En. Fuego. I am recovering from being in bed for 3.5 days this week and considerably less than 100% for the tail end of the weekend. Now I feel semi-invincible. Thanks, immune system! SXSW was this week in Austin…I have had incredible times at this festival in other years (two words: Tori Amos…my blog about that lives here), and this year I hardly participated due to said bedriddenness (new word) and gigs this weekend that kept a 50-mile arm’s length from the madness. It’s like Folk Alliance…you can go network and stuff, but you play for free. And when you live in Austin and the people you’d probably end up networking with live here all year round just like you, it seemed more prudent for Susan to dash in and out and play a couple of real shows and sell some more of her brand new CD.  Suz did do a Music Fog Showcase taping because, I mean, go LOOK at the awesome stuff they do.  I’m excited to see the edited product from Thursday.

All of this working toward and through CD Release shows, seeing shifts in crowd attendance and what makes those shifts happen…it has had us brainstorming a lot lately.  We’ve come up with some really cool things to put into practice to focus effort into getting people at shows.  Some of it is administrative, some of it is social media, some of it is street team centered.  It’s made me think a lot about the basics of the questions we are asking, breaking it down.  For example…”How do we get more fans at shows?”  All artists ask this question, even Lady Gaga.

Probably being drugged up on decongestant and not able to leave the house gave me time to  break it down to the first essential component of that question…”What is a fan?”  There is a pattern to acquiring and keeping fans, there is a life cycle to stages of being a fan.

I say this because I am a huge fan of a lot of people, and I am only now thinking about the process I went through to get to the stage of calling myself a “fan.”  Turns out now my job is to figure out and define what types of fans exist, how we market to them, how we keep them, and how we make them into even bigger fans.  I am making a document, because that’s how I cope with figuring things out.  It will be the next blog post.

All this to say, I am really enjoying arriving in a new workspace where things are melding together…years of study and work applied to creativity and some awesome business partners makes for an exciting time because the ideas we have can actually be IMPLEMENTED.  Implementation is fun.

The opposite of implementation is bedriddenness.  Now that I have used that word twice in one post, it is a real word.

This is a woman who looks like she knows how to implement.