John Mayer: "Manage the Temptation to Publish Yourself" | Hacker News Reader

John Mayer: "Manage the Temptation to Publish Yourself"

berklee-blogs.com

107 pointscyanbane29 comments

I think a few of the commenters are misinterpreting the message he was attempting to convey (or maybe I am!).

What I took from that article was that, as a musician, spending too much time making youtube videos - posting stuff up on myspace music, keeping up with soundcloud track comments, &c... (those are my own examples of what I think he meant by online social media) harms your ability to focus, to create, and to ultimately cultivate a fan base that has a deeper appreciation for your music than the fleeting thousands that skip impatiently through a youtube video then go onto the next artist's video.

I fully agree, publishing yourself using social media is crucial - but so is doing live tours, shows, showing up to a random small beach party and playing some music (that will win you some fans), and spending time on your own creating...

That's what I got out of it, at least, please correct me if I misinterpreted.

That's more or less what I read as well. Keep his audience in mind: Berklee music students. Talented, young, bright and ambitious - he's just telling them to sort themselves out and "find themselves" first. Promotion can come after quality content.

As an added corollary: be careful about promotion, because it may succeed. And if your content isn't fully baked, and if you haven't perfected your craft, then you'll be exposed to the world as such. There goes your first impression, and more than likely, there goes your one shot.

I had a similar thought when I saw the Ok Go treadmill video about the same time as I was reading Keith Richard's memoirs. If the Stones had spent as much time obsessing over choreography of their Youtube videos in their early days as they did just playing gigs, would they have ended up as the Stones? Will we ever see a pop band again with a repertoire that deep?

Then again I guess the Richards himself had time to nurse a heroine addiction and do some other extraneous stuff at the height of his creative powers. So maybe it is possible to be a prolific music composer and obsessed with social media. Just avoid the heroine.

FWIW, heroin is the drug, heroine is a lady hero.

I think he had a heroine addiction as well. Or wait, maybe that was Bill Wyman who was addicted.

This guy is SO out of touch with independent music it's not even funny. How many people know amazing, talented bands that get no where? Good music within itself does not promote itself. You have to advertise, whether it's engaging in fans online or offline, or making friends with other musicians to split the bill. Do not have a backup plan? Is he insane? For every insanely lucky guy like him there's thousands of other guys working off their blood, sweat, and tears only to end up extremely poor or with nothing. What he's saying is like every startup is going to be Facebook or Google... I'm sorry that's not going to happen. But at least even in a startup you tend to make decent money, not near poverty wages like touring musicians have to endure for years before any "break" ...

I agree. If you look on jamendo.com you can find lots of great music that people have released for free that no one is talking about. Here are some of my favorites (I tend to like instrumental, progressive music):

http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/76891

http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/88639

http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/34267

http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/56244

http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/27332

http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/3492

http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/1472

http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/17100

To be fair, John Mayer started as an independent. His first album was self-published. He did a tour where he drove from gig to gig in his own car. Even after getting a contract, he played unglamorous gigs second-fiddle to guys like Glen Phillips (the lead singer of Toad the Wet Sprocket) at dinky clubs in Seattle.

Sure, he's hit the mainstream, but the guy knows something about being independent.

I second this. I haven't been too big of a fan of his latest work, but I bought my first John Mayer album physically from John Mayer. To say he doesn't understand independents isn't true.

Me too. I have a signed copy of his second album that I bought from him directly, by handing him cash, in a club. That's about as independent as it gets.

Not once does he say anything about independence or labels. He just says that the focus needs to be on shipping, everything else is secondary.

There's nothing "out of touch" about that. It's completely, and trivially, true. If you want to ship, ship. Don't tweet that you're half-finished writing a lyric for a song you have the opening riff to. Ship it.

I, like Ixiaus, also took something different away from the article than most of the comments. I have several smart, talented friends who indulge in social media to a gross extent. They are the kind of people, like Mayer, that are at the point where they are asking questions like, “Is this a good blog? Is this a good tweet? Which used to be is this a good song title? Is this a good bridge?" but for their respective fields/talents. I certainly wish they would invest less time into those questions and more time into their craft/themselves.

