Darnit Jim, I’m an IT Guy, Not a Businessman!

Lately I’ve been visiting the HalfPixel forums to learn some stuff about the business of webcomics. No, I don’t plan on trying to become the next Dinosaur Comics, but there’s a lot about the marketing and business of webcomics that I think I can apply to this site. One of the mantras of building a webcomic audience is to stick to a regular updating schedule, the more frequent, the better (Daily update comics, as a whole, tend to do better audience-wise than those updated on, say, a weekly schedule). This gives people a reason to visit your site again and again and again. Well, I can’t exactly pump out music on a daily basis, but I do try and make at least one post a week in the form of the weekly update on Sunday nights, plus whatever else I write/post in the meantime, including new music, reviews, and the like.

I thought about something else while reading some of the posts, namely “What do I have to make myself stand out from everyone else?” And while yeah, I’ll be putting up rough, in-progress versions of all the tracks I’ll have for my upcoming album, I’m not sure if that’s really so original nowadays (Plus, with MP3 players rapidly becoming the method of choice for the masses to listen to music–if they aren’t already there–I’m not sure if many people would even be able to tell the difference between the “rough” and finished versions from a sound quality standpoint anyway). It wasn’t until I was recording “ The Secret” yesterday that I hit on something: I have many, many failures before I record a quality take, even when I’m only recording, say, a verse at a time. I think it’d be cool to throw some of this failed stuff into a file and throw it up for download for people to do as they wish with–use them in techno remixes or whatever people do with random samples nowadays (Quite a few of the vocal takes end with a “Gah, I totally couldn’t find that pitch…” or similar). I also figure it might demystify the recording process somewhat to sort of show what goes into even a semi-successful recording of a song.