Step five: Make friends and influence people
As with any creative effort, the first people you turn to are your friends. I ransack my e-mail address book and get going; some 500 messages are sent out, urging them to visit MySpace and have a listen. The response is muted, and I get the feeling that the majority of people haven’t bothered. Meanwhile, on MySpace itself, I’m sending messages and adding people as “friends” with gay abandon, but repeatedly hitting the same brick walls. For one thing, people are so sick of bands adding them as friends in a frenzy of self-publicity that MySpace has introduced an option that allows them to automatically deny all band friend requests.
I try to add current bands whose sound I think bears a reasonable similarity to mine - such as London’s The Feeling, and French band Phoenix. Phoenix block my request, and while The Feeling accept, they have 82,000 friends already. The likelihood of me being invited round to their bass player’s house for a dinner party are pretty slim.I speak to Charlotte Clark, online promotion specialist at PR firm Way To Blue, for advice. She is frank about the amount of work involved in self-promotion. “If you’re going to make any impact via MySpace, you have to make it your life. If you’re a five-piece band, you’ve each got to be on there for an hour a day, sending birthday messages to people, building relationships with other bands - it’s really time-consuming.”
So what chance for me - a new, bedroom-based act with no profile and only the internet at my disposal? Charlotte laughs. “Well, I firmly believe that no band has ever broken via the internet, and certainly not just through MySpace. Yes, the internet is essential for promoting new acts, but it needs to be combined with other media to make it work.”
So, where does that leave me? At this stage, I have two weeks before my single release date to build up a colossal pool of online chums that, according to Charlotte, normally takes around 18 months to acquire. I have 200 friends. My page has had 900 views. But 800 of those people might have hated the song, and of the 100 who like it, perhaps only 10 will click through to iTunes and buy it. No, if I’m going to flog a few hundred MP3s, I had to reach tens of thousands of people. And fast.
Step six: Make more friends and influence people
In desperation, I create profiles for The Schema on every social networking site I can possibly find that welcomes upcoming bands with open arms, including Bebo.com, Tagworld.com and purevolume.com. Over at Garageband.com, I reluctantly pay $19.99 to enter the song into some kind of contest, in which bands earn themselves reviews of their own work by reviewing other material and rating it for melody, production values and lyrical flair.
It feels like a grim evening class in musicianship; I am informed that my song is “lacking intensity”, although one review does praise the excellent, er, female vocalist. The cheek. But will this translate into sales? Do I really want to appeal to a clique of fellow bedroom artistes? Not really.
I pay my friend Alf, who runs a web development company called LikeMind, to build me a Facebook application that can play “Those Rules You Made” to anyone kind enough to add it to their profile. This secures me another 100 listeners. But with 10 days to go before release, I am experiencing that familiar feeling of futility. I’ve sent MP3s to all the main online music sites - Drowned In Sound, Playlouder, PopJustice and a dozen others - and a clutch of online radio stations, but I am getting no positive feedback.
It is pretty much as I thought: there are just so many bands out there that another new one is almost an irritant, just another flea in the ear of the music industry. On the other hand, maybe I am just being a cheapskate. I’ve only spent £97.11 so far - perhaps it is time to throw a bit more money at this thing, and make a video.
Step seven: Splash the cash
Charlotte at Way To Blue has already told me that a video is key to creating promotion opportunities online - not least because of YouTube, where music promos can pick up hundreds of views in the blink of an eye. I’ve only ever made one video, in 1990, which involved making a friend’s cat move in time to music. It was, needless to say, crap. And not only am I lacking experience and creative flair, my video equipment extends to one rather knackered Nokia mobile phone.
I appeal via e-mail and my blog on the www.schema.co.uk website, asking if anyone can help. Within a couple of hours a friend sends me the e-mail address of Alex de Campi, a graphic novelist who is also a budding video director looking to expand her portfolio. We exchange e-mails. She says that she is interested, and - incredibly - she reckons she can turn it around in just over a week. When we met up, her straight-talking, can-do attitude terrifies me; she has already come up with a complete video treatment, combining the paranoid emotions of the protagonist of the song with a meta-commentary on how difficult it is to make a video.
But how much will it cost? She promises me that, if she works for free and succeeds in pulling a huge number of favours, she can probably bring it in for under £500.
I ponder this. If I’d produced a run of CDs, it would have cost me at least that amount, if not more. Maybe this is the new reality - that a video is where any tiny budget you have needs to be spent. So, with a deep breath, I say, “Yeah, let’s do it.” The next few days are a blur of storyboards, props, reels of tape and endless messages on Facebook and MySpace pleading for extras to turn up on the day of filming. Alex has earmarked a location: a park near Embankment Tube station, as we’ll save money on lights by filming it outdoors. The day before the shoot, I peek nervously at the weather forecast. It’s really, really bad. The phone rings - it’s Alex.
