Productivity Archives - New Music Strategies

So what's with all the silence?

You may have noticed that my week away from the blog turned into ‘the rest of the month’. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have picked up my return to blogging was scheduled for October 1st. That would be today.

I’ve enumerated my reasons on my personal blog, but suffice to say I just kind of needed a break.

I guess the same is true of most creative endeavours. Most people I know who make music for a living have times when picking up their instrument is the last thing they feel like doing – no matter how much they love playing, composing, performing and so on.

Make a wish

Not strictly New Music Strategies territory, but I guess there’s a good reason I should tell you what I’ve been up to for the past week or so.

Apart from all the usual stuff I like to occupy my time with – like travel to Northern Ireland to give a music industry seminar, make a video blog about whisky, listen to lots of records, meet with commercially inviable record labels, do a spot of research about the BBC, and involve myself in long examination board meetings at the university – I’ve thrown together a new website with a talented friend of mine.

It’s a simple idea: people make wishes – and then… well that’s kind of it, really. People make wishes. You can type your wish in on the site – or twitter it (just follow isowish on twitter, we’ll follow you back, and then “d isowish that I was Jimi Hendrix”) – and then you can take a code away and embed that wish on your blog or other website etc.

Like this:

What do you so wish?

The website’s called I So Wish… and the grammatical awkwardness serves a purpose as well as fills a need because so many of the other desirable domains were gone.

How do I find time for the internet?

One of the biggest problems of integrating internet strategies into your already busy music industry life is the problem of becoming overwhelmed with information. Now that you’re using the internet, there are all these sites to maintain, update, and provide content for… and a whole lot of others to read.

There are online references, mailing lists, MySpace pages, blogs, social networks, photography sites, music communities and recommendation engines to contend with.

How do you even start to cope with all that, hang onto the other important stuff you were already doing, and yet not have some sort of nervous breakdown in the process?