Music and Songwriting: This Is A LOT of Work!
Soooo, why didn’t anyone tell me that making the album was the easiest part of the ENTIRE process?! So I started by researching blogs and building an excel sheet which included blog sites, contact info, genre, etc. Once again, I wanted the Apollo’s Interlude ♫Any Which Way♫ album out beforehand so if people wanted it, it was already out to buy. Well…needless to say either the bloggers wanted money, or they weren’t into it. Money: well some of the bloggers couldn’t even show me statistics to back up the amount of “website hits” they say they we’re getting. There’s a difference between hits, and unique visitors. If the same 200 people are looking at your blog every day and they’re clicking on everything, which is making your links rack up hits, it’s not the same as 500 people clicking on two links, which isn’t racking up your hits, but that’s 300 new people added who’ve never been to the site, which really counts. People Not Being Into Your Music: It’s a shame that since I have a background in Marketing, I already know how it works. Most people are afraid to admit they like something, or honestly don’t like it at all. But! When someone they know, or who they feel is important likes something, they will change their whole mentality. It’s okay if you don’t like something, but stand your ground and don’t like it. Don’t change your mind because your peers like it, or don’t be a wuss and not say that you like something because others around you don’t. Anyway, contacting bloggers was definitely tiring and I learned to just pay someone to do that as well. We also got a few spins on some internet radio stations, but it’s only so much that can do. Getting major radio play is costly, especially since we went straight digital and didn’t have any physical albums we could mail out to stations. But besides, I don’t feel that we made songs fitted for mainstream radio anyway, so what would be the point? We decided to shoot the video for ♪Everything Is Not Meant♪. We were just going to shoot the video on a green screen and would change the different colors behind us since the song seemed playful, colorful, etc. Different colored backgrounds included major outfit changes. Wardrobe was such a hard part. For me, I have hella clothes so I’d just pick something out of my closet. But you can’t just think about yourself when you’re in a group. Crown Jones did not buy clothes and decided his stylist friend was going to help him. Well, she never did and Crown went shopping alone. He sent me some pictures and I told him what needed to go back and what he should go buy since we needed to match each other, and the different colored backgrounds. Lol…crazy…but we get to the shoot and he didn’t get everything he said he was going to get and I was like ok, we’ll make this work. We ended up shooting at Brown Lane Studios and it was fun. Yes Crown isn’t as animated as me while in front of the camera, but hey, we made something work. The DP (Director of Photography) and Editor was Josh Brummett. I had seen some of his green screen work and he was reasonable costing, so we decided to go with him. Whew! I was happy that the video was done. It was actually the first time I was in a music video for me, and not just chillin’ in someone else’s. I felt accomplished headazz lol. But on to the next…Social Media. When I was 10 (2001) I discovered Social Media. Social Media was one of the reasons I lost weight. I didn’t want to eat anymore just to be eating because I had something occupying my time…that good ol’ internet. I’ve been crazy about Social Media since then and I even made that my Marketing niche in college. We’ll, after doing it for so long to the point that you’re now studying it…it burns you out. To this day I don’t have a Tumblr, Vine, Snapchat, etc. It’s too much to keep up with, too much random useless info that you’re giving out, while also sacrificing you’re privacy. But guess what, every artist has to be on Social Media. Everyone wants to know what their favorite artists are doing. Logically, Apollo’s Interlude had to be on Social Media, it would be just stupid if we weren’t because just having a website isn’t going to cut it. Crown Jones and I would write at least one random tweet on Twitter every day. Whether it was a quote we made up or some random conversational piece we had with someone, or just some random thought, we had to tweet once a day. So that’s what we did…but obviously just doing these things weren’t going to get us noticed. We needed to do more…we needed more avenues which included needing more money.