CB: When I was growing up, my parents had a rule that we (I have a younger brother and sister) all had to be doing something musical.  I sang in the choir in church, took piano from age 6-12, played saxophone in middle school jazz band, and sang in choir for a year in high school.  They sort of stopped enforcing the rule in high school, so things stopped for a bit.  When I went to college at Duke University, I joined the Pitchforks, an all-male a cappella group.  I didn’t pick up the guitar until June 2008, about a month after I graduated.

As far as artists that inspired me, it’s all over the place.  My parents didn’t let me listen to the “real radio” growing up, so I only really knew gospel music, motown, oldies, and smooth jazz until about 6th grade.  Then the floodgates opened and I’ve been listening to everything since then.  At first it was Usher, NSYNC, Third Eye Blind (It was 1997, cut me a break), and whenever friends would mention people, I’d try to listen to as much as possible.   By the time I went to college, the most played CD’s in my collection were Ben Harper, 2pac, Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Mana (Revolucion de Amor).  I’m always picking up little things from all over the place.

CB: I fronted a funk/rock fusion band for a really short while (Fall of 2008), and had an epiphany – bands have a lot of moving parts and it’s really difficult to get everyone on the same wavelength if you’re not all invested in the vision or if there is no vision.  All of the guys were great guys, but we here all coming in with a different goal – the drummer wanted to have fun and get paid, the bassist and guitarist wanted to “make it” but didn’t know what that meant, and I just wanted experience singing in a band with instruments.  Knowing what I know now, we really had no idea what was going on wrt booking, online presence, engaging fans, anything.  We never had a practice or a show where everyone was happy, and I realized it was because we were all moving in different directions.  I started focusing more on my guitar, and decided to do the solo thing January 2009.

CB: I teach middle school special education math and reading, and the teaching schedule is pretty nice when it comes to music – winter and spring break lend themselves to touring (working on my first one right now), and having a free summer is great because possibilities are almost endless.  I have had a few days after shows/open mic networking where making it in to work at 7:00 hasn’t happened!  It’s really not that different than someone working two jobs except you’re your own boss and the pay is not guaranteed.

CB: It was really a “happy coincidence” of a lot of moving parts.  I’m an economics student by training, and spent the first half of 2009 researching independent artists, doing miniature case studies, and basically doing everything but getting better at guitar!  I came up with the conclusion that combining touring with a really compelling album would be the way to go about things, but since I didn’t quite have the skills or the time to support a tour, I decided to release an album.  I’ve got a few hours of original material, but I still wasn’t quite sure what I wanted my sound to be or how I’d generate enough interest in my original stuff without touring or some other means of supporting a release.

Ben Harper is the reason why I started playing guitar, and I was really intrigued when I heard he’d quit playing with his old band, the Innocent Criminals, and was putting out a CD with the new one, Relentless7.  His CD came out in May, I downloaded it from iTunes, and burned it to a CD for a 13 hour drive to my best friend’s wedding in Florida.  I think I played that CD 12 times round trip.   Since it was somewhat of a departure from the old stuff (a little heavier/more electric), I wondered what would happen if I did acoustic versions of some of the songs.  I put a couple up on youtube and got a good response, so I decided to record a full length “de-mix” album of all of the songs from the album.  I finished the project by August.  It’s kind of a reverse concept of the re-mix combined with the mixtape that comes from hip hop.  Instead of making it more danceable, I was making it “chill.”  I got a good response from people on the now defunct benharper.com forum, and even had a nice guy translate my description of the project into french for the benharper.fr forum.  I wouldn’t have been able to make the same connections with my own stuff, given limitations on my time/resources.  I’ve made a bunch of new friends and send a couple of CD’s a week to France, and I think that’s great.  I’m pushing for a full length original album by June, so we’ll see how round 2 goes.

CB: It’s really, really hard.  Especially when there are 20 people as good or better doing something similar.  It’s all about differentiation, product placement, and audience engagement.  And luck.  Good music floats to the top, but the best/more successful artists/bands have something more to offer – a story, a personal relationship, a gimmick, something memorable.  The people who give my music more than a cursory listen stick around for something, even if they can’t say what it is.  It’s all about the experience.

