Hey, when a site encourages you to repost their thing, I’m okay with linking back to them. Anyway, back when we got our new HDTV at Christmas, I tried to convince my uncle not to buy the $130 HDMI cables, because they were a waste of fucking money. This is, for some reason, an unpopular opinion amongst people who have bought multiple $130 cables because they didn’t know better. I can’t imagine why.
Watch this right now. It’s okay, I can wait.
You done?
Isn’t that amazing? That right there could be my future line of work. Fantastic.
If there’s one universal truth that I’ve found over the years it’s that people, in general, are lazy. Whether the laziness is frowned-upon like leeching from welfare or socially acceptable like buying the newest gadget, it seems to underlie nearly everything we do. Realistically, our society would not be where it is if not for laziness. We wouldn’t have built tools to make our lives easier. We wouldn’t have made buildings or air conditioners or iPods if not to satisfy the laziness of the species. Now you likely see a paradox there – in being lazy, we ended up doing more work in the short-term for a long-term gain. We’re not lazy then, we’re just efficient, right?
Have your MySpace page, but get a site outside MySpace – it’s dying and reads as cheap / generic. Remove all Flash from your website. Remove all stupid intros and load-times. MAKE IT SIMPLE TO NAVIGATE AND EASY TO FIND AND HEAR MUSIC (but don’t autoplay). Constantly update your site with content – pictures, blogs, whatever. Give people a reason to return to your site all the time. Put up a bulletin board and start a community. Engage your fans (with caution!) Make cheap videos. Film yourself talking. Play shows. Make interesting things. Get a Twitter account. Be interesting. Be real. Submit your music to blogs that may be interested. NEVER CHASE TRENDS. Utilize the multitude of tools available to you for very little cost of any – Flickr / YouTube / Vimeo / SoundCloud / Twitter etc.
I do website design as an alternate source of income, and I’ve lost/refused jobs on these principles. You might say that it’s bad business (and you’re probably right), but I’ve made it a point to not learn how to do certain things like Flash, auto-running music, website animation, etc. I’ve ranted against MySpace pages since I found out about them, and all-in-all, I think Mr. Reznor has hit the nail on the head.
If you want to be heard, you need to make it as easy to be heard as possible. If there is something that will make someone unable to read or hear about you at work or on a smartphone (flash, sound), you’re losing your audience. If your site looks cheap or unprofessional, nobody will take you seriously. Don’t have intros because the more people need to click, the more likely they’ll be clicking somewhere else.
And above all else, be real. No, we can’t all be Hunter S. Thompson, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
I’m not going to claim to have been hugely successful with any or all of these things – after all, Stillnoname and everything associated with it has been in various states of disrepair for years. That said, I’m extremely familiar with the theory, and that’s why you will never see Flash (outside of embedded Youtube videos and whatnot) on anything I ever make.
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