Week 5: Changes
April 1, 2024
“Strange fascinations fascinate me,
Ah, changes are taking,
The pace I’m goin’ through,
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes” – David Bowie
This week surrounds “Changes”, specifically the change in time zones between California and India. Midway through the week, my family and I flew to India, and it has been slightly difficult to communicate with my bands with a 12.5 hour time difference.
Additional changes for this week includes a new band member, a completely new band, and some new venues to perform.
We had our second rehearsal for the “Basis Band” (a tentative name, but not if I can help it). We added a new member, and the guitarist and bass role might switch around. The creative process for my two formed bands are different, due to how they were brought together. Since I manually grouped this band, the creative process is slightly chaotic, as it includes hashing out covers and giving up if they don’t work.
Now, this isn’t a bad strategy, since people with different musical talents, but similar musical interests, will come together to find a comfortable medium.
I’ve spoken to and staked social media accounts of some venues where my bands have a shot of performing. These places usually don’t require bands to sign up in advance, and are instead first come, first served.
This brings me back to band names, which are proving to be more of a hassle than expected. My first band came up with a few ideas, including “Say Less”, “Piece of Mind”, and “End of August”. They settled on the last name, as they speculate that their band will probably cease to exist by the end of August when everyone leaves for college. As sentimental as the reason, I could not allow the band to take this name, since it already exists. Nearly every variation of these three words has been taken by some band or the other, ranging from a trash metal Canadian band, to a group of three Norwegians playing indie-folk music.
After I got frustrated with several band name generator sites, I decided to focus on what I could control: marketing. Since social media is the main platform for my project, I focused my research on its effect on the “buzz” new music generates. A paper I read scared me when its results proclaimed that social media has an insignificant and often even negative effect on music sales. The reasoning was that social media has caused an overwhelming influx of new songs, diminishing its effects on physical media consumption.
Thankfully, that paper was from 2014, and the pandemic has certainly changed things. “Profit driven music” arose which has almost replaced popular music. Industries use a certain formula to churn out songs that will inevitably become popular because that is the music’s only purpose.
The pandemic also changed the indie music scene, as people who were not professional musicians, or music majors, decided to spontaneously brush up on their instrument. A new wave of indie arose as people started experimenting and allowed creativity to dictate their music, without the expectations and intention of it becoming famous.
The scary paper did mention, however, that niche songs were predominantly discovered on social media, while popular music spread through the radio. If time permits, and my bands create original songs, I would like to get at least one song on a local radio station and test our luck.
I’ll be in India for one more week, and hope to hit the ground running when I arrive back in the States. Till then!
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