Yonder Mountain String Band with Ed Caner on Fiddle

Patrick Metsker sent me this link.  Shot at the Canal Street Tavern in Dayton, OH on March 24, 2002.   The song is called "If I Lose".  Yonder sounds absolutely amazing.  By this time they had about three years of Beatles-in-the-Kaiserkeller-type experience working together.*  It certainly shows.

I first met the Yonder guys in January of 1999 at the Pioneer Inn in Nederland.  I was on vacation from Wayne Newton and staying with a friend Mark Dudrow's named Peter Fiori.  I had backpacked my fiddle down the hill about a mile from Pete's house to the PI in a fairly heavy snow, and was ready for beer and music.  The pick did not disappoint.  I was not a bluegrass player, but that didn't seem to bother anyone.  I'll never forget Dave Johnston's smile that night.  Wonderful.  About 2 months later I ended up moving to Ned to join Runaway Truck Ramp and a few months later became housemates with Dave and Adam Aijala.

When I met up with Yonder in Dayton, I had already been studying for a year at Case Western Reserve.  I'm surprised that I still knew how to hold the fiddle!

Serendipitously, my group Hey Mavis will be opening for Yonder on February 17, 2011 in Columbus.

*Every music group should do this.  Runaway couldn't do it because jobs, mortgages, and marriages kept getting in the way, and there were too many of us at 6.  I see other groups trying to succeed where members have "side projects" and salaried full-time jobs.  (Hey Mavis could be considered one of them, but we are trying to succeed given these constraints and are not trying setting unattainable goals).  Very few bands have the ability to commit 100% of band member time to the project and subsequently work out problems so the group doesn't break up.  Yonder did this, and they still have a great organization.

John Oszajca - A Model for Hey Mavis and STEP?

John Oszajca, Founder, Music Marketing Manifesto, has has a neat thing going.  In an age where musicians are gasping for sales and clicks on the internet, he is gaining customers on four fronts:  email management, potential promotion clients, potential production clients, and his own music.  It's pretty slick, and I think that the model can be tweaked for just about any marketing effort--even perhaps a college master's degree program.  Here's how he's doing it:

First, he creates lots of content.  This is done in two main arenas:  (1) He is securing SHORT blurbs on other people's blogs and newsletters by offering content that will appeal to their readers.  In this case he is offering something that promises to help alleviate a great pain.  I personally noticed him on some spam called the "Indie Contact Newsletter" that I probably picked up from my dealings with CD Baby (you can purchase my trio's CD on CD Baby under Hey Mavis).  (2) He is doing his own blogging, tweets, and You Tube videos where he creates content that "name drops" or "concept drops" (my phrase) with the goal of snagging other people's fans or people searching for a particular "something".

The goal of this content is to drive people to a "squeeze page" that exists solely for collecting email addresses, which is the second piece of the puzzle.  The squeeze page offers a free video--in exchange for your email address--that tells how he teamed up with a musician and achieved the top sales in a particular day on CDBaby with a very low budget, which is a potential solution to the pain.

Third, he offers more videos and links that drives his now intrigued and/or jealous target customers to several different products, only one of which is well-defined, which opens the door for future curiosities.

Finally, he places the target customer in a system that delivers well-timed emails with strategic content that will ensure that the customer will always remember his name, even long after they hit the "unsubscribe" button.  Many will buy something from him.

In his case, the targets customers are (1) musicians who are struggling with marketing and (2) a large subset of these musicians who are actually fans masquerading as musicians ("wannabees").

The primary product that he is selling is an email management company called AWeber.  There are direct links to this site just below the teaser video (which actually gives quite a bit of information).  A second link is a more subtle:  It is a squeeze page template for you to use at no charge!  He gives instructions on how you can set this up.  To make things easy, all emails that you will collect feed directly to AWeber (so now you have to sign up as a client)!

The second product that he is selling pertains to his services as a promoter.  It is not clear if this ties in with being a producer (it probably does), which is his third product that he is selling.  And the fourth product is his own music and performing.

It's quite ingenious stuff.  I am already trying to figure out how to use some of the tricks that he outlined in his video to drive the "one in a million" students to the Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Program.  On the Hey Mavis front, I will see if Tootsie Parker is interested in upping the web content that will snag the searchers for the Kent Stage, Folk Alley, Folk Alliance, and stars like Bob Dillion and Guy Clark.

With an ounce of creativity, this can be customized for our unique situations. Can't say that we'll use his squeeze page template, though.  But I might contact the folks at AWeber and actually speak to someone to see what they can do for us--at a better price.  (Most people don't do this!)

As a side note, the goal is not frivolous content, which is one of the things that I like about John's approach.  I'm getting a little tired of videos of rock stars brushing their teeth or eating a cupcake and getting frosting on the camera.  It's more targeted and should be more artistic and intellectual.  Or it's not worth doing.

