Week 73: RedEyeZack - One (U2 acoustic cover version)

Week 72: My Music Mission - 100 Weeks to develop a music career

Well, the first place I started was by opening a Myspace page about 3 years ago. 'People in the industry' had told us it was the place where they looked to find artists and bands. There were great limitations and the irritation of being bombarded with banners and advertising of artists that were of no interest to me at all. There was nothing much more I could do with Myspace except upload my songs with the hope that someone would 'discover' them.

I was living in Istanbul and planning to create my fusion of Pop-Rock music with Oriental & Indian elements. It was also my first interview regarding the music project.

Around the same time I read some articles that proposed that every band would need an extra member who would be a tech person, fulfilling the role of social media and database manager. Duties would include; posting the bands blog, tweeting, keeping up the mailing list, organising newsletters & generally managing the bands web presence.

I found an interesting site: http://www.artistshousemusic.org for musicians and entrepreneurs. An inspiring professor at Berklee College of Music - George Howard, gave some compelling insights as a musician, label and artist manager. In this site, I started looking for different tools and came across www.reverbnation.com during my research. I set about building my own Reverbnation profile for RedEyeZack and at the same time I opened a LinkedIn account, a Twitter  account and created a Facebook group. I allocated about 50 dollar a month for subscriptions and went about building my mailing list. I started with 500 and slowly but surely (Organically) grew the list to 2500 and invested in a new set of tool. Now I'm looking at a new set of tools to manage 2500-5000 fans.

I released ‘The Purpose Of Existence’, my first single on iTunes and made it available at Amazon and Lastfm , Spotify and many more. It was an experiment to try to understand how digital distribution works. I didn't have resources to promote the single, but that wasn't the objective anyway. Next was to have my own  application for iPhone and Android. Only 99 dollars a year allowed me to glimpse into the future of mobile devices as a medium to experience and purchase music.

So now I'm looking at Japan and Asia in general. I'm making myself mobile too! QR codes (Quick response codes) could become standard with links to music, campaigns and links to where song are available for purchase.

Since I'm technically a solo artist (I write all music and lyrics and started performing them solo), I'm focused on  developing the songwriting. I was compelled to learn about social media by playing with the 'tools' myself. A bit of  Html, experimenting with a Wordpress blog and making simple websites without knowledge of programming.

I learned about CSV files, importing and exporting lists and started to intuitively build a web presence at  www.redeyezack.com

The platform allows you to really get creative by embedding html from other sites like YouTube & Twitter. Widgets are incredible tools that can be tracked and placed all over the web. I teach English during the summers In Brighton, UK, so I decided to put a show together. I built a Facebook group for the event. We invited all the students to the event. We created a backing group made up of the students themselves. Before the GIG at the Latest Music Bar, I arranged an interview with a local radio station - Radio Reverb and surprised the host by turning up with the whole entourage of 10 performers We took video, performed live and used the footage to create content. Last month I started a new Facebook Page for RedeyeZack

Now we are starting to put competitions and rating widgets in place to get feedback on what songs the general public prefer. On the artist website, there is an option to rate 90 second clips of 10 demo songs.

I'd love you to go and 'Rate These Songs': http://www.redeyezack.com/21st

These stats are pretty surprising and helped me to decide which songs to focus on to record in the studio. 

I ran the rating campaign as a 10 day countdown to Christmas, sending a song out in a newsletter to those who had opted in to rate the songs. I decided to set myself a target of 100 weeks to see how far I could develop my music. I marked the progress with a periodical Blog. The last entry was week 59: http://www.redeyezack.com/blog

Now I'm in week 72 and starting to get some momentum as well as motivation. The 100 weeks will be up by the end of the summer. I'm looking at festivals to get my music exposed to a wider audience and putting a band together just for this purpose. At that time I should be in a position to know whether the songs have touched people and if I have a sustainable career as an independent artist and music creator.

Join us on this journey into the Void!

PLJ (Peace, Love & Joy)

Zack Qureshi AKA RedEyeZack