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About Joe Taylor Jr
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Blog postDecember 31, 2018
Dear Reader,
Since 1997, spinme.com's been the place where I posted anything I wanted to about music and pop culture. Sometimes, I'd share the platform with other folks. Other times, I'd use it to amplify only my own voice.
Early in my career, a mentor told me to watch out for "seven-year runs" on anything related to creativity. That concept trickled into my early work with musicians, and into my first book, "Grow Your Band's Audience.&quo -
Blog postWe knew it would happen someday.
Back in 1989, Andres Serrano busted open a simmering debate over whether it’s right (or even effective) for tax dollars to support arts. As a high school student at the time, I got worried about whether the theatre, films, and music I was absorbing like a sponge could ever get made without help from sources like the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, or various state and federal film boards.
By the time I -
Blog postMorning Edition’s Allyson McCabe dropped a five minute mini-documentary about how “pay for play” at radio stations has evolved from the scandalous “song plugger” systems of the 1950s, through the bizarre indie promotion world of the 1990s, and into today’s branded content marketplace.
Brands like Pepsi, Coke, and Dr. Pepper rely on relationships with musicians to provide raw authenticity — even more now in today’s jaded marketplace than when Alan Freed was spinning records at the dawn -
Blog postspinme.com turns twenty this year. Our mission, when we first launched this thing, was to try to expose the work of artists who weren’t getting enough attention from mainstream radio and television. Today, it seems like radio’s the last place you’d turn to hear about new music. It’s easier than ever to publish your work, thanks to technology. But it now seems harder than ever for early stage creative professionals to get real traction around their ideas.
Like many of the folks who star -
Blog postI just posted dozens of "classic" coaching call recordings to our membership area, and even though some of them are over a decade old, many of those conversations hold up really well! (If you take some of the specific technology out of the equation—replace MySpace with Snapchat, for instance—a lot of this stuff hasn't changed. That's good. That's also kind of terrifying.)
I wanted to bring one out from behind the paywall, because we're still talking a lot about music industry -
Blog postExcellent advice for comics from Brent Morin, who released an excellent Netflix special not long ago:
Get up every night. Bar shows and coffee shops apartment shows etc. avoid comedy clubs for a year or so. https://t.co/eVk05M7xqp
— Brent Morin (@BrentMorin) June 8, 2016
I've been teaching a new video course for musicians who want to sell more tickets to their gigs, and an interesting thing keeps popping up in our quizzes and our workbook responses. Whatever specialty you -
Blog postNathan Hubbard, former CEO of Ticketmaster, dropped a scorch-the-earth essay on the state of concert ticketing on The Ringer. Lin-Manuel Miranda, who’s about to haul away a whole bucket of Tony Awards for Hamilton, penned an op-ed piece for the New York Times about how scalper bots swoop in on Ticketmaster every time a new batch of tickets gets released.
This isn’t new.
In fact, I wrote about the secondary concert market here nearly six years ago and nothing’s changed.
By -
Blog postIt's a big day here at spinme.com, since we're launching the first of our new series of courses for working musicians and other creative professionals.
Even after writing a bunch of music marketing books, I still end up in conversations with artists who tell me they're struggling to figure out how to sell tickets to their shows. Even though we've got social media, YouTube, and dozens of automated tools to help us connect with audiences, selling tickets to gigs is still the most-watched -
Blog postI'm posting some early chapters of Audience Supported for spinme.com members...
It doesn’t matter if you follow every other step in this book to the letter, and it doesn’t matter if you benefit from the best coaching and mentoring you can find if you don’t take care of your core.
That doesn’t mean you need to become a yogi master or unlock the mysteries of life—though if you do, please tell the rest of us. It means that you have to make sure you’re caring for both your physical -
Blog postFrom our “Ask a Question” mailbag, Joey M. writes to ask: “I guess my query is the same as many others. How do I get my music to the right ears?”
I think there’s a deeper question behind that question. Who, exactly, has the right ears?
We’re no longer in a world where getting your demo in front of an A&R rep, a program director, or a journalist automatically “breaks” your band. Your job is to line up a succession of tastemakers and champions, in roughly the right order to gr -
Blog postI'm posting some early drafts of chapters from Audience Supported just for supporters of spinme.com...