I couldn't disagree more. Publishing and promotion is so easy and cheap these days it should be the default option of every musician, book writer, etc. to self-publish.

Sure, it'll take some work to maintain a blog (or tumblr), use twitter, reply to emails, use facebook/g+, etc. But if you do it right it'll just be a very natural way to keep in touch with your fans and it'll be a rewarding experience on its own. The benefits are too huge to ignore. For one, complete control of your music and your career. For another, vastly increased profit margins enabling you to avoid having a day job at a far, far lower threshold than if you had used a more traditional publishing model. And ultimately a much more significant and meaningful connection between you and your fan-base, making your "work" all the more rewarding for both you and them.

I think it really depends. Let's not forget a significant portion of HN have already "cultivated" their talents into something worth marketing. These students (especially being at Berklee) are likely to be talented enough to find themselves to be worth showing off, but not talented enough that they should be.

If you spend a day creating something for audience, you are more likely to waste it on perfecting what's already good. When do you do it for yourself, you're likely to spend it making mistakes all day-- and IMO, that's what it takes.

It might be a matter of order. After writing Startups Open Sourced, if I had just put it on the Kindle store and let it sit there, nothing would have happened. But I was pretty active in blogging, which has resulted in it becoming a bestseller. I tried to get people to engage before, and it didn't work (example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2163427).

I'm not a musician so I don't understand that creative process, but it sounds like Mayer was trying to engage his fans while writing an album. The only musicians I've known to effectively pull off something like that is 50 Cent, where he wrote in 50th Law that he would intentionally leak parts of his album just to understand how his fans would react. He would then reconstruct the album based on that feedback (one leak resulted in fans complaining it was too "soft" so he released newer tracks that were more aggressive, and the response was more positive). Nine Inch Nails is probably the band that comes to mind when I think of musicians who engage with their community, but Trent Reznor had even admitted to being fed up with Twitter at one point and shut his account down. He eventually came back to it. But I don't recall Trent Reznor doing much while he was in the process of recording. It seems like one of those "goodbye world, I'm off to create, see you on the other side" types of things.

I guess what I'm getting at: it seems like I never really see the creative process while it's happening. I only see it from artists afterwards. For a while, Ronald Jenkees was doing this on YouTube, although I don't know if he has done that for years now. There might be a reason why artists work that way (I recently read an Eminem biography, and he has the same pattern for producing music: he locks himself in a studio for long hours, doesn't engage with anyone until after the work is finished). Produce first, engage later.

> It might be a matter of order. That's exactly what John Mayer was saying. He was telling people not to prematurely publish and be distracted from the creation process.

What is the point of publishing if you have nothing interesting (yet) to say? He is talking about developing a voice before you scream.

Publishing can help you develop a voice, though. I'm currently reading an interesting history of the 90s riot grrl movement (Sara Marcus's Girls to the Front), and from what I can tell, publishing zines was a big part of what helped them develop a community, find friends/bandmates, hone philosophies and possible lyrical ideas, etc. In fact a few of the bands existed only in concept until they got put on the spot by someone who liked their zine enough to book them to play a gig! (Then they had to finish learning to play instruments and write some songs.)

In part I think that's because some kinds of publishing, like zines and social media, are somewhat in between pure publishing and conversation; they're not just a polished finished product, but also a way to discuss ideas and meet people.

That's a misleading dichotomy. All artists develop and mature over time, even at the start. You don't need to be fully developed to nevertheless have meaningful work and artistic talent that others would appreciate. Look at xkcd, for example, imagine if randall munroe had said "maybe I should wait until I have something more meaningful to say, and until I have better drawing skills".

Sure, maybe you don't quit your day job if you're still incubating a nascent talent, but you don't have to hide it away from the public. Indeed, one of the best ways to improve artistic skills is to merely exercise them a lot, and to get your work out in front of thoughtful critics and fans. Don't force artistic development into a waterfall process, it can be iterative and agile.

