Month: January 2024

AOL MUSIC WEB PRODUCER

In an effort to completely remove myself from social media, I am moving my WORK HISTORY from LinkedIn to my site, which is a platform I own and control. This will help me tell more of the story of my work experience. I hope it’s helpful. Enjoy.

In April of 2006 I started my very first for-real web job, as a web producer at AOL Music. It was just a three month contract gig, covering for someone on maternity leave, with zero guarantee of anything afterwards.

I got this gig because I put my music blog (Buzzgrinder) on my Monster dot com resume, and a headhunter found me. I left a full time job with five weeks paid vacation for this gig, and looking back it was one of the best moves I ever made.

This was someone else’s set up, but I was able to plug in my iPod and listen to my own music while I worked. I wrote copy for weekly new songs and videos features, built and scheduled music main page graphical elements, and wrote daily headlines for Music Main news section.

Some of the people that worked at AOL Music recognized me from the referral traffic that Buzzgrinder sent them, which blew me away.

I remember seeing artists come in and perform acoustic in conference rooms, which was sort of the start of AOL Sessions.

I had typos on pages that were seen by millions. This is where I learned a valuable lesson from a co-worker, when he was sitting beside me while I got “talked to” for my mistake – “we’re not saving lives!”

Oh yeah, I auditioned to host The DL, which was AOL Music’s “music show,” but Sara Schaefer got the job and MURDERED IT. They picked the right person for the job on that one.

My time with AOL Music music last just 3-4 months (I can’t really remember how long it was), but I met a lot of amazing people along the way.

Oh yeah, around this time in 2006 the #1 music site on the internet was MySpace. Wild, right?

SHOW DON’T TELL

I’d imagine one reason people don’t sign up for email newsletters is because if they can’t see your email newsletter, they’re going to assume it looks like all the other shit newsletters out there, so why sign up?

This is why something like Substack works so well. It’s literally the secret sauce. You see what you’re going to get before you sign up.

Not so with Mailchimp or the countless other shit newsletters we sign up for from artists we like.

We blindly sign up and get tossed a product catalog every few weeks.

Meanwhile, the same artist shovels 19 posts a week up on social media, filled with jokes, rants, photos, and stories.

Email subscribers are only worth sales, apparently.

BIG SKIES

WordPress is telling me I’ve published 1,000 posts.

A few hundred people a month read things I write here.

No likes, no comments, no “engagement.” Just me posting for the sake of posting. It’s a digital journal of sorts, I guess.

I’ve been publishing things on the internet since 1995 or so, which is about my earliest memories of the “commercial web.”

I had a Packard-Bell computer that I bought at Sears on credit, and it was about $3,000. Had Windows 3.1, and I think I had mIRC on there.

Met a lot of people via #pasxe.

We’d find out about shows like that back in the day. We’d make plans there to hang out and meet at diners. Then AOL Instant Messenger came along and fucked everything up.

I’m so frustrated by all the platforms these days. The tie-in. Streaming music services where you rent music. My Photos app has over 300GB of photos, and my new laptop has just a 512GB HD. I moved my photo library to my external HD, but now it won’t do the iCloud Photos thing.

This is why I go for walks. Today I walked about six miles, spread across three jaunts. “When in doubt, go for a walk” is my mantra for 2024.

SHARE ART

Since I deleted Instagram at the start of 2024, I wondered how I’d find random bits of amazing artwork. Well, from blogs, of course.

Wait, not just blogs. From people.

It’s people that write these things and find these things.

Social media platforms get rich on the unpaid effort of all these artists and creative curators, while limiting reach, and making people think “who even has a website anymore?”

Fuck Zuck. Fuck Musk.

Go buy something from Old Made Good. Found via Swiss Miss.

WHERE I WRITE

My desk is on wheels, so sometimes it faces east; sometimes, I swing it around so I can look west.

I use a standing desk that I bought in 2019 or so, before the pandemic. Attaching the power strip to the leg was a recent move, to make it easier to wheel around, with the cords getting caught under the wheels.

Yeah, the cords take away from the “minimal aesthetic,” but I need power, and my external HD plugged in, so whatever. This really works for me. I can’t stand having a lot of stuff on my desk while working, so having a small desk makes that easier.