“Bad news,” she says.
“What, the weather?” I ask.
“Worse. Westminster council wants £300 to let us film there.”
All our plans for the video are arranged, and the council has me over a barrel. I’m supposed to be funding this myself, in the true spirit of DIY, and there is certainly no slush fund available. So the question is: will spending that £300 earn me the 600 MP3 sales that I’d need to cover the extra cost?
“But Alex,” I whine. “I might pay them the cash, and then it might rain all day.”
“Stop stressing,” she barks. “You’re winding me up. Let me worry about the rain. You just worry about the money.”
So I bite the bullet. What else can I do?
Step eight: Make a video
We arrive at 8am with two taxis full of equipment. Alex has managed to find willing, upcoming actors on casting websites to play the various parts, including stern-looking twins, a buxom glamour model, someone from a Steps tribute band, and our lead actor - a young chap called Mark Joseph who has, apparently, been in The Matrix.
My internet-sourced extras show up looking miserable and knackered, but all they have to do is be filmed sitting in deckchairs reading newspapers - nothing too arduous. My job: to play the tune from my iPod through a tiny speaker, held up at head-height so the actors can mime along.
After a ludicrous day of hand-jiving, bottle-smashing and fending off the local vagrants, Alex is able to say: “It’s a wrap” just before 4pm. We’ve done it, and in just eight hours - and the rain had held off.
“Now the hard work starts,” says Alex - she has 48 hours to turn this into a coherent promotional video. She stays up all night on the day the single is released, tweaking the clips and adding effects so we have something to put up on YouTube. When I wake up the next morning, there is an e-mail from her: “It’s up. I go die/sleep now.”
Step nine: The YouTube factor
I take my first look at the video - and I’m the 16th person to watch it. Alex has done a brilliant job - it’s funny, it complements the song beautifully, it’s packed with friends of mine looking slightly self-conscious. I’m truly proud of it. I do another big e-mail-out and another blog entry urging people to watch it and tell their friends to do the same.
By lunchtime, it’s going down well; it has received 650 views, and has become the 64th “most favourited” video in the UK that day. Then, at some point during the afternoon, the YouTube editors notice it is picking up plays, and - god bless them - they stick it on the front page.
At this point, things go ballistic. By the end of the working day, we’ve had 6,000 views and a string of positive comments. By the time I go to bed, we’ve had 25,000 views and have been officially crowned the most-watched music video in the UK that day.
By the next morning it has notched up 64,000 viewings. And then, at around 6pm on Thursday 23 August, “Those Rules You Made” becomes - and I still can’t quite believe this actually happened - YouTube’s most watched music video in the world over the previous 24 hours, with 67,500 views.
I receive an interview request from an Argentinian newspaper. This is success way beyond what Alex and myself could ever have hoped. But, while ravaged with excitement, at the back of my mind, I am wondering whether anyone has actually gone and bought the thing.
Step 10: A star is born?
We have to wait until yesterday, 29 August, to get my first set of sales figures from Ally at Emubands.com. By this point, almost a quarter of a million people have watched the video, and for a brief period we’ve edged out Linkin Park and become YouTube’s No 3 music video globally during that week. The chart rundown looks hilarious, with my solitary, valiant DIY effort amid a sea of swanky major-label productions for the likes of Foo Fighters, Pharrell Williams and Enrique Iglesias.
At midday, the total sales for that the previous week finally arrive in my e-mail inbox. There’s no easy way of writing this, so I’ll just write it: 58. And for the avoidance of doubt: fifty-eight.
This news is, on a personal level, deflating. My total costs, including the £300 for Westminster Council, have come to around £870. My total receipts are about £27. Extrapolate these figures to the industry as a whole, and you can see why the boardrooms are in crisis; even taking into account that my record might just be a bit rubbish, 58 sales out of a quarter of a million YouTube views provides undeniable proof of both the fleeting nature of internet success, and the reluctance of the public to spend money on pop music.
I break the news to Alex; it’s her video, after all, that has brought my song to so many people. “Bah,” she texts back, grumpily. “Nobody actually pays for music anymore, do they?” Hmm. Maybe that’s just how it is. So maybe I am being needlessly downhearted. There’s my own artistic fulfilment to consider, after all. I might be out of pocket, but a quarter of a million people had heard my song. So let’s paraphrase Scritti Politti’s inspiration, the Desperate Bicycles. It was fairly easy. And it would have been cheap, had it not been for Westminster Council. So hey - why not just go and do it anyway?
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