Dan Ariely's Proposal for Reducing Piracy

Behavorial economics is the study of how psychology affects people's behavior in economic situations, and Dan Ariely is one of the discipline's susperstars.

Three days after releasing his new book, The Honest Truth about Dishonesty, he discovered it had already been illegally downloaded over 20,000 times. Being a scientist, his primary response was curiousity as to why people steal intellectual property.

He describes his process of understanding in this blog post:

My first insight came with a personal conversion. Before it was my book being illegally downloaded, I was more on the “Information wants to be free” end of the spectrum. The sudden, though predictable, shift in my feelings when I found my own work being downloaded for free was a jarring experience. Maybe Information finds complete freedom too threatening, I thought, and maybe it would rather be a bit more protected. It was a very clear example of how my own views of morality are biased – as are everybody’s — based on our immediate perspective.

Somehow I don't find it hard to believe that the more time, money, and effort you've spent on your album, the less likely you'd support giving it away for free.

He continues with another gem:

Once people start seeing a particular behavior—such as illegally downloading books, music, and movies—as a very common behavior, there is a chance that this sense of social proof will translate into a new understanding of what is right and wrong. Sometimes such social shifts might be desirable—for instance, being part of an interracial couple used to be considered illegal and immoral, but now we see such couples all around us and it helps shape our understanding of social approval. However, the behaviors we most often observe and notice are ones that are outside of the legitimate domain (e.g., doping in sports, infidelity by politicians, exaggerated resumes by CEOs) and in these cases the social proof can change things for the worse.

In other words, piracy is the new speeding on the highway.

So how does he propose we attempt to solve this sticky problem?

He suspects it's about confession:

How can we stop such trends toward dishonesty (in this case, broader acceptance of illegal downloading)? The problem is that if someone has acquired 97% of their music illegally, why would they legally buy the next 1%?  Would they do it in order to be 4% legal?  It turns out that we view ourselves categorically as either good or bad, and moving from being 3% legal to being 4% legal is not a very compelling motivation.  This is where confession and amnesty can come into play.

What we find in our experiments is that once we start thinking of ourselves as polluted, there is not much incentive to behave well, and the trip down the slippery slope is likely.  This is the bad news.  The good news is that in such cases, confession, where we articulate what we have done wrong, is an incredibly effective mechanism for resetting our moral compass.  Importing this religious practice into civic life was effective in the Truth and Reconciliation Act in South Africa, where acknowledging the many abuses and violations of the apartheid government allowed the South Africans to forgive past sins, and start fresh.

While I applaud new ideas of anti-piracy that aren't "sue them into oblivion", I do see a few potential snags this method.

First, if there's not enough political capital to push through complete amnestry for those who admit to piracy, the actual policy that would pass could become a "temporary stay of prosecution" instead of full forgiveness. For example, Obama's pledge to not deport young immigrants for two years was described by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano as "It is not immunity; it is not amnesty. It is an exercise of discretion."

A reversable immunity is a worthless immunity.

Second, this method would require pirates to register their personal information in a database. Given how closely piracy advocates align with privacy advocates, this will be a very tough sell. If you were a regular offender, would you want your name on an offical list?

As always, I must note that I DO NOT SUPPORT PIRACY. But, given that piracy has become the new speeding on the highway, I write to help your band understand how to live in the new music industry.

Adapt.

You Must Play Politics

To my ears, "I don't play politics" translates to one of the following:
   1) I'm not good with people and I will burn bridges.
   2) I deal with stress poorly and I will cause drama.
   3) I'm very good at politics and I play dirty.

"I don't play politics" is a red-flag statement for me.

Unless you're interacting solely with your instrument or DAW, you're dealing with politics.

Politics is the art of accomplishing your goals while keeping the most allies possible. This is a flexible statement for a reason.

Humans are composed of moods, feelings, hunches and many other idiosyncracies that color every single interaction. If you're alive, bias is inevitible.

It's never just about your raw skill. In fact, according to MIT researcher Thomas Malone, it's the groups' intrapersonal skills that determine their collective talent, not the "average" of their talent levels. This is why so many supergroups end up as a disappointment.

Imagine you're a highly regarded promoter with bands approaching you every second of every day. Would you rather give a leg up to the band you hung out with after a couple shows, or "Band #1093703"? Whether you believe this is wrong or right, this is how the world functions.

Public relations is simply politics on a wider scale.

Your political skills will play a large part in your eventual success or failure in business dealings.

Pay attention to your relationships with others.

Evil Works

As does good, but it's easy to overlook that fact.

True Change requires force. Structures and habits roost upon study foundations of inertia and fear. They won't be moved except through sustained, herculean force.

Often, the only tactics that comes to mind to clear blockage are conflict-driven. You can't smooth talk a form, so getting angry at red tape at the DMV seems like the most obvious solution.

But there's a selection bias at work here.

We view our world through the lens of stories. Naturally, more memorable stories affect us more than the boring ones simply because we can recall them easier (aka cognitive fluency). .

Conflict is far more interesting than snuggling.

In fact, a 2010 Wharton study confirms that

“the most powerful predictor of virality is how much anger an article evokes” [emphasis mine]. I will say it again: The most powerful predictor of what spreads online is anger. ...

...Anger has such a profound effect that one standard deviation increase in the anger rating of an article is the equivalent of spending an additional three hours as the lead story on the front page of NYTimes.com.  (Except from Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, via Barking Up The Wrong Tree

It's easier to recall famous artist meltdowns than it is to recall skillful mediation, leading us to more easily make the connection between "aggression" and "success".

Throwing a guitar at your band mates in the recording studio makes for a fantastic story, it's "emotionally loud". Sitting down with your bassist over drinks to talk about what's been bugging her lately and where her creative block came from makes for dreadfully boring reading, it's "emotionally quiet".

You can accomplish great things by being a jerk. I'll be first to admit, that sometimes you have to get aggressive to break past resistance.

But pay attention to the leaders you admire and you'll begin to pick up on their methods. Sometimes all you need to get someone to put forth their best effort is to get them to publicly commit that they'll put forward their best effort. (see my Negotiation Without Being A Jerk series for additional tactics)

Real, positive leadership power isn't about using deception and coercion to meet your ends. "Light Side" persuasive methods use soft force, so that even if the target of the message understands exactly what you're doing, they wouldn't be mad at you. The same could not be said for gaslighting, an effective but terribly manipulative method of planting false memories and instilling doubt.

As you dig deeper into management and psychology, you'll begin to see the framework that managers act within. Most are of mixed style, only rarely will you see a pure-evil or pure-good individual.

Be aware that people are naturally attracted to others like themselves.

The strategies you use will create your environment.

