The world is full of sheep. People who do things because everyone else is doing them. It's not necessarily a bad thing either. It makes sense sometimes to do things the way everyone else has always done it because that what's worked before.
You often hear people say that people are stupid...except for themselves, of course. I don't believe that. I don't think that most people are stupid. But most people are lazy, selfish and uninformed. All three of these qualities feed off of each other to produce sheep. It's the big reason why people who actually create interesting and useful things that the rest of us want are so rare.
Ok, so I said that it's not necessarily bad to do things the way everyone has always done them. That's the case with religious tradition because human nature doesn't change. But there are areas where it's not useful to be a sheep because things change fast. The music industry is one of those areas.
When you're in an industry that's being heavily affected by technology, like the music industry, sometimes you really have to ask yourself whether what you're doing makes all that much sense.
Even if everyone around you is still doing it. Labels are still spending millions of dollars to market artists' albums. Does that make much sense anymore? I don't think it does. And just because they're still doing it doesn't mean you should be trying to copy them on a smaller scale. Large organizations are almost always the least informed about new industry trends. Look at how bad Microsoft is with search.
People occasionally ask me to give them feedback on their music. This one chick recently asked me to give her honest feedback on her brand new album. The funny thing is that in the email where she asked me if she could mail me her CD, she also had a link to her CD Baby page which had the exact same songs in mp3 format that were on her CD. So why did she spend money to mail me the CD?
Because that's the way things have been done for the last several decades. That's the way you pitched yourself to the A&R rep at Universal or Jive. It's tradition. So that's what she did. Now, I do understand that asking artists to send a physical CD can be a strategy to weed out all the lazy and untalented people who don't want to go through the trouble of producing a nice looking package and paying to mail it.
But, c'mon. I know this girl. She didn't have to send me a CD to get me to listen to her music. I'm sure she knew that. But a little voice inside her head probably told her that that's the way it's done.
As soon as the CD arrived, I opened the package and looked at her cover art. Then I turned it over to look at the back. At the very bottom it mentioned that her songs are copyrighted. I thought to myself, for an artist of her low caliber, is it really worth going through the effort of copyrighting all of her songs. But that's what you're supposed to do, right?
The point is, think about whether everything music-related that you do really makes sense in the modern environment. Just because they say that Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the best days to send out an email newsletter doesn't mean it's the best for you. Test and learn. It's so easy to test and analyze things with the Internet.
Don't just do things because everyone else is doing it.
