Reverbnation, one of the many social media platforms available to musicians looking to keep their bank account static while wasting tons of their time, contacted me the other day.
This, in itself, was unsurprising. I get emails from them every week, helpfully reminding me that even in Arlington, there are hundreds of Reverbnation artists who get more traffic than I do. Years ago, my old band (which I referred to then as “my band”) had a big local following that was eager to go see us play whenever and wherever we performed, as long as we appeared within a proscribed three hundred foot area of Wilson Boulevard, and it wasn’t raining. Back then, I had incurred a tiny level of fame which entitled me to stalkers (two), people approaching me to talk about my music when I was eating at a restaurant with my parents (seventeen) and even sometimes strangers asking me questions about songwriting at bus stops. (I mean the strangers were at bus stops, and when I walked by the bus stops on the way to my car, parked roughly where the Apple Store is now, that day’s stranger would ask me a question about songwriting. “What do you think about bridges?”, I was once asked, by a man wearing a windbreaker although it wasn’t windy.
All of this was achieved mostly through word of mouth. This means that people who liked my songs would tell their friends about them (I assume they were their friends. I don’t like to pry), and then those people would go to a show or buy a CD at one of the many record stores in the area. We were terrible at self-promotion, but this whole word of mouth thing helped offset that. We used to pack a small club in Arlington past the point of fire safety, and this situation continued for a while. After years of this, I negotiated a new agreement with the venue, as follows:
If I was in the mood to book a gig, it was mutually understood that I was to email the venue no less than ten times with no response. I also had the option of calling on the phone, if I wanted realtime confirmation that the booker wasn’t there. The next phase of the process involved me getting into a vehicle of some sort and driving to the venue in order to be told face to face that the booker had a new direct line, making it possible for VIPs like me to cut out the middleman and find out more quickly that the booker wasn’t there.
Once I got into the swing of things with the new system, it provided a healthy element of stability in an otherwise perapatetic existence. For a while, when things were flush, I hired an assistant to help me not book shows, and this made it possible to expand our base of non-operations. My band began to not book gigs all over the area, even occasionally not booking a show in Richmond, or Charlottesville. At one point, a local booking guy who had been not booking me for years in DC moved to New York City, and thus it became possible for me to not book gigs there too.
As I got older, I started to realize that the pace was getting to me. Not playing gigs out of town had been fun for a while, and we’d even begun to not break into the festival scene, not booking gigs at some pret-ty prestigious venues where tastemakers and record company people would fail to see us perform. But I came to realize that I was most comfortable not booking gigs locally, where the hometown crowd could get their fix of not seeing us onstage.
It was a little scary for a minute, when the economy went south, and the gigs I wasn’t getting started paying less, but although the recovery has been slower than I’d like, I can report that in recent years, venues have been much more generous regarding the amounts they aren’t paying me. Sometimes this means I don’t get paid with a check, and while I prefer to not get paid in cash, I’m flexible. You have to be.
These days, I rarely have time to not book gigs, and most of the gigs I don’t play involve a booker contacting me initially, before not responding to my attempts to follow up. It’s nice to not have to do so much legwork before a gig falls through.
This brings me back to reverbnation. They tell me that for the first time since I began neglecting my web presence, I’m actually ranked in Arlington’s top forty. As I’ve barely played out under my own name at all in recent years, I’m baffled by this. Is it possible that my new approach to self promotion is actually paying off?
My new method, which I’ve turned to with the goal of negotiating a changing music business landscape, is my own invention. I call it the “Reminding People That I’m Alive” method. When I go out to a venue now, like Gypsy Sally’s, people see me and say, ah, he’s evidently still alive. When I get on stage at a jam session, especially Neel Singh’s at Villain and Saint, I generally plug into a big amp and crank it up. The result? Immediate clarity regarding my existence. As René Descartes once said, “Is he not? No he is not not. Does that mean he is not? It does not. Or, wait a minute. Maybe it does.”
The same goes for my blog, where I write stuff of the sort you’re reading now. Or The Hot Plate Show, where I’m writing and recording music and blather. All of this is supposed to lead to monetization somehow. In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess I am gathering and collating data on people who are burdened with impeccable taste and discernment. If that sounds like you, to you, then I can promise that in the future, I’ll be using a combination of cutting edge technology and a human brain (a brain that was lousy at this even when the brain was current, and this brain sometimes develops bugs following updates) in order to sell merchandise to you. This merchandise may take many forms, but it will all be Karl Straub merchandise. Could be music recordings— although that will require some older brains to learn about downloading. Could be a book— perhaps written on my phone and turned into a paperweight through the efforts of one of the many vanity presses in the USA. Could be some sort of cap. I can guarantee you of one thing, though— it won’t be ceramic-erotic tschotzkes.
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