Cheers!


Ed Caner
Director, STEP, Case Western Reserve University
Fiddler/Violist, Hey Mavis

A Pulizer Prize for Lousy Experiment - Gene Weingarten covering Joshua Bell in the Washington Metro

In 2008, Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post, won a Pulizer Prize "for his chronicling of a world-class violinist who, as an experiment, played beautiful music in a subway station filled with unheeding commuters."[1]

I have studied this with some of my physics colleagues.  Conclusion?  It is a load of crap.  Here is why:  As the reader of the article, we see the "whole"--that is, a world-class violinist who, although "dressed down", is playing beautiful music in the Metro.  In reality, each of the commuters saw and heard something completely different.  To start with, there was an intelligibility threshold that could be measured in distance from the source.  This depends primarily on 1) background noise from people's feet, trains, outside traffic, voices, etc. and 2) acoustics (i.e., echos, reverberation and geometry).  I would guess that in this particular situation, most of the commuters would not be able to even KNOW that it is a violin (let alone HOW GOOD) until they were a few meters from the source.  Since most of the commuters were walking at a speed of 2 meters per second, they probably had about 3 seconds in which to shift their morning groggy "got to get to work" thoughts to "there is a violinist".  Further, the sight did not match the sound.  Perhaps it would have been different if he were wearing a tux (a scientific control!!!).

But alas, the Mr. Weingarten was not a scientist.  Unfortunately for the Pulizer judges, it could come across that they awarded the prize because the "chronicling" seemed to be an attempt to provide evidence that "nobody cared" (an implied hypothesis) when in fact a closer look revealed that conclusions were impossible to draw.

Aiyeee!

[1] http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2008-Feature-Writing

I Dislike Apple

Paul Graham sums up some of my sentiments about my IPhone and why I will not purchase an IPad.  He most likely wrote this before Notion Ink announced the Adam (I can't wait for it to be released!).  One thing that he doesn't mention is that AT&T--currently holding a monopoly on the IPhone--has a crummy cell phone network, but I think that is another issue...

http://www.paulgraham.com/apple.html

Cheers!

Ed

Hey Mavis is Rolling

After 17 months of sporadic gigging and spontaneous potlucks, Hey Mavis is going into the studio with the legendary Don Dixon (REM, Hootie & the Blowfish, Smithereens, etc).  The band is now seriously booking gigs and potlucks in order to try to make our money back on the investment and sell some CDs.

If you think that you might like "Modern Old Timey" music, please visit heymavis.com.  Cheers!

Traffic Lights and Stop Signs May Be Unconstitutional

When considering kinetic energy as private property, stop signs and traffic lights may violate the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, which states that private property must not be taken for public use, without just compensation.  But there is a solution:  replace traffic lights with roundabouts.

Why do traffic lights and stop signs violate the Constitution?

Consider a person driving down a road.  She has kinetic energy equal to one half of her total mass (including vehicle) multiplied by the square of her velocity relative to the ground.  She clearly owns this energy because she paid for the car and the gasoline to run it, plus all the necessary taxes to build the road.  (This is not her only "energy", but we will neglect all other types of energy for the sake of this argument).  If a traffic light ahead of her turns red, she must stop according to the law.  Thus she will relinquish her energy, and thus her private property has been taken.

Now consider the Fifth Amendment.  Private property must not be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Are traffic lights unconstitutional?  I think so.  Clearly, if individuals do not relinquish their respective energies, then the traffic light system used by the public is useless.  Thus private property is “taken” (privately-owned energy is removed in the process of stopping on public (government) command), and the public “uses” this loss of private property to make the system work as intended, even though the item that is removed (energy) is not directly used by the public as energy.  Finally, there is no compensation for this loss of energy.

If this sounds absurd, it is not.  Billions of dollars are wasted per year because people are required by law to stop and start their cars at traffic lights and stop signs.  There is no government compensation, and often traffic lights favor one group of individuals over another. 

The Solution:

Some European countries have replaced traffic lights with roundabouts.  In a roundabout, the government is not taking energy for the good of the public.  The onus is now on the individual, and we might be able to apply the old axiom “the right for me to swing my fist ends where my neighbor’s nose begins”.   In other words, if there is a vehicle already occupying the space in the circle, I do not have the right to hit it, and I must yield (as the sign says).  This is not true for traffic lights and stop signs.

 

 

Dance Dance Dance 101

For the second time in three years, Sebastian Birch and I performed as guest artists for the College of Wooster Spring Dance Concert. Sebastian wrote the music for Web2.0. We received a great review on Professor Wesch's blog (Kansas State Univ). As usual, we had a great time with our friends at Wooster, especially Dale and Kim!

http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=221