Piracy Still Isn't Going Anywhere

Emily White, an intern at NPR, wrote the article "I Never Owned Any Music to Begin With", explaining she has 11,000+ songs in her iTunes library by has only paid for 15 CDs in her life. While she states that seh supports bands through concert tickets and t-shirts, she admits that her generation probably won't be buying

This triggered a thoughtful, well-written post from David Lowery at The Trichordist. In it, he talks about the heavy burden that artist friends of his had to bear due to financial hardship, eventually leading to their suicides. Wow, heavy stuff.

He then goes on to clearly explain the immorality of piracy quite well, although the extended metaphor for the internet as a neighborhood that is built around theft fell a little flat with me.

While I agree that piracy is immoral. I don't think the morality angle will make much of a dent in people's behavior. It's preaching to the choir. Saying something is immoral doesn't make people any less likely to do it, especially if the systematic structures in place make it easier to be immoral than moral. 

For many people, piracy doesn't feel like a crime and so their moral intuition doesn't interpret the behavior that way. The band doesn't have "less MP3s" to parcel out to fans, so it's simple for someone to rationalize "It's only a couple cents the band isn't getting."  Even when we know with certainty that driving above the speed limit increases traffic deaths, virtually everyone speeds at least a little. "Because come on!", people rationalize, "I'm just going a few over and I'm already late for the concert!"

Think about how much easier to click "download all" than it is to:
   -Decide how much you actually want to hear the band.
   -Look at your music budget and determine if you've got the $9.99 for the album.
   -Weigh the moral implications of how much the download hurts the band / label.

Most people won't spend too much time on a band. There's an infinite number of songs to listen to on the internet and a casual fan won't spend too long with one before moving on to find a band that better connects with them. Only medium to strong fans will go through the purchase process.
Yes, it's a bummer.

But piracy isn't going anywhere.

The icecaps have already melted on planet music.

Adapt to the new planet or fail.

***
I DO NOT CONDONE PIRACY. I AM ONLY EXPLAINING WHY THINGS ARE THE WAY THEY ARE.
***

How Meetings Kill Ideas

After reading the research showing that brainstorming doesn't work, I began to think about how meetings sometimes smothered good ideas.

Most meetings are uneventful, consisting mostly of routine decisions and loyalty signaling. Once in every great while, we'd have a meeting that felt like a real breakthrough. Time flew and everything was discusssed. Refrains of "Let's do that" set to a chorus of agreement.

We had the plan. But no motion.

Next week: agreement and excitement continued to swell about the plan. But no motion.

The following week: no motion.

Enthusiasm waned. Soon, the idea wasbe forgotten and relegated to life in an assisted living home. Visition hours would be from ten to noon on weekdays and during nightly bingo (except Wednesday, as that night belonged to arts & crafts).

Idea are alive. Like our bodies, ideas need lots of nutrition and activity to grow correctly. If we want our ideas to flourish, we need a parent to ensure the idea is raised right and/or isn't eaten by wolves.

Getting everyone to agree on an idea is often easy but anyone ever stuck writing a "group" paper knows, it's really easy to dodge responsbility like a ninja. Often, it's a game of chicken played according to who cares the most about their grade.

When responsability is assigned to a collective instead of an individual, it's easy to be a free rider since everyone can rationalize that someone else will do it.

There's a scary analogue in psychology called the Bystander effect, which attempts to describe why a huge crowd wouldn't help someone in the middle of an emergency. (See the tragic and controversial case of Kitty Genovese being murdered in public.) Saying "help me" to a group of bystanders is less effective than pointing at one individual and saying "You help me!" There's no dodging responsiblity or question of who should act. This simple action vastly clarifies how the bystanders should act instead of leaving it to a moral quandry.

The secret to getting ideas to grow, then, is to make sure there's a baby-momma / baby-daddy for every idea.

 We can do this by either taking responsability ourselves ("I love this idea. I'll take ownership of this") or assertively asking one person to take responsability ("Great. Since you're the best with people, will you make this happen?"). Make the commitment firm, but not agressive. Follow up by checking progress and ensure the idea's parent has really internalized the concept that they are the one responsible for the idea.

Make a record.

Feed that baby.

The Art of Public Relations

Remember when I talked about how a nerd hero was able to manage his response to a humiliating article so well that he got hundreds of offers for dates?

Today we're going to look at an ineffective response to bad PR and how we could improve things.Let's look at another bad response and how we could make things better.

Last week an executive director for Goldman Sachs wrote a public resignation letter in the New York Times describing how the company only cares about taking money from clients. Needless to say this was some bad news for a investment-services firm like Goldman. The company lost $2.2 BILLION in market value because of this letter.

Goldman's response was weak:

While I expect you find the words you read today foreign from your own day-to-day experiences, we wanted to remind you what we, as a firm – individually and collectively – think about Goldman Sachs and our client-driven culture.

First, 85 per cent of the firm responded to our recent People Survey, which provides the most detailed and comprehensive review to determine how our people feel about Goldman Sachs and the work they do.

And, what do our people think about how we interact with our clients? Across the firm at all levels, 89 per cent of you said that that the firm provides exceptional service to them. For the group of nearly 12,000 vice presidents, of which the author of today’s commentary was, that number was similarly high. 

Anyone who feels otherwise has available to him or her a mechanism for anonymously expressing their concerns. We are not aware that the writer of the opinion piece expressed misgivings through this avenue, however, if an individual expresses issues, we examine them carefully and we will be doing so in this case.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how effective would you rate this communcation?

Notice that this People Survey only asks employees about how client-centered they are. Do you think current employees would have any incentive to bad talk their current employer? How persuasive is this message considering its source?

Let's pretend we're the chefs at Goldman Sachs and we want to make a tastier PR sandwich.
For bread, we ask 1,000 of our clients to answer a survey about how satisfied they are with their advisor, not the company. People respond much more positively about individuals than faceless organizations, so this will nudge us towards a more favorable response. This bread gives us a good foundation of data that we'll lay the more important ingredients upon.

I'm feeling like black forest ham, so add some of that to our sandwich. Get a few op-ed pieces written by individual clients telling a heart-felt story about how Goldman Sachs has helped put their kids through college, saved them from financial ruin, saved a basket of cute kittens from a tree etc.

Add some caramelized red onions and lettuce for crunch. Take some of the better stories from clients and record them in a short video explaining how Goldman has helped them through life.

Delicious.

Add some avocados. No metaphor for this one, avocados are just delicious.

  
What should we use for secret sauce?

Back in 2011, Fox News was accused of hacking into people's phones so they could get news before anyone else. Shady indeed, but their effective use of the principles of Tai Chi softened the PR blowback.

