Learning about the music industry - week four

This blog is a day late!! I meant to write it yesterday, however, we are the middle of a week of very intensive rehearsals prior to heading into the studio to record an acoustic album which will... be slightly different to the way in which we play our songs normally. Partly the reason for doing this is that we are still capital raising to do the full electric album and partly because we do have an alternative acoustic version of each of our current songs and people keep asking where they can buy both versions. So.. if you like the hard pop-rock version of 'Steady On' that we give away as a free download when you sign up to our mailing list i know you will also like the folk version that will be on the album. Fingers cross the plan is to have it recorded and mixed by the beginning of September, mastered by the middle, and out in October! It will also feature a team up with the lovely Christina Novella on a song we wrote four years ago called Final State.

Anyway in between, redesigning each song and getting a load of new photos done I'm still reading Ariel's book and this week its all been about web 2.0. Now to be honest I'd never really got this before i read this and in some ways this week was a bit of a eureka moment. I almost cant say exactly what I've learnt because i really think that you should GO AND READ THE BOOK yourself.

So what will the band and I be doing having read this chapter.

Well, firstly - the website www.isaacsaircraft.com comes down tonight to be replaced by a new much simpler and easy to maintain website. (learning have a presence in as many paces as you can - make them as fast and simple to maintain as you can).

Blog lots more and talk to lots of people about the blogs that they are posting.

Network with bloggers where we can.

Set up a podsafe profile (not heard of this one before).

Keep tweeting.

Start using Flicker (again) This might take a bit of time to sort.

Most of the stuff in this chapter we were already doing, however it is not just about the doing it. It's the way in which you do it - otherwise you can put an awful lot of effort into not getting very much done. Sometimes i look back what the band so done online to date and i now know we have been very guilty of that. You have to have great music, a great show and a great vibrant online presence too.

Cheers

Zak