CB: I have this conversation with my music friends all of the time, and half agree and half think I’m way off base.  I strongly believe that good music alone isn’t enough for an artist to progress.  With so much good music (and free music) on the internet, artists need a hook to get people to listen and keep them coming back for more.  The hook doesn’t have to be a gimmick or even something an audience can easily define, but it needs to be there.  This is the collection of best practices I collected from my observations last year:

1. Play good music.  The definition changes by genre, but it needs to be there or nothing else works.
2. Clearly define your product/service.  I’m a nice guy who plays good music, and that’s evident from the web presence to the live show and everywhere in between.
3. Identify your target demographics based on #2.  It’s not the whole world, but it’s probably larger than you think.
4. Develop specialized ways to connect with those target demographics.
5. Repeat – music can always get better, and 2-4 aren’t static

If you’re trying to make money, #4 has a couple of subpoints, but that’s the basic idea.  Anyone who thinks they’ll be fine just because they play good music is crazy or doesn’t realize they’re accidentally doing the other steps to generate their progress.  I tell my friends who don’t want to do anything more than #1 to find someone who will help them do the rest. I’m still working on #1!

CB: I didn’t play that many live shows last year, and the ones I did were more for experience than exposure.  I’ve made live performance a big part of my strategy this year, and expect it to stay that way in the future.  I play open mics where I network with other musicians and venues owners/bookers (and occasionally pick up a fan or two), a monthly gig where I’m opening for myself (there’s more info and a video on hypebot.com), a few regularly paying bar gigs, short tours, and a decent number of benefit concerts with multiple bands.  Although I’m not covering a ridiculous amount of square miles, there’s not too much over-saturation due to market segmentation and product differentiation – I told you I was an econ major!  In the short-term future, live performance will continue to look like this.  Long term, I think touring is the way to go, even if it’s just a regional circuit.   I’m looking into that now for the summer, and, if all goes well, the fall and beyond.  All that being said, I’d be crazy to ignore the Internet.

CB: The upside to being an independent artist is freedom.  I can do whatever I want, have full artistic license, and don’t have to ask anyone for permission or go through a chain of command to do last minute changes – freedom is awesome.  I don’t know if I’d take a major label deal if I were offered one – I was pursuing one last year and things fell through.  I’d like to have resources available to have better connections to press and make recordings better, but I don’t know if a label deal is the best route to that.

CB: I’m all about developing personal relationships, and having a ton of ways for friends (I like that word better than fans) to interact with me and my music.  I want to know how they found me, what they liked, what they didn’t like, what they do, and all of the social networking tools make this possible.  I did this a lot with YouTube before I “went pro,” and now I use facebook, twitter, thesixtyone.com, email, and to a lesser extent myspace to interact more than inform.  One thing I am worried about is maintaining information on all those sites and the new ones that seem to pop up everyday.  ArtistData.com is great for updating/maintaining everything, and I’m just getting started using it.

I think the biggest game changer is the ease and inexpensiveness with which artists can record (audio and video) high quality material.  It allows for a lot of new, fresh material, but I don’t think anyone quite knows how to manage it yet.  I envision a multimedia monthly magazine, of sorts – I’ll be putting out 10+ new tracks each month (not all originals), but neither the content creator nor the consumer know what to do with all that stuff.

CB: Up until now, I’ve defined success by my ability to develop music that people want to consume.  I think the past year and a half has been really successful – I went from not playing guitar to recording a couple of albums and playing live shows that people seem to enjoy a lot. I think that definition may grow as I grow, but for now, it’s still focused on making music people want to consume steadily increasing the number of people who know who I am and like what I do.  Hopefully the rest will follow.

EP: Thanks for your time Chris.

For the latest information on Chris and his music, make sure you check out his official website, and listen to his sampler album below, or on his Bandcamp page.