Tai Chi's philosophy (the self-defense kind, not the retirement home kind)  "emphasizes yielding and "sticking" to an incoming attack rather than attempting to meet it with opposing force". The concepts of "Fox" and 'Hacking" are tied together in the public's mind. This is the force of a punch. Instead of trying to resist the connection and get hit, Fox merely adjusted the direction of this punch by rebranding the "Fox-Hacking" connection that people already had made. Whenever Fox mentioned the event, they described how "hacking happens to everyone" from Citi to the Pentagon instead of emphasizing that Fox was the hacker, not the victim. Politicans have been using pivots like these since time began, pay attention to the next debate you watch for some good ones. (Note: I'm not condoning the phone hacking. I'm just talking about public relations techniques.)

For Goldman's secret sauce, we would ensure that every communication talks about the company's client-focus and any program/policies they do to make sure they have happy clients. Something along the lines of "I'm glad this brings to light the important issue of all the work we regularly do for our clients. Sometimes we get so immersed in the details that we don't fully communicate the value we create. Let's talk about how we've served our clients in the past..." Follow that up with a blend of additional client stories and data about the money you've made for your client. Mix thoroughly and apply liberally over sandwich. Slice sandwich diagonally and serve.

Now wasn't that much tastier than the bland response we initially recieved?

The Science of Inspiration

Jonah Lehrer, science-writer extraordinaire, walks us through recent research shedding light on how we can become more creative people.

He begins by breaking creative "revelations" into two different categories; inspiration from relaxation and inspiration from perspiration.

Some ideas will only come when you're not focused on the problem. Researchers found that watching stand up comedy clips or having a beer before trying to solve creative association tasks increased performance by 20-30% over the control group.

What explains the creative benefits of relaxation and booze? The answer involves the surprising advantage of not paying attention. Although we live in an age that worships focus—we are always forcing ourselves to concentrate, chugging caffeine—this approach can inhibit the imagination. We might be focused, but we're probably focused on the wrong answer.

And this is why relaxation helps: It isn't until we're soothed in the shower or distracted by the stand-up comic that we're able to turn the spotlight of attention inward, eavesdropping on all those random associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain's right hemisphere. When we need an insight, those associations are often the source of the answer.

This research also explains why so many major breakthroughs happen in the unlikeliest of places, whether it's Archimedes in the bathtub or the physicist Richard Feynman scribbling equations in a strip club, as he was known to do. It reveals the wisdom of Google putting ping-pong tables in the lobby and confirms the practical benefits of daydreaming. As Einstein once declared, "Creativity is the residue of time wasted."

The other type of creative task involves a long, steady grind on the problem. We know this as the "two measures that took fifteen hours to write." They're nasty beasts, yes, but ones worth fighting.

But wait, aren't those two methods completely opposite one another? How do we know which way we should try to solve our problem?

The good news is that the human mind has a surprising natural ability to assess the kind of creativity we need. Researchers call these intuitions "feelings of knowing," and they occur when we suspect that we can find the answer, if only we keep on thinking. Numerous studies have demonstrated that, when it comes to problems that don't require insights, the mind is remarkably adept at assessing the likelihood that a problem can be solved—knowing whether we're getting "warmer" or not, without knowing the solution.

This ability to calculate progress is an important part of the creative process. When we don't feel that we're getting closer to the answer—we've hit the wall, so to speak—we probably need an insight. If there is no feeling of knowing, the most productive thing we can do is forget about work for a while. But when those feelings of knowing are telling us that we're getting close, we need to keep on struggling.

And there's even more insight within the article as Jonah walks us through important factors for kick starting our creativity.

One of the keys to being more creative is immersing yourself in new and diverse experiences.

Steve Jobs famously declared that "creativity is just connecting things." Although we think of inventors as dreaming up breakthroughs out of thin air, Mr. Jobs was pointing out that even the most far-fetched concepts are usually just new combinations of stuff that already exists. Under Mr. Jobs' leadership, for instance, Apple didn't invent MP3 players or tablet computers—the company just made them better, adding design features that were new to the product category. 

And it isn't just Apple. The history of innovation bears out Mr. Jobs's theory. The Wright Brothers transferred their background as bicycle manufacturers to the invention of the airplane; their first flying craft was, in many respects, just a bicycle with wings. Johannes Gutenberg transformed his knowledge of wine presses into a printing machine capable of mass-producing words. Or look at Google: Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with their famous search algorithm by applying the ranking method used for academic articles (more citations equals more influence) to the sprawl of the Internet.

By seeking out new experiences, our status as an outsider may even allow us to solve someone else's unsolvable problem.

At 3M, engineers are typically rotated to a new division every few years. Sometimes, these rotations bring big payoffs, such as when 3M realized that the problem of laptop battery life was really a problem of energy used up too quickly for illuminating the screen. 3M researchers applied their knowledge of see-through adhesives to create an optical film that focuses light outward, producing a screen that was 40% more efficient.

Such solutions are known as "mental restructurings," since the problem is only solved after someone asks a completely new kind of question. What's interesting is that expertise can inhibit such restructurings, making it harder to find the breakthrough. That's why it's important not just to bring new ideas back to your own field, but to actually try to solve problems in other fields—where your status as an outsider, and ability to ask naive questions, can be a tremendous advantage.

Finally, we can embrace the Buddhist concept of the beginner's mind to discover new islands of thought. The beginner's mind is a way of approaching a problem not as a seasoned expert but as a fresh apprentice, eager to learn and willing to ask "stupid" questions that challenge assumptions. When composer Bruce Adolphe wrote his first cello piece, the piece was deemed unplayable because of an "impossible" chord written into the piece. But famous cellist Yo Yo Ma sight read the piece and nailed it.

Mr. Adolphe told Mr. Ma what the professor had said and asked how he had managed to play the impossible chord. They went through the piece again, and when Mr. Ma came to the impossible chord, Mr. Adolphe yelled "Stop!" They looked at Mr. Ma's left hand—it was contorted on the fingerboard, in a position that was nearly impossible to hold. "You're right," said Mr. Ma, "you really can't play that!" Yet, somehow, he did. 

Other recent research describes how to jump into the beginner's mind using a method called the Generic Parts Technique.

Here's how GPT works: "For each object in your problem, you break it into parts and ask two questions," explains McCaffrey, who is now a post-doctoral fellow in UMass's engineering department.

"1. Can it be broken down further? and 2. -- this is the one that's been overlooked -- Does my description of the part imply a use?" So you're given two steel rings and told to make a figure-8 out of them. Your tools? A candle and a match. Melted wax is sticky, but the wax isn't strong enough to hold the rings together. What about the other part of the candle? The wick. The word implies a use: Wicks are set afire to give light. "That tends to hinder people's ability to think of alternative uses for this part," says McCaffrey. Think of the wick more generically as a piece of string and the string as strands of cotton and you're liberated. Now you can remove the wick and tie the two rings together. Or, if you like, shred the string and make a wig for your hamster.