Thanks to @Beth Kempton for these #meetthewriter prompts.

SNOWY KUTZTOWN

It’s the first big snow in a while, so I went out for a night walk!

The next morning I went out in search of a the perfect spot to sit and watch the snowy world pass on by.

Tell me you prioritize automobile traffic over pedestrian safety without telling me you prioritize automobile traffic over pedestrian safety.

Let’s stop playing games we don’t want to play

I was a one-man band called Seth W.

I played the drums with my feet, I played the bass, and I sang all at the same time.

I played “The Car Song,” “The Jock Song,” “Runny Nose,” and many more. I even covered Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” (The Titanic movie has just come out).

It did this from 1998 to about 2001 or so.

Around this time, I met Tommy (maybe he took the photo above, but I’m not sure). He drove from NJ to see another band on the bill, but he “got” what I was doing. He booked me for a show in his town.

I got to play with Folly. I met Ben Kenney from Supergrub, who would go on to play with The Roots and Incubus.

That was around 25 years ago, and me and Tommy are still buds.

Could I have kept playing shows, writing silly songs, and maybe started touring?

Sure. But I didn’t want to do all that.

As Scott Perry says, play your own game:

“You can’t win playing someone else’s game.

And you can’t win a game you don’t want to play.”

I never got to play arenas or do big interviews, but I met Tommy.

What has this got to do with the Social Media Escape Club?

Well, I deleted my Instagram account on January 1st, 2024.

I met many great people through that app, but after all these years, I didn’t want to play that game anymore.

Could I have met another “Tommy?” I don’t know, maybe.

But just like I don’t want to spend time writing silly songs, I don’t want to waste hours on Instagram every week for some mystical payoff.

I mean, I turn 48 this year. I have a limited number of years left on this flying space rock – do I really want to spend that time staring at my phone?

Sure, “growing my audience” sounds like the right thing to do, but how much time am I investing in the people who are already onboard?

It’s like when I see people on social media say, “Gonna send some goodies to my 1,000th follower!” Is that how you make your first 999 followers feel special?

Instead of chasing more, let’s seek depth in the new year.

Can you name five of your subscribers? Do you know what state or country they live in? Have you seen photos of their pets?

Depth isn’t a growth hack, but it has much better rewards.

Happy New Year.

BURN IT ALL DOWN

Music blogs in the mid-2000s were a power (I was there). A good review could help sell a ton of albums.

After that, we ditched our iPods and piled onto social media and streaming playlists.

It’s all burning down.

I’m surprised how anyone is upset at this. Unlike popular DJs that would make radio shows, the people making these playlists were somewhat “hidden.” Yeah, sure, we knew who some of them were, but it’s not like the big prominent names and faces that we see in the world of radio, you know?

So how then are we surprised that they just replaced everyone with computers anyways?

None of these companies want to actually pay money for editorial discernment. If they did they’d have a full staff of amazing writers, like how Bandcamp used to operate.

Email lists and vinyl records will outlast social media, and I’m adding DSPs to that list now, too.

(via, Bloomberg)

THE TRUTH WILL FIND YOU

Fight Club and The Matrix are two very important movies for me, mostly because I was in high school in the early 90s.

So yeah, I may watch these two movies a lot. I even have a Matrix tattoo.

Something struck me recently. Near the end of Fight Club, when Edward Norton is beginning to realize that he’s Tyler Durden.

“You work nights because you can’t sleep. Or you stay up and make soap.”

Now, the scene where Neo meets Trinity for the first time:

“I know why you’re here, Neo. I know what you’ve been doing. I know why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night you sit at your computer.”

Neither of these main characters can sleep. They’re searching for something. Your next life, who knows?

And then each character expands because they start hanging around people.

Edward Norton was fighting with himself in the parking lot of Lou’s Tavern, when that guy walked up and said, “can I be next?”

Neo was searching, living alone, living on his computer. But his pals dropped buy for a miniDisc, right?

This then leads to Neo meeting more characters that wear all black and do stuff with computers.

This is an absolutely incomplete line of thinking between the two movies, the two characters. I’m not saying they’re connected, or in the same universe.

But the concept of not sleeping, or searching for meaning in some way outside yourself… I don’t know where this is going, so please stand by.