What was that famous line from that “legendary” Dodgy song ‘Good Enough’? Something like...
“If it’s good enough for Ice T, it’s good enough for me
If it’s good enough for two, it’s what I wanna see”.
Pretty sure it went something like that, either way it was a dodgy song, but they we’re onto something – without even realising it their lyrics have burst from my subconscious and chemically combusted along with an idea that Ice T may have uncovered the future of PR – Ok, well maybe not the future but it’s an example of how you can cut out the middle man and go straight to your fans. I like to call it ‘Personal Journalism’ or PJ – the term is work in progress but remember where you heard it first.
Getting back to the article, which as the title suggests is about Ustream, I’d like to explain a bit about what it is for those who don’t know and also look at who’s currently using it and how it can be used as promotional tactic for artists. As this blog is primarily about providing info for musicians, I’ll be looking at Ustream with such a bias.
How do musicians go about getting noticed on the Internet? Nowadays there are a plethora of channels that are essential tools for independent artists to master if they want to start building up an online presence. In terms of getting your music heard, it’s no secret that the avenues of promotion and distribution have altered slightly over the last decade. Online PR for example is such a vast area that it must be approached with as much DIY vigour as you would display in the rest of your independent muso existence. Bloggers have become as important if not more so than journalists and large music publications. Don’t get me wrong, print media is still important and there are large web resources that pull a lot more weight than one blog but it’s the power in numbers effect that the hype blogs have.
It’s so easily to talk in riddles, jargon and gibberish when discussing things like this as it seems new internet colloquialisms are popping up faster than the apps, widgets, channels and sites that they describe – so i’ll attempt to censor myself and talk in normal peoples speak where possible. The bloggers are a community, a network of people who have nothing better to do – no, only joking – a network of music lovers who thrive on the new, the unique and the en vogue. At the heart of the music blog community is The Hype Machine (Hypem), the aggregator that only the coolest of the cool blogs get to be a part of. If a blog is in fact worthy of being listed on Hypem then every time it posts an MP3, The clever little Hypem feeds a snippet of the posts into their ‘uber cool’ blogs timeline. Anyone can go onto Hypem and listen to all of the music that has been listed. You tend to find that a lot of the music you hear is repeated across several blogs and I take it that this is what causes ‘the hype’. So if it was good enough for ‘you’ it was good enough for dodgy, if it was good enough for one hype blogger, it was good enough for the next and if it’s good enough for Ice T, it’s good enough for you. See, no gibberish at all, haha.
With uStream anyone with a camera and internet connection can make a live feed, a bit like having your own internet TV channel which you can broadcast to an audience of unlimited size which is dead cool really. It’s also free to get a Ustream producer account with which you can do everything you need to get your ugly mug on internet telly or you can pay a one off fee of $199 to get a pro account which allows better quality streaming and some other features that I can’t be bothered to read about because the free account is sufficient.
It seems to be mainly American musicians that have took to the service so far with people like Outkast rapper Big Boi offering a live gig, Kanye West doing a conference call with fans talking about his new album and our favourite, Ice T’s very candid question and answer sessions with fans. You don’t have to be a rapper or American to use it though. Another one of our favourite examples of Ustream content is Wiley and I know he’s a rapper, but he isn’t an American so there! The Guardian covered his honest, outgoing and often nonsensical Ustream ramblings. If you want to cut out the middleman i.e. the blogs and really give your fans some straight from the horse’s mouth exclusive content, then you could do that for free with Ustream. It’s really just a matter of how creative you can get and if it’s good, online press will pick up on it and it will go even further than your fan base and if it doesn’t go viral, who cares as it’s strengthened the relationship with the fans you already have. That’s as long as you don’t go doing a Chat Roulette style broadcast!
