Rainhat – the band

My progress toward rockstardom so far

It has been a couple of productive days, with two new songs up on the website and on MySpace. Sudden inspiration struck last night, and I wrote “Tomorrow” in about half an hour and recorded it this morning. A total of six new songs up now. I’m gonna record six more and call it an album. “Album” is a bit of a misnomer, since it will be a completely virtual thing. At least for now, I have no plans of releasing and actual physical disc with music. Maybe I should call it a “collection” instead…

Anyways, my first “collection” will contain 12 songs and will go by the simple, yet incredibly descriptive name “The first dozen”. Then the world shall be mine! Muahaha!

But seriously, how far have I gotten on my way to fame and fortune? Time for a small recap. Here are things that I’ve made/gotten/signed up for so far.

1. A myspace account with my music on it, and even some new friends on there. This could be useful for letting people hear my music.
2. A website of my own, complete with a shop powered by payloadz, and streaming media player for my music. A must have for any aspiring band. Minimum web presence established.
3. An Eventful account. This will let me know if people want me to come play somewhere. I can also post events and invite people to them. Plus, it’s another place where the name Rainhat can be seen, which doesn’t hurt.
4. A twitter account. Seemed like a good idea for just letting people know I exist. Not very many followers so far, though.
5. A YouTube account. This could be a great resource for getting seen, but without something to actually show people it doesn’t really do much. As an experiment, I put made a video consisting of a still image and one my songs and uploaded it. Pretty lame, I know, but just to see if it actually gets viewed at all, or if people only watch stuff they already know about and deliberately search for. In the last two days it’s been viewed a whopping 3 times. Woohoo.
6. I uploaded my songs in a torrent on Piratebay so people can download it for free. However, since nobody knows Rainhat exists, they can’t search for it, which makes the whole thing a bit useless. Torrents will probably be way more effective once I’m actually well known.

So, I have Rainhat firmly planted online, and with a thorough consistency. As far as possible, the different sites match each other in themes and color schemes and such. A good start, I think.

Now, the next thing to deal with is to actually get people to read this blog, follow me on twitter, and rush to my website and myspace page to listen to my music by the millions. I’m not exactly sure how to accomplish that. My MySpace page has had about 500 plays in the last month. Some improvement would not be unpleasant.

Ok, here’s the plan: Once I have recorded the rest of my collection, I will put the music up on Last.fm. There it should get at least some airtime, which will help.

I also thought about creating an artist profile on Facebook and then trying to get all of my friends to invite their friends and try to get a following there. Facebook has some 200 million users, so it might be useful. I haven’t done it yet, though. It seems somehow pretentious, like I’m taking myself too seriously, just proclaiming myself an “artist” like that. But then again, if *I* don’t take my band seriously, I’m quite sure nobody else will either. So I think I’m gonna go for it.

And lastly, there is the music. I write new songs fairly consistently, and I have plenty of music left to record. There is always that gnawing self-doubt, though. Is my music good enough? Will I fail to draw an audience simply because nobody likes my music? This is something that I guess every performer has at some point, and maybe it’s impossible to get rid of. A critical eye towards your own work isn’t necessarily a bad thing. At least for me, it challenges me to keep trying to write better stuff all the time. I don’t worry too much about it. I like my music, and I know there are others who like it too. If they like it, there’s no reason why everyone else wouldn’t too, so I’m just going to keep going. If it’s good, it’s good. Then there’s no problem. If it isn’t good enough, I will find out and re-evaluate things then. So full speed ahead!