Exposure: another dirty word?

I've just seen this article from The Daily Mash pop up on Facebook and it got me thinking about playing for free.

It's very tongue-in-cheek, as everything for their website is, but it raises a valid point about playing, and asking others to play for this myth of 'exposure'.

'Exposure' is word that plagues hard working musicians everywhere. I see gig adverts all the time that all say the same thing; 'we can't pay you, but you will get exposure to a new audience'. That's all well and good if you know there are going to be a lot of people there who have never seen you before. I played at half time at a Wolves match last season for exposure to over 26,000 people (if you measure 'exposure' purely in terms of Facebook 'likes', I still only gained about 15 new 'likes' directly from that gig). I've also taken support gigs for more established artists who play similar styles to me because playing to an audience that enjoy similar music to mine is good 'exposure' for me and my music. These gigs were also great fun and in the case of the latter I've often sold more than my fair share of merchandise to cover the costs.

My main problem with this comes from the idea that all gigs are like this, that all gigs have masses of people attending who are all fans of the sort of thing you are doing and want to hear music that is new to them. We all know that this isn't the case and that actually most of the time you end up playing to an empty room and getting evil looks from the promoter for not bringing anyone with you. 'Why would I need to to re-expose myself to people who are already my fans?' I hear you ask. 'Surely if I was just going to play to my friends and fans, I would just put on my own show'. Well that's because in reality there is no 'exposure' on offer. It's just a buzzword used to mean 'the venue/promoter is doing this on the cheap and lazy and so can't/won't pay you'. I've ranted on this blog about promoters like this in the past so won't go into it again, but if you fancy a chat about it you can find the original post here.

I don't want to fall into the trap of this becoming another 'poor, down-trodden musicians' post where I sanctimoniously go on and on about how musicians don't get paid enough and it's all so terrible. I put on open mic nights myself where other musicians don't get paid to play. I get both professionals and people who just do it for the love of it play at them and they do it for a variety of reasons. I guess what I'm really getting at is that real, genuine exposure to an engaged audience of people who like the style of music you play, regardless of how big that audience is, is vital to musicians at almost all levels. My issue is that that, in the majority of cases, this is simply not what is on offer.

If you want to see me 'exposing myself' (in a musical way...) I'm hosting open mic at The Rainbow in Coven tomorrow night (Wednesday 29th October) from 8:30. See you there :)

Update

Ok, so we've established I'm rubbish at updating my blog...

I'm currently sat at a gig in Wednesbury (I'm posting in between acts, I'm not a prick!) and I thought I would write a quick update about what I've been up to recently.

I've decided I'm not playing live enough. At least not as much as I used to. So for the second Thursday in a row I'm at SOMEONE ELSE'S open mic! This time it's The Roost in Wednesbury hosted by David Young (check him and his band, The Midnight Chorus out). Needless to say I'm really enjoying playing to new people and seeing new and old friends play.

Any open mic nights going on near you? Let me know and I'll come down one of the nights :)

Live streamed gig!

Tonight I''m playing a live streamed gig at The Songwriter's Cafe, The Tree House in Kings Norton. You can listen to the whole show online here from 8:30pm. Let me know if you get chance to listen in and how you think it went!

Codfest 2014

Well the biggest day of the year has been and gone.

For all the headaches I had regarding, well, almost every aspect of the planning of the festival, from bands dropping out, splitting up or turning down slots to licence issues and field disputes, Codfest 5 still delivered an even bigger and better day than any of the 4 previous years. Every year I get to this point and think 'how can we possibly improve on that' and every year we somehow manage it.

The line up was absolutely superb. All the acts performed superbly and I'm especially pleased that the guys who play at a lot of festivals (Gaz Brookfield, Neil Morris, Under a Banner et al) all stated how much they had enjoyed it. I'm also pleased that the line up went down so well with the punters because; A- The audience probably isn't your normal 'festival' crowd and B- I worked really hard on the line up for a long time. I had a lot of acts apply to play and when I was struggling for acts I could have put someone in there who I wasn't really sure of just to fill up the numbers, but I stuck to my guns and made sure I was happy with every one of the acts, and so it's great that every one of them delivered to such a high standard and got such a good reaction.

From a personal point of view I was really happy with my own performance too, both solo and with The Replicas. I can't believe so many people filled the tent for my set! I mean, I know I have a lot of friends there, but it was still really nice to see so many people listening and singing along. I even sold a couple of T-shirts!

T-shirts are here!

I'm delighted to announce the launch of my official T-shirt range. Each one is hand printed by me, so get your order in today and send me a message with what colour you would like. Exciting times!

In other news, I'm right in the middle of festival season, the best time of the year. Last weekend I had a great time at the world famous Llangollen Faery Festival, and now I'm gearing up to this weekend at Bakewell Music Festival! See you there!

Another DIY adventure

A week or so ago I had a bash at screen printing on fabric for the first time and it went really well! So well in fact that I'm going to be releasing some T-shirts in my online store really soon!

I always think that white band shirts are pretty boring. I know they are cheaper when you are buying a large amount of them, so I can totally understand why people go for them. I just don't really like them. The good news is that, as I'm printing mine myself, I can go for whatever colour shirts I can get hold of! But what colour would you guys like? You can answer that question by contacting me on Facebook (or by email if Facebook isn't your thing). I'd really like some help on this one, so your input would be greatly appreciated.

Let me know what you think :)

New Video and a debut!

A new video has landed and I'm excited about it! Not only is it a cover of a great song from a great film, but also it's the first appearance on YouTube of my wife, Kayla.

The song is called 'Falling Slowly' by The Swell Season and is from the film 'Once'. It's great film that I urge you to check out if you haven't seen it already. It was on BBC a few weeks ago late at night and I couldn't help but watch it all, and that's when I got the idea for us to cover this song for the latest round of the BH covers challenge.

As always, let me know what you think of it :)