Awesome.

It's truely wonderful to be alive in a time when we're beginning to unravel the mysteries of creativity so that we can become more creative, enlightened versions of ourselves.

Brainstorming Doesn't Work

Johan Lehrer's article in the New Yorker lays it out bluntly.

...Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.”

This provides some interesting insight into the dynamics of group creativity. This further develops my earlier thesis describing changing social dynamics as the primary cause of "lame supergroup-itis".

But there's more nuance to this story than outright dismissal of brainstorming. One of the defining factors of brainstorming, according to it's creator, is not allowing negativity as it supposedly stifles creativity. This is wrong.

According to Nemeth, dissent stimulates new ideas because it encourages us to engage more fully with the work of others and to reassess our viewpoints. “There’s this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone’s feelings,” she says. “Well, that’s just wrong. Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive. True creativity requires some trade-offs.”

Sometimes blind positivity isn't the best answer.

As the article continues, researcher Brian Uzzi studied Broadway musicals to develop a measure Q of how familiar different artists were with one another. The higher the Q, the more familiar the artists are with one another and vice versa. After running the data to analyze Q scores with relation to the success of these musicals, the results were stunning.

When the Q was low—less than 1.7 on Uzzi’s five-point scale—the musicals were likely to fail. Because the artists didn’t know one another, they struggled to work together and exchange ideas. “This wasn’t so surprising,” Uzzi says. “It takes time to develop a successful collaboration.” But, when the Q was too high (above 3.2), the work also suffered. The artists all thought in similar ways, which crushed innovation.

...The best Broadway shows were produced by networks with an intermediate level of social intimacy. The ideal level of Q—which Uzzi and his colleague Jarrett Spiro called the “bliss point”—emerged as being between 2.4 and 2.6. A show produced by a team whose Q was within this range was three times more likely to be a commercial success than a musical produced by a team with a score below 1.4 or above 3.2.

If these results were to hold true across the creative spectrum, they could explain countless musical phenomena.

• Could this be why so many "legendary" acts tend to flame out after producing their masterpiece instead of producing two masterpieces many years apart?
• Is this at fault for the sophomore slump?
• Is there an optimal creative lifetime for a band?  I suspect yes.

Profound food for thought.

Is it time to reevaluate some of your band's procedures?

Lessons From Louis CK's MIllion-Dollar DIY Experiment

For those of you who missed it, on December 10th Louis CK released a self-produced, self-financed comedy special for a $5 download on his own website. No restrictions, other than asking you "please don't pirate this."

He made a million dollars in ten days, no middlemen required.

Louis C.K. said he was shocked as he watched the orders come in -- and then began to feel guilty about the amount he'd netted.

"I've never had a million dollars all at once. I grew up pretty poor and I was like, this is not even my money," he said. "This is just a five-dollar impulse that 220,000 people had, and now I have it. And I felt uncomfortable about having that much money."

So Louis C.K. set aside $250,000 to cover the cost of the expenses of producing the special, then doled out another $250,000 in bonuses for his staffers.

He then donated $280,000 to five charities: The Fistula Foundation, The Pablove Foundation, charity: water, Kiva and Green Chimneys.

"I was going to [donate] $100,000, but it's like blackjack -- I just kept dishing it out," he told Fallon.

That leaves $220,000 left over.

"Some of that will pay my rent and will care for my childen [sic]. The rest I will do terrible, horrible things with and none of that is any of your business," Louis C.K. wrote in a statement posted on his website.

He's not the first artist to make a killing without a label, this just serves as more proof that you can make it on your own. Radiohead's In Rainbows made the band more money than they've ever made for a record even though it was a pay-what-you-want record.

1 Direct-to-fan sales mean cheaper products AND more money going to the artists.

For a large company, $1,000,000 is break-even. For a DIY artist, it's a smash hit. Rembember $18 CDs back in the 90s? Each CD you bought from a third party only returned cents to the band.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather keep my first million.

2) Fans will pay for great art from the artists they love.What with all the crap the MPAA and RIAA are throwing about to justify the Protect IP Act and Stop Online Piracy Act, you'd think people will only pay for art when they're forced to.

Nope.

As the video game distribution platform Steam has shown, making legitmate purchase a better experience for consumers opens their wallets.

Piracy is a service problem.

Louis CK allowed you to download and watch his video using any platform you wanted.

He didn't even bother copy-protecting the video.

He didn't have to.

---

"I like the people at our record company, but the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs one. And, yes, it probably would give us some perverse pleasure to say 'Fuck you' to this decaying business model." - Thom Yorke

Negotiation Without Being a Jerk Vol. I

Whether it be predicting how much merch to purchase, choosing whether to book a larger or smaller venue for your release show, or what time you tell everyone to load-in, how you manage the expectations of everyone involved can be the difference between resounding sucess and abject failure.

I'm continually reminded of how all-encompassing this concept truely is.

Managing expectations is when you EXPLICITY outline the criteria to be used to evaluate an experience and the how everyone involved wants issues handled. This is why getting written contracts are so important. A contract serves as a visual aid outlining the expectations of all parties involved so everyone is crystal clear on what exactly to do.

Until you've worked with someone a couple times, you need to be painfully clear with how you want the deal to go. Not to the point of being patronizing ("and you'll play the guitar with your hands, correct?"), but the more work you put in up-front about your requirements, the easier your life will be when money starts to change hands.

Van Halen added a now famous clause hidden deep in their contracts that the band must be served M&Ms with all the brown ones removed. They added this clause not to be capricous rockstars, but to verify that the venue thorougly read through the contract. David Lee Roth explained that a venue not matching the expectations of the contract could lead to their road crew having to deal with life-threatening safety oversights.

Last year I was going over show details for my heavy-metal band Onward We March with a venue we booked a show at, only to find out that they "didn't want any of that screaming stuff" for the show.

No. Can. Do.

Not matching expectations can ruin your credibility, stall your marketing, or even cause your band to collapse.

When people aren't sure exactly what you want/offer, they fill in the gaps with their best guesses.

Your goal with managing expectations is to minimize hearing phrases like, "Oh you guys wanted a sound check? Sorry, we don't have time for it. Didn't think you'd want one because our last band didn't care."

Be clear.

Why Being Polite is Overrated

Negativity as a tactic is severely underrated.

We're taught to say something nice or not say something at all. After all, art is subjective so even if we don't like something, we don't have the right to critique, right?

But what do we do when the execution of the song is obviously flawed?

