"You're a Musician. Now What?" by Janek Gwizdala Summary

I actually read this book for my own personal brand building but decided to throw a summary here because I think it could be quite useful for our band. These are all a rough outline of each chapter. If you guys have any questions, feel free to bring them up here. I just thought this topic would be helpful in general for future forum topics!


Points of Interest for Band:

1. Website - Do we want one? Do you want to go super crazy or just make something nice and simple on WordPress? We can honestly use it as just a place to link everything else we do. This personally isn't top priority for me but it would be nice to have something.

2. Mailing List - Never really given this much thought. I don't mind if we get one. I think it would be nice to send monthly letters out to people who want them. Also, if we plan on doing a song every/every other month, it would be a great way to send out some music early to those who follow as an incentive. the book recommends a website called mailchimp.com. This website allows us to send mass messages safely for free until we reach 2,000 subscribers (so probably free for a good while ).

3. Brand and Content - Who is our demographic? How do we present ourselves in our band (personality, clothes, what we talk about)? Videos or blog about what tech we use? People can buy tabs/sheet music? Merch (Shirts, hats, mugs)? Live practices? Behind the scenes footage?

4. Social Media - How personal do we get with fans? How many sites will we be posting on to start? How many do you wanna work up to? KEEP TABS ON FOLLOWER LOCATIONS! Check out Hootsuite to help us schedule posts.

5. Blog - Gives us a more personal experience with our fans. Possible step by step process about how we make music and get it out there?


These are just some jumping points I would love to touch on on the future. Thanks for giving this a read!

What was your impression of the book? We've talked about all of these things to a degree previously, so I'm curious if it had any other takeaways.

I'm sure we'll chat about these things in person but here are my initial reactions:

1. We have a website: alloutcrash.com
The HTML is all there and the content is ready to be replaced with something meaningful, but there are no graphics. Personally nobody gives a fuck and we should just have a 'links hub' for it. If we want to use facebook or something else instead, I can just redirect the domain name so that we can just tell people to go to alloutcrash.com. Otherwise we will have to spend some time to make graphics and give it a look and fill it with meaningful content.

2. Let's sign up and get it set up. We will probably want to discuss how often we post and what and how much work those updates will require.

3. Anyone that has money. But this is something we should definitely think about when we start trying to make money. Will we have more success trying to market to men in Tokyo or are the girls in Argentina the biggest consumers of music right now? Which one gives us more bang for less effort? I honestly don't know, but it's something we should watch closely and experiment with.

4. Maybe we can assign platforms to each of us, so that Erik would do Instagram, Dan gets facebook, and I rock the MySpace... or something like that. Obviously we'd have 'band' posts that go up everywhere but for the sake of commenting and interacting quickly and candidly with other people it might make sense to give ourselves that authority as individuals.

5. I vote we revisit this when we have a repertoire. I'd rather spend our time writing/producing music than trying to come up with ideas for a blog post.