‘Gathering’, by tobias tinker

As mentioned previously, I am participating in a ‘blogging contest’ sponsored by Ariel Hyatt of Cyber PR. The objective is to write 9 blog posts, one for each of the 9 chapters of Ariel’s book, ‘Music Success in Nine Weeks’. This is my first ‘official’ blog entry.

Chapter 1 of the MSNW coursebook is all about setting goals. This is, of course, a good time of year for such things – year-end reviews, New Year’s resolutions and whatnot – and perhaps the timing of Ariel’s contest is not accidental. In any case, being a good student, I dutifully set out to work through the process…

It seems like a fairly simple concept – in order to succeed in any meaningful sense, in order to achieve your career goals and aims, you should know what they are, right? Be clear about where you’re going, so that the steps you take are leading in that direction? And yet, this simple exercise has been – well, let’s just say, full of surprises for me.

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photo credit: Sh4rp_i

As a kind of follow-up to the last post… and again, before I begin the official contest blogs (I have to work with the first chapter a bit first)… I should mention, by way of related news but not directly as a part of this process, that I seem to be doing something a bit radical.

It’s something I’ve toyed with for a while but never quite had the nerve to pull the trigger on, but for various reasons this seems like the right time to do it. I am throwing my entire musical catalog open to a pay-what-you-want pricing model.

Contestants, start your engines!

Greetings fearless friends… and hopefully some new ones: this blog is now a Contest Entry, so apparently being read and judged by a panel of experts… (welcome, experts! Enjoy your stay! Don’t jump off of anything I wouldn’t jump off of!)

For other readers, I’ll explain – as part of my ongoing attempt to redesign myself as someone with an ounce of business and marketing savvy, I have bought a book called ‘Music Success In Nine Weeks‘ by one Ariel Hyatt, who runs a prominent music PR firm and is generally regarded as a person from whom one can learn a lot about such things. I have high hopes for this book (rather, for what it can help me accomplish if I put as much of it into practice as I can).

Ariel is now running a contest wherein my fellow entrants and I will blog about our progress through the book, our experiences implementing some of the advice it contains, and so on. Nine blog entries, for the nine major chapters of the book, in nine weeks… Tolkien would be proud.

So here we go. Before I launch into the project, as kind of a Prologue to the main event, let me introduce myself. Since in fact I’ve never done this in these pages before, it probably makes sense to give a bit of background to my quest for Music Success. Read the rest of this entry »