I think his general premise here is that the ease and ability with which one can generate and publish content instantaneously -replete with instant feedback loops- sets up bad mental habits and subroutines that begin to inhibit the ability for John Mayer to make great content.

There is a gestational element to most great creative work that cannot be denied. I think to protest this too much this suggests an infatuation with tools and process, not the product.

I really liked his thoughts on this. While I understand social media is a powerful form of promotion, its not the be all end all, there is more too it, especially when you do something outside of social media that you are promoting. The part about going for the little applause was great, you get hooked on each tweet, each video, each blog post and its performance in regards to audience reaction, instead of the entire body of work you've created. It has the ability to chop your "art" into micro bits, because it has got to fit inside the constraints of social media. In a way you become your product, it sounds like he stopped being a musician and was selling John Mayer on Twitter, it wasn't about the music anymore.

Which is kind of hard to stop doing, because its what the majority of the internet audience wants. Jeri Ellsworth made an interesting statement about the electronics/hacks she creates, the audience likes the simple ones, and don't care much about the much more technical and in depth videos she creates. The audience to some effect seems to be only interested in the short and simple. Which I would imagine, if John Mayer spent all his social media time, talking about music, and music theory, and the kind of things you would think someone would want to know from a talented artist, I doubt he'd have the followers. Where as, if he sticks to the one liners, and small talk, its vastly more popular.

As for the mental changes is causes, I fully understand this. I've read a bit about how the human brain changes according to how it is use. And also, when I was still blogging, I noticed an interesting change in myself. I started consuming the world in a "how can I blog this" sort of way. Anything even remotely interesting that happened, instead of me enjoying the life experience, quickly turned to, how can I phrase this on my blog? The short time I was on Twitter, I found I spent more mental capacity, sorting through my thoughts to Twitterize them, than on the actual thoughts. If you're famous for social media, that is great. If your a musician, author, electrical engineer, etc, it has the side effect of changing how you think, and then how you create, if you focus on it too much.

You have to remember the audience is a college of music. In a venue like this, the primary question is not how to become a commercial success, it's how to become better at your craft as a musician.

Mayer is also speaking from the unique perspective of being a serious commercial success, wanting to nurture it, but still having the "burden" of creating music to (his) high standards. I don't think most normal people need to create such a black and white line between posting on Twitter and writing a song, but Mayer needs to, and it's at least somewhat interesting to hear his reasons.

I get what he's saying about it destroying his creative process, but he's clearly forgotten what it's like not to be popular. Advertising yourself is the ONLY way to get fans. They do not just come to you automatically.

Really? I don't think for musicians that "Advertising yourself is the ONLY way to get fans". That's the fallacy of modern celebrity. For musicians the music should attract fans, not the musician talking about himself and his work.

He specifically talks against advertising your music on social networks, and not just your talking about it.

Getting a gig somewhere local without having fans isn't much fun. Anything you can do to jumpstart that is probably a good thing.

It's almost like telling programmers not to put code on Github and share it because it takes time away from the coding itself.

The truth is, sharing the music is beneficial in itself, and it's not really like you can only do 1 or the other.

He had a Twitter addiction and took it to extremes. It was ruining him. That's a lot different than simply using it to create a fanbase or interact with your fans.

And while here in tech/web/startupland we may acknowledge that there's a certain amount of promotion necessary to get at least the initial eyeballs, once those eyeballs have landed it's your product that's the best attraction.

If you build it good, they will stay.

Some context: Jennifer Aniston dumped him over his Twitter addiction:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/5038203/Jennif...

Mayer shared that he found himself asking himself questions like “Is this a good blog? Is this a good tweet? Which used to be is this a good song title? Is this a good bridge?

As much as I disdain this guy's style sometimes, he makes some excellent points. I take issue with this particular quote though. Perhaps his true calling is to be both a musician and commentator. There's nothing inherently wrong with letting oneself evolve and change focus. It's not like music is a dying art form or something

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