Sometimes, however, the best thing you give someone is a piping-hot plate of uncomfortable truth.

Steve Jobs was notorious for his outbursts of anger, but there's not a person in the world who wasn't affected by the inventions he shepherded into the market. He busted heads because he had to bust heads in order to release high quality products.

To make a masterpiece you must be willing to disagree.

Sometimes forcefully.

In fact, arguing and sarcasm make you more creative by forcing you to view concepts in a different light. Negativity improves group performance on idea-generation tasks. Competitive tasks improved creative output, (like Eric Clapton competing for the love of Layla). Moderate rule breaking is positively correlated with number of leadership roles. Anger at people who slacked off can make them up their effort (assuming they cared in the first place). Being angry also makes you process information more analytically. 

Being negative will also help you be more persuasive.

Negative reviewers were perceived as more intelligent, competent, and expert than positive reviewers, even when the content of the positive review was independently judged as being of higher quality and greater forcefulness.

However, don't storm into your next band practice, punch a hole in the wall, and go full-on Ghaddafi expecting magic to happen. A willingness to be negative when needed is different than oppressive pessimism. As anyone who has worked in a dictatorship of a job knows, pervasive criticism without positivity leads to learned helplessness. This is about the necessary balance between being emotionally sensitive to the needs of your band mates and being assertive enough to push through hard decisions to get serious work done.

Negativity is a tactic, to be used in some situations where strong analysis or action is needed. Breaking deadlocked negotiations, evaluating new opportunities, critiquing new songs: all of these are times where a little negativity might be needed to push through resistance. Trying to write new songs, improvising, networking or marketing: these activities would be much better served by positivity.

The next time you're stuck, step back and ask:

Should I be using a soft or firm touch to solve this problem?

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*Shout out to Eric Barker at Barking Up The Wrong Tree, almost every link referenced was from research he found.

How Can I Improve A Student's Motivation to Learn?

Don't call them smart.

I'm serious.

Jonah Lehrer goes over some classic psychology research by Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller showing how calling students "smart" can backfire.

Her most famous study, conducted in twelve different New York City schools along with Claudia Mueller, involved giving more than 400 fifth graders a relatively easy test consisting of nonverbal puzzles. After the children finished the test, the researchers told the students their score, and provided them with a single line of praise. Half of the kids were praised for their intelligence. “You must be smart at this,” the researcher said. The other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”

The students were then allowed to choose between two different subsequent tests. The first choice was described as a more difficult set of puzzles, but the kids were told that they’d learn a lot from attempting it. The other option was an easy test, similar to the test they’d just taken.
When Dweck was designing the experiment, she expected the different forms of praise to have a rather modest effect. After all, it was just one sentence. But it soon became clear that the type of compliment given to the fifth graders dramatically affected their choice of tests. When kids were praised for their effort, nearly 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. However, when kids were praised for their intelligence, most of them went for the easier test. What explains this difference? According to Dweck, praising kids for intelligence encourages them to “look” smart, which means that they shouldn’t risk making a mistake.

Dweck’s next set of experiments showed how this fear of failure can actually inhibit learning. She gave the same fifth graders yet another test. This test was designed to be extremely difficult — it was originally written for eighth graders — but Dweck wanted to see how the kids would respond to the challenge. The students who were initially praised for their effort worked hard at figuring out the puzzles. Kids praised for their smarts, on the other hand, were easily discouraged. Their inevitable mistakes were seen as a sign of failure: Perhaps they really weren’t so smart. After taking this difficult test, the two groups of students were then given the option of looking either at the exams of kids who did worse or those who did better. Students praised for their intelligence almost always chose to bolster their self-esteem by comparing themselves with students who had performed worse on the test. In contrast, kids praised for their hard work were more interested in the higher-scoring exams. They wanted to understand their mistakes, to learn from their errors, to figure out how to do better.

The final round of tests was the same difficulty level as the initial test. Nevertheless, students who were praised for their effort exhibited significant improvement, raising their average score by 30 percent. Because these kids were willing to challenge themselves, even if it meant failing at first, they ended up performing at a much higher level. This result was even more impressive when compared to students randomly assigned to the smart group, who saw their scores drop by nearly 20 percent. The experience of failure had been so discouraging for the “smart” kids that they actually regressed.

Totally counterintuitive, yet research since the original paper (1998) bears these findings out.

So when you're trying to motivate someone to perform better, praise and reward hard work (which can be changed) and not innate talent (which can't).

Do We Really Need 10,000 Hours to Achieve Mastery?

(Warning, long post)

By now you've probably heard about the 10,000 hours theory popularized by Malcom Gladwell in his book Outliers. According to Anders Ericsson's work on expertise, to attain mastery in something (such as playing bass) you'd need the equivalent of 10,000 hours of dedicated practice. (Three hours a day for ten years) This message, like many disseminated by Gladwell, has reached audiences far and wide. The Freakonomics team of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt even uses this theory to propose an explanation for why so many all-star soccer players are born in the first few months of the year (age cutoffs).

But Ross Tucker and Johnathan Dugas of Sports Scientists took at a different look at Ericsson's data in the context of athletic performance.

"Let me start out by saying that culture, training, diet, opportunity are all crucial to producing sporting champions or elite performances.  But the problem with the debate as it stands is the relative dismissal of physiological factors like genes, and also the extremely oversimplified view that "it's all about the training", or that science suggests genes don't matter.  My purpose with these posts is thus not to dismiss the role of training, culture or belief, but rather to balance out the argument with the facts.

And in so doing, to give an indication of just how complex it really is - the only certainty is that whoever says that success is due to one or two things is wrong."

Tucker and Dugas point out a huge omission in Anders Ericsson's work; the 10,000 hours theory talks only about averages without regard of variance. Even though the average practice time needed is 10,000 hours, it's possible to get that average by having one person practice 17,000 hours and another practice only 3,000 hours. That's a few practice years worth of difference.

Concerning a study of high-performing darts players by Duffy and Ericsson, Tucker and Dugas note that practice alone doesn't tell the whole story:

What is most interesting about this is that 10 years of practice explained 25% of variability, while 15 years explains 28%.  So clearly, the more you practice, the more you can explain performance.  That's not surprising, but the question is this:  How many hours of practice would it take to explain "most" of performance as a result of practice?  Look at the quote in the figure above, where Ericsson writes that "the development of expert performance will be primarily constrained by individuals' engagement in deliberate practice" (Ericsson, 2009).  Well, 28% is not "primarily constrained" and even though more practice explains more of performance, there is clearly a lot missing from this practice argument.

