Well it has been something like four months since my last post. The holidays are hectic and I barely got City Of Chrome And Glass released before Thanksgiving and Christmas started swallowing chunks of time. On the Saturday before Christmas my mother passed away and that holiday was taken up getting across the country to the funeral. Arriving back home after that experience I found that I just wasn't feeling very creative. After spending several weeks going to the doctor for some back pain issues that have gotten worse over the last year, I finally started working again.
The first thing I finished was a piece that I called Magic Cave Lighting after a phenomenon from science fiction movies. You know how people go in to a cave on an alien planet and they can see all around for a thousand yards? That is Magic Cave Lighting. The piece was composed over a couple of weeks. It was edited together using multiple tracks of sine wave generators and effects.
I decided to put the track on SoundCloud and enable a complementary download. I used the download to test how much Twitter works as a way to spread the word about a new piece of music. I discovered that "not very well" is the answer. With over 3,000 Twitter followers the track was downloaded twice in 24 hours. It has risen to 22 downloads after posting links to FaceBook that were then picked up by Matrixsynth. It has been online for 12 days and has now been played about 350 times.
The first thing I finished was a piece that I called Magic Cave Lighting after a phenomenon from science fiction movies. You know how people go in to a cave on an alien planet and they can see all around for a thousand yards? That is Magic Cave Lighting. The piece was composed over a couple of weeks. It was edited together using multiple tracks of sine wave generators and effects.
I decided to put the track on SoundCloud and enable a complementary download. I used the download to test how much Twitter works as a way to spread the word about a new piece of music. I discovered that "not very well" is the answer. With over 3,000 Twitter followers the track was downloaded twice in 24 hours. It has risen to 22 downloads after posting links to FaceBook that were then picked up by Matrixsynth. It has been online for 12 days and has now been played about 350 times.
So as a way of getting your work out there I think Twitter works well if you have a record contract and fans in the hundreds of thousands. A certain number of people who follow Atomic Shadow on Twitter are mostly looking for a follow back, which I almost always do. Sadly a good number of them then turn right around and unfollow you as a way to boost there number of followers-to-following ratio. Sort of Internet bottom feeding. Luckily there is a site called Unfollowers.me that allows you to see all of these stats and take appropriate action. I only follow people that I discover who seem to be like minded or are doing something that looks interesting to me. I have discovered some really interesting artists on Twitter.
I do have a small, active group of twitter followers who share my videos and posts. Their support and encouragement is the only reason that I still spend any measurable time on Twitter. Without this small, core group of people I would do just as well to delete my Twitter account and focus on some other social "Notworking" efforts. It seems that Twitter is going to move in the "pay to promote" direction that FaceBook adopted soon after going public.
I do have a small, active group of twitter followers who share my videos and posts. Their support and encouragement is the only reason that I still spend any measurable time on Twitter. Without this small, core group of people I would do just as well to delete my Twitter account and focus on some other social "Notworking" efforts. It seems that Twitter is going to move in the "pay to promote" direction that FaceBook adopted soon after going public.