Social Media and Art

I (Twitter address @MarianeMatera) went to the December Social Media Club Richmond VA (@smcrva) meeting at the Firehouse Theater (@firehouserva), which afterward dispersed to The Camel (@TheCamel) a few doors down, and then a few diehards went on to Sine. I did not.

The focus was how independent music and film can use social media. Ian Graham (@IanGraham) of RVA Magazine, which to me is a publication of style over substance, was the moderator. The panel was an imported Amy Greenlaw (@girlgamy and @FilmPop) of Film Pop! from New Hampshire to talk about independent film promotion; Joel Burleson of the band Ki:Theory (@kitheory) and Jessica Gordon of The Trigger System (@triggersystem), to represent music. Gordon used to bartend at Twisters, ran the place when it was the 929 Cafe, and still books bands for The Canal Club and some other places. She also teaches English at VCU, which made me smile because she speaks in the flowing cadence of today's young people, so she reminded me of no English prof I ever had.

So what did I learn -- other than as usual I am the least luckiest person ever? (Even with two raffle tickets, a relatively small attendance, and many poinsettias to give away, I still didn't win one.) If you've been to one seminar on social media, you've been to them all. Seldom is anything new brought to the table after the basics, but this discussion was a reflective discourse on what social media killed.

Victim: the flyer on the telephone pole as a way to promote a show, for one, although Gordon said she still makes use of flyers, but not like the old days when you'd run off several hundred at Kinko's and then hire some derelict musicians or street denizens to wander around with a staple gun and cover the telephone poles.

When I first started the Journal, the city had declared war on telephone pole flyers and occasionally stripped the poles, but that didn't stop anyone. Bands were engaged in pre-show warfare to staple their flyers over everyone else's and sometimes it got very ugly.

Still, we can list as victims of social media:
Flyers
Kinko's
Staple gun salesmen
Poor musicians with staple guns who need the job for cigarette money
Fax machines for faxing the flyers to Style Weekly

For bands, the victim of social media is the traditional press kit. They no longer need a demo cassette or stacks of 8x10 black and white glossies. Instead they can stream their latest originals on their MySpace page and park color band photos and videos of performances there as well. Despite MySpace being the ugliest, most difficult to use social media site, it's perfect for bands because it streams music in a handy audio player.

You neglect MySpace at your peril. I learned this hard lesson recently when the Tobacco Company was feeling around for some classic rock bands for long-term regular bookings. By the time my husband's band got three songs together to burn onto a CD, and realized there was no current band photo, and the press kit was years out of date, the Tobacco Company booker had made his decisions. We would have been able to move faster on that feeler if all I had to do was email him back with a link to a MySpace page, which would have everything already on it.

Clubs and bands can reward people for following them on Twitter, MySpace or Facebook with a few ticket give-aways before each show, essentially functioning as their own radio station.

(Shall we list local radio as another victim of social media as far as promoting local shows? Okay:

Local radio)

Nationally, iTunes and Walmart killed the recording industry as far as the $19.99 CD goes of two hit songs and 10 bad songs. Bands no longer make their fortunes through album sales. The dollars are in concert tickets and merchandising now, and local bands must go the same route. Burleson said he pretty much gives his music away on the Internet, but it's all about cultivating your fan base. They will come to your shows not to hear the music they can get for free, but to meet the band, to experience the show, to meet other fans with similar taste, to buy the T-shirt, to get a CD/DVD that has some added value to it, like artwork, or a video. Burleson says he makes his money by licensing his music to television shows.

Getting signed by a major label, getting radio play, making the Billboard Top 100, kissing your keyboard player as the closing act on the AMAs and then having to apologize for it to Barbara Walters -- these are all still the goals of any band, but be realistic. Making the big time is as likely as being struck by lightning. Divide the number of bands in Virginia by Dave Matthews and you still have one single lucky son of a bitch.

But you can have a degree of local notoriety through the cultivation of fans through social media. YouTube some of your past song performances, stream your best originals on MySpace, create a fan page on Facebook. Be a little star.

Greenlaw was less engaging about promoting independent film because that is a narrow niche -- film people and film fans. Essentially, though you build a website for your little film and from that mothership, launch your droids: clips and behind-the-scenes videos on YouTube and Vimeo, Facebook fan pages, Twitters to alert people to film festivals where you're showing the movie. Unlike music, you never give the film away free, even though, if you ask me, little films are just auditions for directors and screenwriters to get a bigger deal.

You realize Southpark started out as a little holiday gift Internet video shared by industry people.

So that's it. I sort of knew all this already, only I'm not doing it yet because if I was, my husband would have a three-nights a week gig now at the Tobacco Company, bringing home an extra $180 a week (okay, not that much, really, for the sacrifice of three nights a week gone), but it's $9,360 a year! That buys something.