Tucker and Dugas propose a different theory that is equally valid using Ericsson's data:

Ericsson concludes that these children just accumulate more training time and that this explains performance.  The difference between the "best experts" and the "least accomplished players" is the training time.

But what if it is exactly the other way around?  Let's take two children at nine years old.  Do they have the same ability to play on first exposure?  Ericsson's model says yes, and that the difference comes later, when one child practices more, gets better teaching.  But what if the difference is present from the very first note, the first exposure to the activity?  The parents of a child who shows some ability encourage further practice, they invest in teaching and training, and this child, by virtue of the fact that he/she has more ability to begin with, accumulates more practice.  

But the child who has little innate ability makes the violin sound like the death march of stray cats, and their parents do not encourage more play.  In fact, they discourage it - the "go play outside" syndrome takes over, and the child is never exposed to teaching or practice.  His trajectory is set precisely because he has less innate ability.

Same data with a wildly different conclusion. For anyone who has taught before, it's very obvious that some students have more innate talent and drive than others.

Clearly, practice will always be important to success. You can't pick up a Squier at a garage sale and become Frank Zappa over the weekend. That'd be crazy (awesome). But denying that people have differing levels of innate talent is as silly as denying that tall people exist.

In fact, I even saw a tall person last week!

Do You "Support Local Music"?

We're going on a bit of a detour today.

Over at the blog Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong takes a look at a fascinating study by Christopher Bryan on using the power of words to create action:

"Countries around the world have tried many tactics to encourage people to vote, from easier access to polling stations to mandatory registration. But Christopher Bryan from Stanford University has found a startlingly simple weapon for increasing voter turnout – the noun. Through a simple linguistic tweak, he managed to increase the proportion of voters in two groups of Americans by at least 10 percentage points.

During the 2008 presidential election, Bryan recruited 34 Californians who were eligible to vote but hadn’t registered yet. They all completed a survey which, among other questions, asked them either “How important is it to you to be a voter in the upcoming election?” or “How important is it to you to vote in the upcoming election?” 

It was the tiniest of tweaks – the noun-focused “voter” versus the verb-focused “vote” – but it was a significant one. Around 88% of the noun group said they were very or extremely interested in registering to vote, compared to just 56% of the verb group.

In two later experiments, Bryan showed that these claims translate into actual votes. The day before the 2008 election, he sent his survey to 133 Californians who were registered to vote but hadn’t yet. After the election was over, Bryan used official state records to work out what his recruits had actually done. The results were clear: 82% of the people who read the “vote” question eventually filled in their ballots, compared to 96% of those who read the “be a voter” question."

 Why is this so?

"Bryan thinks that the subtle change from “vote” to “be a voter” plays off two psychological quirks. First, when we use predicate nouns to describe ourselves, we see the words as reflections of our essential qualities. This creates a far stronger impression than verbs do – it’s the difference which defining who we are, versus to what we do. As Bryan writes, “People may be more likely to vote when voting is represented as an expression of self – as symbolic of a person’s fundamental character – rather than as simply a behaviour.”


Second, when we use predicate nouns to describe future behaviour (“to be a voter”), we not only reflect on our qualities, but on the qualities of the people we could be. These words offer a vision of a future identity that’s up for grabs. And voting, regardless of whether people do it or not, is generally seen as positive and worthy – it’s something that people feel they should do. “Using noun-based wording to frame socially valued future behaviour allows individuals, by performing the behaviour, to assume the identity of a worthy person,” writes Bryan."

(Emphasis mine)

What we learn from this experiment is that people make decisions based on their own concept of identity. This topic keeps recurring in this blog because it's a fundamental aspect of human behavior. (Previous posts here and here)

Identity is the frame through which we view the world and make decisions. Do you listen to metal or are you a Metalhead? Do you like delicious food or are you a Foodie? Do you support local music shows or are you a Local Music Supporter?

There's a huge difference between the two.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Going Viral is a Waste (Pt. 2)

As I've said before, don't build your band's strategy around "Going Viral". It's a short-term strategy, and speed of adoption is inversely correlated with longevity (The quicker you rise, the faster you fall). Wasting your brainpower and creativity on ineffective strategies instead of building a solid musical catalog will burn you out fast. A music career is built on making superb music, not making superb stunts.

Tim Harford gives us a great analysis of the research work on social media marketing by Duncan Watts from Columbia University.

...we notice the successes simply because they are successful, and overestimate the likelihood of success. And there’s a survivor bias: in our analysis of what works we ignore what fails. “People think it’s all about videos of cats or cute children,” says Watts, “But there are millions of videos that have these attributes but haven’t spread.”

...The first surprise, then, is that the typical Twitter cascade is both rare and tiny. Ninety per cent of tweets are never retweeted, and most of the remainder are retweeted only by a person’s immediate followers, not by those at two or three removes. 

The second surprise is that beyond the mind-numbingly obvious, it’s impossible to predict which tweets will start cascades. Simply knowing that a user has started previous cascades tells Watts and his colleagues almost everything they can divine about the likelihood of future cascades – which is not very much. (It is not especially useful to know how many followers a user has if you know about their previous success in starting cascades, because the two pieces of data overlap.) 

Viral videos are the lottery. High payoffs, but essentially infinite players and loooooooong odds. Doing sustained, fan-focused marketing isn't sexy but it's been working for generations.

Am I saying give up social media altogether? Never! Just remember it's one of many tools in your marketing toolkit. Don't expect spending 4 hours a day crafting "the perfect tweet" is your ticket to becoming famous for your music.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Why do videos go viral in the first place?

Alrighty, I gotta admit I'm surprised.

I wrote this post last week with the intent of posting it in late september, but Lefsetz beat me to the punch. He even made the "empty calories" analogy I make. Glad to know he thinks the same though.

So it goes.

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Having said my piece on viral videos before (Part 1) let's take a different approach this week and look into how and why media "goes viral".

Have I mentioned that Jonah Lehrer is one of the best science writers out there today? Here's his analysis of Jonah Berger's (University of Pennsylvania) recent research into media sharing.

It’s one of the most popular online videos ever produced, having been viewed 355 million times on YouTube. At first glance, it’s hard to understand why the clip is so famous, since nothing much happens. Two little boys, Charlie and Harry, are sitting in a chair when Charlie, the younger brother, mischievously bites Harry’s finger. There’s a shriek and then a laugh. The clip is called “Charlie Bit My Finger—Again!”

Three hundred fifty-five million views.

But why?

In his study, Mr. Berger demonstrates that such states of arousal make people far more likely to share information. For instance, when he had subjects jog in place for 60 seconds—Mr. Berger wanted to trigger the symptoms of arousal directly—the number of people who emailed a news article to their friends more than doubled. He also boosted levels of “social transmission” by showing his subjects frightening and funny videos first. “Levels of arousal spill over,” Mr. Berger says. “When people are aroused, they are much more likely to pass on information.”

