another thing to follow-up and take notice of what’s being said and written. The same second you upload tunes they are up for public assessment. And it’s important to catch what the people you don’t directly ask have to say. If you’re good at keeping track of and detecting who like what you do you’ll create a foundation with important deliverers of your future musical achievements.

One of the best tools that Google has provided since the release of their search engine is also one of the easiest. Google Alerts let you subscribe to a specific search string. Set up subscription for your “yadayada song” and you will get notified when someone writes about it. To close the circle you can copy the links with texts written about you to your Mindmeister document and mark that blogger, newspaper etc as done.

Those tips might seem close to boring administrative tasks but they are nevertheless important and I hope that the tools I’ve suggested will make the job a little bit more joyful. So, get your act together and listen, learn and follow-up on how you are doing with reaching an audience.