The new boss looks a lot like the old boss.
We’ve only been handing out Grammys for about six decades. The Oscars started about twenty years before that. You may still have a relative who can tell you about how her family entertained themselves each night before live television dominated the living room. What we think of as the professional entertainment business hasn’t been ar -
Blog postI'm posting some early drafts of chapters from Audience Supported just for supporters of spinme.com...
Elvis Presley only recorded one commercial in his life. It was for Southern Maid Donuts, a Dallas chain that advertised fresh, hot donuts at 4pm every day. According to Elvis historian Phil Arnold, the donut shops sponsored a local radio show in Shreveport, called The Louisiana Hayride. Acts appearing on the show, including Minnie Pearl and Johnny Cash, also cut spots shilling hot don -
Blog postI'm posting some early drafts of chapters from Audience Supported just for supporters of spinme.com...
“You don’t need a hit to survive.”
That’s the crux of the argument Kevin Kelly made in his 2008 essay, 1,000 True Fans. Kelly’s influence in the technology sector brought into wider debate a topic that regular readers of spinme.com have watched our community debate since the late 1990s. Instead of waiting to “get signed,” to “get discovered,” or to win a reality show competitio -
Blog postI caught a little bit of the dust-up on Twitter today about this article in the Atlantic that targets the—shall we say—sanitized nature of the National Association of Campus Activities conventions.
Today's college students can't seem to take a joke — .@CaitlinPacific http://t.co/AbKcNSvwZQ pic.twitter.com/rkqeCfsaz0
— TheAtlanticEducation (@TheAtlanticEDU) August 11, 2015
On one hand, we've got reporting that bears out the anecdotal evidence I often hear from artists tha -
Blog postI'm posting some early drafts of chapters from Audience Supported just for supporters of spinme.com...
David Berman has worked with everyone from IBM to the United Nations. He specializes in designing things (like forms, posters, and websites) that serve practical purposes while helping people feel good. In his frequent talks and lectures, Berman advises audiences to start spending three minutes at the start of every day to visualize what would happen “if everything went splendidly.” -
Blog postI'm posting some early drafts of chapters from Audience Supported just for supporters of spinme.com...
Much of what follows in this book involves learning how to make your audience happy without compromising the artistic integrity of your work. It’s a less dangerous line to cross than you’d realize. Patronage doesn’t require pandering. But it does develop a self-awareness in a way that artists often take years or decades to attain.
Psychologist Steven Handel reminds us that you’ -
Blog postHere in Philadelphia, a core collection of 160 “arts and cultural groups” has issued an urgent plea for $1.4 billion in philanthropic funding. This, only five years after a report noted the challenges of making significant social impact when creative professionals struggle to break even. “Donor fatigue,” as reporters and consultants suggest, could wipe out dozens of organizations who don’t have deep-pocketed backers with a passion for their shared missions.
Where the hell do they think -
Blog postMaybe it’s a sudden wave of nostalgia, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my senior year of high school. At the time, I was taking piano lessons and thinking about film school. So I picked a college where I thought I could get formal music training while I learned how to make movies and television shows.
Here’s the thing: I was bad.
Really bad.
Halfway through my audition, a jarringly upbeat arrangement of “As Time Goes By,” I stopped playing, looked at my instruct -
Blog postStorify by Joe Taylor Jr.
Mon, Jul 08 2013 14:18:01
The coming concert cameraphone backlash Cultivating a relationship with your fans means getting clear about your attitude toward showing up in their Instagram feeds.
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I'll confess: I've probably taken more than my fair share of cellphone concert photos over the years. I work hard to be discreet. Usually, -
Blog postToday's roundup of music business news and opinion from around the web:
Mute Records has returned as an indie, and founder Daniel Miller explains the complexities of running an iconic imprint while continuing to help major labels with A&R for former Mute bands. [The Music Network]
Cutting a cover of a popular song used to be a great way to sneak your name into some popular searches on iTunes and Spotify. Now that the tactic's a little overused, bands face listener backlash.
Titles By Joe Taylor Jr
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