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Put Butts In Da Seats

Posted on December 26, 2013

Special guest blog by DannyC, South Louisiana, USA

Larger audiences . . . am I doing my share to “Put Butts In Da Seats?”

I ask this question as while StreetJelly is no doubt a wonderful site for musicians and songwriters to showcase their talent the fact remains for ultimate success, for performers anyway, we as a group must do all we can to boost the “civilian members” of our audiences. This is of prime importance if indeed you truly want to get compensated i.e. tips from your performances.

For you “true” buskers out there, I’d be willing to bet when you stake out a setup location you are looking for the highest traffic and target music demographic audience you can reach. Well on SJ while we have a built in audience, they are like family, and while I love my “real” family as much as the next guy they are the last group I would ever expect to support my living, especially as a musician. With this said, if we want to grow our tips and audience size we simply must get more music fans to visit SJ.

As a group we can instantly start bringing in more audience members. Look, we all have email accounts, 99% of us have FB pages or websites. I urge you to take a little time, say once a month or so to do some blitz emails campaigns, FB sharing promotions and website links and yes “blatantly plug” your future performances. It’s numbers game guys, the more we “all” tell the story to our contacts and get them to tell it to their contacts the larger the “civilian” audiences will be. And every new music lover we drive to our performance will eventually check out other performers. In fact I encourage you to point out the diversity of music they can hear on SJ in your campaigns. I learned long ago you only gain by plugging other acts as you highlight yours.

Frankie and Martina have a wonderful website built with the musician and music lover in mind, and I like many of you are very thankful for the platform they have given us to showcase our music. But, IMHO, the time has come for “us” to do something to grow SJ. We as musicians just can’t sit back, plug in and expect for our popularity and tips to grow. We owe it to ourselves to do something with this platform they have afforded us to insure it does, as the saying goes the ball is in our courts.

Bottom-line . . . How often do we hear lines like, man we can’t get squat for a 3 hour gig in my town, and the next thing you learn is that very often some cat is playing a gig for “nadda” just so he/she can get “the exposure”. Well we can’t do much about that but we do have the ability and means to help build our SJ “civilian” audiences. My bet is that not only will your tips increase but the more local audience members you bring in the more audience members you will have supporting you in your live events around your town . . . therefore your number of live paid gigs should also increase.

Fellow SJ family members please take this for what it is and no more, a personal opinion offered with the hope that if some of you agree you will get on board with trying to build civilian audiences. Either way, I thank you for your time to read it.

Now let’s count off the next tune 1 ana 2 ana 3 . . .

Best Regards,

Danny C.

Let Flies be Flies

Posted on February 21, 2013

Flies are our friends. Of course, I’m talking about Jellyflies! A Jellyfly is a term created by the StreetJelly community to indicate viewers watching a musician but not participating in the conversation. They are just “flying” around a performance.

There is a great discussion on the Do’s and Don’ts blog post how to increase your tips while performing on StreetJelly. This topic of flies is really a continuation of that post, but I think it’s worth to talk a little deeper about Jellyflies.

So here is my tip to musicians: Let the Flies be Flies. Odd advice, you’re thinking? Some musicians are great at engaging their StreetJelly fans and prying the flies out of anonymity. But others try too hard to get the flies to talk. There is definitely a fine line between being inviting and being too aggressive.

I speak from experience because I am a fly on the site sometimes. I know, “how dare you Frank?” Yes, it’s true. There are two reasons why I end up being a fly.

I only have about 5 or 10 minutes before I have to go do something (I have a crazy schedule). I choose not to become part of the conversation because otherwise I’ll enjoy myself too much and never leave.
I like to listen to the music while I work. Again, I may be very busy and really have to get some work done – even at 2am. I have to force myself not to look at the chat. After all, StreetJelly is a music site, and sometimes I just want to listen.

I know that on a few occasions, I’ve heard musicians lay on the guilt trip pretty thick to get the flies to talk. That’s probably not going to help get them to talk nor tip more tokens. They may even leave the performance. Performing art is a lot like marketing. If a potential customer (i.e. token tipper) is driven away, they may never come back.

There are probably many other reasons why someone may be a fly. As a matter of fact, StreetJelly was built around the fact to allow anyone to listen in, find great musicians, and jump in only if they like. Think of a street musician, they could never possibly stop everyone that walks by and ask to see their identification.

You never know who is watching on StreetJelly. If someone needs to be a fly for whatever reason – that’s fine. Say, “hello.” Remind them they can login to chat (maybe they don’t realize that). And thank them for stopping by. They will be happier if you did.

Thoughts from the artists? How do you engage the flies? Continue the discussion below…

Ideas to Increase Your Profits On StreetJelly

Posted on February 8, 2013

Special guest blog by Amanda Crann from “ImageAndFamily”

I think that every artist who joins StreetJelly has one thing in common, the love of music. We all love playing and performing the tunes that move or inspire us and we all want an audience to watch and enjoy our music. Luckily we have all found a wonderfully encouraging community of artists and music lovers here.