This builds on previous work by Mr. Berger in which he analyzed 7,500 articles that appeared on the most-emailed list of the New York Times between August 2008 and February 2009. While Mr. Berger initially assumed that people would share articles with practical implications—he imagined lots of pieces on diets and gadgets—he discovered instead that the most popular stories were those that triggered the most arousing emotions, such as awe and anger. We don’t want to share facts—we want to share feelings.

In a piece The Atlantic did on this same study, social psychologist Kim Peters says:

"What we share may have as much to do with the stimulation provided by the environment as with the information itself."

And that's why viral marketing is dumb.

There's an infinite number of ways to arouse emotion. Creating a classic album for your fans arouses emotion. So does a video of a guy getting hit in the crotch. Both activities will get you huge amounts of hits.

But hits / "friends" / retweets are not dedicated fans. Viral marketing is junk food; full of calories (hits) and not much else. These numbers are transient fans who saw a cool video of "that band that fell down the stairs a bunch". And now they're bored with your video and don't remember your name.

The real danger of "friends" is that these numbers are easily quantifable whereas actual fans can't easily be counted. My facebook feed is full of bands touting how many facebook "likes" they have. It's fun to compare, sure. But don't treat it like a measure of your band's "true" worth. Correlation doesn't prove causation.

Focus on creating real fans with brilliant music.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to watch videos of dogs on skateboards for the next hour.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Anti-Marketing

The Atlantic did a killer piece that highlighted the trend towards band's using Anti-Marketing.

Short Version: Some indie bands are purposely obscuring their names, hiding their faces, and refusing interviews as a means of image-management.

Love it.

As I mentioned previously, speed of adoption is inversely correlated with longevity.

Buzz magnifies people's expectations, which in small doses is beneficial for a band. But if too much buzz is laid on, the gap between fan's expectations and the actual music is too wide, and the fan is left with a foul taste in their mouth.

In the same way the US Federal Reserve will adjust inflation rates to either stimulate growth or limit inflation, smart bands need to adjust how much hype gets pushed on them. Too little and the band's fan growth stagnates but too much and the band's fan base deflates. It's all about managing expectations.

From the article:

From that point on, there has to be enough substance to the group to sustain them through the post-hype phase. Look at Die Antwoord. The South African rave-rap duo baited the media for months with a lewd web art, bizarre videos, scarce information, and exotic promise. Once people learned that they were a satirical act helmed by Johannesburg performance artist Watkin Tudor Jones, who had released music under other personas in the past, excitement for the group largely vanished, right on time for their Interscope debut, $O$, to debut at 109 on the Billboard 200—a flop by major-label standards.

Anti-marketing is a valuable tactic. It's a pressure-release valve for when you feel that the press is going a little too far in their promotion of you. How to make the call when you're getting extravagant praise is the real challenge here. Intuition is all you've got here, and that's easily clouded by the ego getting all warm-fuzzy from the attention. In all likelihood you won't need this tactic though, since most artists don't get explosive hype storms.

Anti-marketing, like all tactics, needs to fit within the strategy of your art. Using a tactic that doesn't fit your strategy is not a good idea. Self-aggrandizing rappers probably don't have much use for anti-marketing. Bedroom produced indie-electro-pop is a different story.

Keep an eye on how much hype you get. Anti-marketing may one day be just the tool you need to keep buzz under control.

What Does Enjoyment of Music Come From?

Making science accessable to a layperson is a gift. And once again, Jonah Lehrer delivers in this thought-provoking article on the psychological effects of price on perception of wine quality.

Excerpt
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Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less. Our results indicate that both the prices of wines and wine recommendations by experts may be poor guides for non-expert wine consumers.
...
The taste of a wine, like the taste of everything, is not merely the sum of that alcoholic liquid in the glass. It cannot be deduced by beginning with our sensations and extrapolating upwards. This is because what we experience is not what we sense. Rather, experience is what happens when our senses are interpreted by our subjective brain, which brings to the moment its entire library of personal memories, wine shop factoids and idiosyncratic desires. As the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars pointed out, there is no reasonable way to divide sensory experience into what is “given to the mind” and what is “added by the mind.”
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Emotion depends on context.

Your music can be brilliant, but if it sounds like it was recorded in a garbage can, less people will like it.

If the show is sold out and crowded, people will tend to assume your music is better.

If someone you loathe trys getting you to listen to their favorite band, you're probably not going to like the band.

Lesson: The better you craft the emotional context that people experience your music through, the better people will pecieve your music.

Ways to do this: Genuinely engage with fans (live show, twitter, website, merch booth etc), explain stories behind your songs, build a band mythology, play with bands that fit your sound, etc.

(Previous posts on this topic here, here, and here.)

Don't Get in Car Wrecks With Your Fans

Guilty admission.

Yes, we've probably met before but I'm sorry, I don't remember you. It happens often, so don't take offense.

But I can rap every word of I Like Big Butts like a champ.
I've got my priorities.

And so does everyone else.

We've only got so much room in our brains. Things we consider relevant stick, everything else tends to float away. It's efficient and helps our mind stay organized. (In fact, perfect memory is a miserable, horrible existence. Check this Radiolab episode about the man who couldn't forget.)

So it's eaaaaaaaaaaaaasy to forget about Local Band #A2496BBQ21. If you wrestle bears for a living, you probably don't have a local band that high on your mental priority list. Even the rest of us with less dangerous careers have a lot on our minds.

It's all about Mind Share.

Whereas market share (another good term to be familiar with) is the % of total sales within a market that your product sells, mind share is the % of a customer's mind you occupy. To put it more simply, when a customer thinks about bands, how likely is the customer to think about your band? The more likely you are to be remembered, the more business you get.

For example: Your homie asks for a good restaurant in the area. The names you remember get 100% of the business. Simple.

If you've got a HUGE mind share, your brand essentially becomes the name of the product. In the US, people ask for a "Kleenex", not a "facial tissue". (How's that for some awesome marketing?) If you've got NO mindshare, your band essentially doesn't exist for this consumer. That's being a little too underground of a band.

Soooooooooooo how do we build mindshare?

Mindshare is all about building memory, so it's a matter of salience, repetition, and context.

Salience is how powerful an impression the memory makes. Remember when you got into that car wreck and you remember every single moment in slow motion? That's a salient memory become it was powerful and your brain told you hey, pay attention! DO NOT GET INTO CAR WRECKS WITH YOUR FANS. KILLING THEM IS NOT GOOD FOR YOUR BAND.

TRUST ME.

