Month: November 2009

Creating Tunelog, a Music Industry Blog

For the last week I’ve been working  a lot on a new project of mine: a blog providing commentary on the changing face of the modern music business. I’m calling it Tunelog, which will be at tunelog.net once I’m ready to launch.

I have a few reasons for doing this right now. I’ve enjoyed keeping this blog, but at the end of the day, the stuff I write on zekeweeks.com is for myself, and it’s a nice bonus if anyone else cares to read it. It’s mostly personal stuff that’s a bit more thought-out than a quick Twitter or Facebook posting. And for every two things I post, I’ve got a mostly-finished rant sitting as an unpublished draft that I ended up rereading and thinking, “well that’s great, I guess I worked that thought out in writing and came to a better understanding of it, but I don’t want that drivel being seen by anyone.” But when I get more focused on writing focused material that would be presentable to others, I remember how much I’ve missed writing for an audience. (It’s one of the things I gave up in going after a Business Administration major.)

So I’m going like crazy after this syndicated blog deal. It’s amazing just how simple it is to produce content online these days, and the social Internet is making it even more effortless to access a loyal and interested audience. I have professional experience with WordPress and have the know-how that unintentionally comes with being a Facebook and Twitter user, so that helps me personally, but I really can’t believe how the barriers to building a brand from scratch have fallen in such a profound way.

I’m learning a lot as I go: unlike this personal blog, I’d actually like to gain some serious readership and make a bit of ad revenue from it. So I’m doing a lot of thinking about the right strategies to employ for such a business venture: search engine optimization (SEO), marketing through social bookmarking sites, and active participation in related online communities. There is something to be said about using these things effectively, but at the end of the day, publishing high-quality content that people actually want to read is what will make or break me.

I’m going in with an extremely minimal investment in the site beyond my own human resources. I’m intentionally telling my web app developer side to take a back seat to my side that likes to actually produce written content. I imagine that I will have spent less than 20 hours on technical site setup before it launches. I figure that even if Tunelog fails to gather an audience, I’ll be spending a good amount of my free time doing professional writing on a topic I enjoy writing about, and I’ll have developed several different kinds of professional skills and a portfolio site in the process.

My to-do list of pre-launch tasks is getting smaller by the day, and I’m looking forward to taking it public. I have two big strategy things left that I still need to think a lot about, even after the initial launch:

  1. I need to properly gauge the target audience’s attention span. I don’t want to be regurgitating other news blogs, but rather offering insightful commentary. The question is about how to effectively do that amidst today’s “too long, didn’t read” mentality. I have to figure how independent artists and other interested parties want to consume content.
  2. I need to polish off my writing skills to present stuff professionally without sacrificing the unique voice that I want to associate with my personal brand. I’ll probably tackle a few of my journalism nerd friends and try to tap their brains for ideas on how to do this.

So that’s it for now… I’m really excited about all the work I’m doing on this site now, and you can be sure to hear more about it as Tunelog comes closer to launching!

Review: “Battle Studies” by John Mayer

Battle Studies

It’s been a while since I posted a music review, but here’s one worth mentioning. Battle Studies is a good new offering from John Mayer – stylistically different from his previous albums, not a pretentious attempt to answer his double-platinum, Grammy-winning release, Continuum.

Musically, Battle Studies strikes me with its layered tones that create a cool, moody backdrop. The tunes have a low to moderate energy level – no hard-hitting songs like “Bold as Love” here. With this album, Mayer mixes his earlier albums’ contemporary pop sound with Continuum‘s predominantly blues theme.

Lyrically, this album is about one thing, and one thing only: a major breakup. The album’s song lineup very closely presents a chronological overview of the his phases in dealing with the end of a relationship. “Heartbreak Warfare” begins the album and sets the stage for what is to come:

“I don’t care if we don’t sleep at all tonight
Let’s just fix this whole thing now
I swear to God we’re gonna get it right
If you lay your weapon down
Red wine and Ambien
You’re talking shit again, it’s heartbreak warfare”

Mayer ponders the depth of his commitment in “Half Of My Heart,” and begins to enjoy the upsides of single life in “Who Says” and “Perfectly Lonely.” Over the next several songs, he begins to feel the true depth of his relationship’s intimacy and the weight of the subsequent falling out, and expresses the full range of his conflicting emotions: “I want you so bad, I’ll go back on the things I believe / There, I just said it, I’m scared you’ll forget about me.” Finally, “Friends, Lovers Or Nothing” is a literal resolution of the whole ordeal, a ballad full of major chords and clear direction forward in the relationship.

This is definitely not my favorite John Mayer album. Each track bleeds of heartbreak, without respite. Also, his cover of “Crossroads” is thoroughly disappointing compared to live performances, and sticks out as a sore thumb from the otherwise cohesive album. To sum it up, Battle Studies is a great piece with some powerful songwriting, but its singular theme is enough to keep me from putting it in frequent rotation in my music library – though I’m sure it’ll be the first album I pull out the next time I’m in a similar situation.