My family and I have been fortunate enough to find a measure of success on this site and we wanted to share some of the tips and tricks that have worked for us. There are a lot of do’s to be successful here and just a few don’ts:

Do’s

Be Creative – You don’t have to be the most talented musician/singer around to make money, but you have to let the passion you feel for your music show in everything you do – every time you’re on.

Be Entertaining And Engaging – Talk to your audience, get them involved in conversation and remember that you are performing for their entertainment.

Practice, Practice, Practice – If you want to be good, you’ve got to invest your time in your craft.

Promote Yourself – Use Facebook (your personal page and StreetJelly’s page), Twitter, free printable StreetJelly flyers (available here) and word of mouth to let people know when you’re performing.

Promote Other Artists – If you would like other people to talk about your shows, make sure you talk about theirs.

Have A Good Audio/Video Setup – Fuzzy images and poor sound detracts from the performance and will make attracting and keeping an audience harder. (You can find StreetJelly how to blog posts and videos to improve your sound and video) If you’re not sure how your broadcast is coming across, don’t be afraid to ask your audience.

Be Courteous To Performers – If you don’t like what someone’s playing or saying, just leave the room. If you think someone is being inappropriate, let StreetJelly know so they can handle it (contact page).

Be Family Friendly – Remember, there are viewers and artists of all ages, so try to keep your language clean. F-bombs and other such language will definitely lose you viewers.

Be Supportive – Tip the artists that you enjoy watching, and if you are unable to tip support them with applause and positive comments.

Get To Know The Other Artists – There are some awesome people on StreetJelly. Get to know them, watch their shows and join in the conversations while they’re playing. Artists love to know who’s watching them. If viewers are enjoying the music, and the more active you are on the site, the more people will want to check out what you are doing.

Read The Blogs – The StreetJelly blog offers great information for new and experienced performers and is a great way to keep up to date on the craziness that is StreetJelly.

Don’ts

Play Just a Few Riffs – Learn whole songs, the audience will get bored of hearing only bits and pieces.

Miss Scheduled Performance – If you schedule a show, try to stick to it. If for some reason you can’t make the scheduled time, post a message on StreetJelly’s Facebook page to let people know that you aren’t going to be able to go on.

Drive-by (Steal other Performer’s Audience) – Popping into another performer’s show just to say you’re going on is rude and disrespectful. If you want to mention that you’re going on, wait until the performer is wrapping up their show.

Steal Another Performer’s Thunder – Use your discretion when scheduling your shows, you will find that you can attract more viewers by following another act or opening for another performer (just be courteous to the other artists).

Have more Do’s and Don’ts? Add them below in the comments. ~frankie

Tips for Performing by Webcam

Posted on August 26, 2012

Performing online in front of a webcam is something probably new to most musicians. It’s certainly new for us, too. We noticed some things that will help your performance be visually more appealing.

Sit or Step Back away from your webcam. This is probably the best advice. Most performers are sitting too close to their webcam and basically it’s just their head filling up the screen. Being at least 6 to 10 feet away from the cam frames a nice image of the artist, especially when playing an instrument. Which leads to tip #2.
Show us that you are playing an instrument. Don’t worry about your fancy finger work, when we can visually see you playing the guitar or whatever – it adds to the experience. So if you are in tight quarters and can not sit too far back, point your cam down at your instrument.
Don’t over power your computer’s microphone. If you are performing through your pc’s or laptop’s built in mic, chances are your voice and music will over power the mic at some point causing distortion. Again, sitting further back will help even out the sound. Just remember to speak loudly in between songs so the mic can pick up your normal voice. For a better sound, you can make huge improvements with a just a simple sound-leveling, noise-cancelling pc mic. These are basically called USB “conference call” mics you find in computer stores (not music stores). For around $60-$75, these mics make a big difference.
Last, don’t forget the room around you. You don’t need to be performing on a stage, but make sure the background is not distracting to the performance, i.e. messy, cluttered, dirty laundry, etc. Remember, you are performing for tips, make every bit count.

Do you have any more ideas? We’d love to hear them.

Busking Online has Arrived

Posted on August 17, 2012

teo_doro from Guam is our first live performer on StreetJelly.com

Busking, playing music in a public forum for gratuities, has now officially arrived on the internet. Last night, August 17th, 2012, all the way from Guam, we had our first musician perform live from his webcam. Teo_doro was awesome!

StreetJelly.com had only been live for about a day. Somehow, word-of-mouth from Nashville and Knoxville TN had reached Teo. The Nashville transplant found the site, signed up, and just started playing. That is as spontaneous as it gets.

Things went well, all systems checked out. Actually, we were amazed that the sound and video quality was quite well from Teo’s stock Gateway laptop with built-in webcam and built-in mic.

We can’t say enough how pleased we were of the outcome. Our vision of bringing real LIVE entertainment for everyone – and helping musicians earn money for their craft – is still alive and well!


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