It’s been a while since I posted a blog entry here. One of the reasons is I’ve actually been working. I’ve been working both on getting the new Logic Users Group platform up and running, and finally on more Ember After songs.  Towards that end, I finally took possession of a fantastic new guitar, which I detail here in the geartalk blog.   I also have just ordered a Dave Smith Instrumens Mopho, a fantastic analog monosynth based off the Prophet 08, but with some special editions just perfect for grinding mean industrial music: sub-oscillators, feedback, audio input.  Tasty treats, all!

Dave Smith Instruments Mopho

But all this has got me thinking about this whole Interweb, and how much time can be spent communicating on it.  Ember After has a web page, a Myspace page, an iLike page, a Facebook page, a Bebo page…I’ve almost lost track.  And of course Ember After is on Twitter.  To keep up to date on all of these would leave no time to be creative!   (Let alone do a full time job, if recording and performing music isn’t paying the bills).

And it’s not just typing to your huge (ha…) fanbase, it’s keeping up with other people—the whole point of this communication is that it’s supposed to be two-way, to bring people together, and not simply be another one-way announcement system.  But it all eats into what limited time there is to write music, which ultimately is the reason that people are following/friending with Ember After to begin with, right?

Somewhere in there is a balance.  More successful acts have discussed hiring a marketing company to take care of the mailing list/updating news/blog aspect of their “music business.”  That can really help free the artist to both communicate and create…if you’re successful enough to afford it, or have a record company willing to pay for it.  As long as the updates and blogs and tweets come from the artist, if they are propogated and managed by hired help shouldn’t mean the communication is less authentic.

But for those of us who don’t have the means or the success yet to hire a team, we’re left trying to figure out how to keep these dozens of sites and networks up to date while at the same time finding the time to make the music that you are communicating about.  And it’s a double edged sword—without communicating, nobody knows that you’ve got the music out, and without the music, there’s nothing to communicate.

For now, I’m shifting the balance towards creating.  I’ll still try and actively post whenever I have a moment, but that’s proving to be not as frequent as I wish.  I hope that makes sense.

In the news section, I just posted that we have over 1000 “friends” on Ember After Myspace. And considering when we started a few months ago, we had a single friend, the ubiquitous Tom, that’s pretty cool.

But what do “friends” mean in a social networking site like Myspace, Facebook, etc? (Sorry, I guess they’re called “fans” on a Facebook or Bebo or whatever page). It’s an interesting concept. Most of them are other bands who found us when checking out Myspace Music. And that’s great! We love to meet fellow musicians. I’d love to think that Myspace is really capable of fostering a “scene” of like-minded Myspace groups, who can collaborate, set up shows, all sorts of things.

Of course, some of them are groups that I sent my own requests to be friends, because I found them on Myspace. Again, I think it’s great, and maybe something will come of it. But do I really think that Peter Murphy, Tony Iommi, Jeff Beck, Trent Reznor, Thomas Dolby, and so on, are my “friends?” Well…

And of course there are simply the “friends bots” out there who troll around, looking for adds. Ember After has never used such software to artificially pad our friends lists—who would we be fooling? But I’ve no doubt that we’ve been hit by some of them. When a folk/jazz/kazoo act from Thailand wants to be our “friend” something tells me that it’s not because they have been deeply moved by our music…

Myspace Music, theoretically, can be a great way to get our music out in front of people, as well as a great way to meet music lovers and musicians. And certainly, those groups out there who have hundreds of thousands of friends have no doubt made a lot of fans, who have dutifully signed up for blogs and updates. But at the level we’re at, while I’m happy to see forward momentum, it’s hard to know how much is “real” if that makes sense. And the same goes for Facebook, Bebo, and the other social networking sites we’re currently on or will be soon. I think—I hope—they can become great ways to interact with an audience. But we’ll have to see how it works.

I dunno, maybe part of this “rock star” game is that I’m not supposed to reveal how I really see these things, and I’m supposed to try and keep up this illusion that 1000 Myspace friends and climbing means that its inevitable we’ll be playing football arenas in your region in no time, etc. But that’s just not me. I’d rather use this space to be honest, and hope it strikes a chord. I hope you don’t mind. Thanks for reading.