Getting your band into a fan's memory without mutilation is ideal and not too difficult. Simple things like responding to a fan's tweet says "Hey, I'm the band and I actually care about you."

We remember people that care about us, because obviously they have good taste in people.

Or if you know it's a fan's birthday, tell em happy birthday from the stage. Simple, but it adds the personal connection to the memory that builds salience. (Or you can take the brute-force method of physically connecting with your fans. GWAR)

Memories are also context-dependant. Back to the earlier example, when you're thinking of restaurants to suggest to your friend, not only does your memory call up a list of restaurant names, it also remembers what the food was like, how the service was, what kind of dress code the place has...

All things tangentially related to the experience reinforce the experience.

So to build mind share you can also interact with fans in different contexts. If the only way you connect with your fans is facebook (see next week's post), that's only one context they'll remember you through. Now say you happened to do a cooking show on youtube as well. Then when people mention cooking there's a possible "I know a band that cooks" connection as well as at a show they can think "I've seen those guys cook". Essentially you're creating more "things" that people encounter that will likely "trigger" memories of your band. There will be more on this topic in later posts.

Finally, repetition is the part of marketing that gets the most focus because it's the most obvious. The first time you hear a band name, it's new. Then when you see it in a magazine you go, "Hmm, I've heard of them." Then after you see their name on a poster on every street corner, you're more likely to think "Those guys are everywhere."

Putting up flyers and getting your name mentioned is good, but repetition alone doesn't mean squat if there's no salience or context. Then all you'd have is the "Oh yeah, I recognize that name." While mere recognition does improve liking of something (mere exposure effect), you want people to actually take action when they run into you. There's many bands you recognize the name but haven't even given a listen to because there's no real reason you're compelled to listen on just a name alone. Nevertheless, the more people hear your name, the more likely they are to remember you.

Phew, good post. Nap time.

How to Audition for a Band

We've been running auditions for a new vocalist for the past few months (with steadily improving results thankfully), but it appears the world needs this post.

Bummer.

An audition is a JOB INTERVIEW. Sure, it's not usually super-formal and often involves beer, but your goal is still to impress complete strangers enough to want to work with you multiple hours a week, for an indefinite amount of years.

And 90% of what we make our decision upon will be our first impression of you. That's the way the human brain works. It's not fair; the true measure of a person can only really been determined over the course of years. But that's the way the human brain works. 

Research on first impressions from Barking Up the Wrong Tree: "The findings indicate that getting off on the wrong foot has devastating long-term consequences. Although later breaches seemed to limit cooperation for only a short time, they still planted a seed of distrust that surfaced in the end."

Artists, even more so than the average person, make decisions on intuition and emotion. If the band gets bad vibrations from you, there's no way you'll get in the group.

So what are ways we can give off good vibes to help increase our chance of getting into a band? The same ways that help you do a kickass job interview:

-Show interest in the band you're auditioning for.

   Unfortunately, this does need to be said. You want to show genuine interest in this band, not a band. Even if you only listen to a couple songs and read a bit of the website, this is very important. 

Mention to us "I really like what you did with the harmonies in The Golden Vine, how does that relate to the direction your music is going?" and we'll be ecstatic. This shows you've at least thought about what we're trying to achieve with our music, and you're intrigued enough to ask for more information. 

If you send us an email or text saying "Hey man, I can scream. What do you sound like? When can I come in?", you're not going to get an audition. It's not hard to google the band so we assume if you won't make that little effort, we assume you'll never make any effort.

This is why good job interview advice always says "Ask questions at the end of the interview." It's not the questions that are important, it's all about signaling to your interviewer that you care enough to know more about the position. You want to convey that you want this job, not any job.

Other examples of good questions/conversational topics: 

   "Where do you draw your influence from?"

   "I come from a background of _______, and I could use that to add some _______ to your music. I think it would improve your current _______ influences."
   "Between your last album and your most recent album, I see you went more in a ____ direction. Why did you decide to make that change?"

-Look like the band. Even if you have the technical skill, bands are as much about talent as they are about personality and artistic fit. Don't show up to an indie rock band wearing all black. Conversely, if you're a perky, positive drummer who loves wearing sun dresses, you're probably not going to get the gig for Metallica.

The whole "you shouldn't judge a book by its cover" argument may have moral merit but it's counterproductive to getting the position you want. Unless your mom still dresses you (NERD), you're in complete control over how you present yourself to the world and, therefore, how you would like to be perceived by the world. THIS IS YOUR CHOICE. AND IT WILL AFFECT PEOPLE'S FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF YOU.

People like people that look like them. The friends we associate with have a similar level of attractiveness as us.  If someone has a similar trait or interest, we tend to ascribe other traits to them without any other information.

Be conscious of what the band's image is. Act accordingly.

-Ask them what they're looking for and why they're looking for it

   Sure, the musician wanted ad they posted had good info, but this question is very important to determine the big reasons the band is looking for a new musician. Did their last bassist have a super-dramatic ex who constantly fought on stage? Did two guitarists have a drug problem? Did the drummer not have "the band's look?" This is important for you to know, since it lets you know what the band values.

In a similar vein, if you found the ad on craigslist, make sure to reply back to the message saying how you fit the criteria. You don't have to mention everything, since that would become tedious, but if the band says they're looking for a serious musician, tell them how your serious. Telling only that "yeah, i'm serious" doesn't convey the same conviction as "I'm ready to throw everything I have into the band."


Want ads are a golden opportunity that lets you know what values are important to the band.

If you want to get the gig, you'll have to know how the band will determine if you're successful or not. It's an easy issue to over-step Which brings us to the next step:

-Once you know what the band values, either say that you're (a Ask for the Job or (b Walk Away.

   In the nervousness of an interview it's easy to forget or wuss out and not ask for the job/position. Trust me, I understand how it sometimes feels emotionally awkward to be so forward and ask for what you want. I've spent a large portion of my life afraid to ask for what I want and what was important for me. Once I got over the fear of speaking up for myself, (which turned out to be baseless) I began to get ridiculously awesome results in both my business and personal life. 

So if you want the job, and you're a good fit, ASK FOR IT. It's scary, but once you finally internalize it you'll see crazy results. Promise.

On that same point, if what the band values isn't what you feel is important for your art, walk away. Trust your artistic gut on this one. If your values aren't aligned now, you'll eventually have to compromise or argue over what's important to the project.

-Don't talk smack about your last band.


Even if there were terrible, awful people (like some of the stories I heard, wow), do your best to spin it as positively as possible. If you come across as bitter and negative, it only reflects poorly on you and shows off your bad side. Since this is an interview, you should probably be playing up your good side. Just an idea.
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That's all I can think of now, but I'm sure I'll come back to this as more ideas come up.