Simon Fairbairn – Aural Antidotes for a Prescribed Life

I really don’t care about the ethical arguments of filesharing. There are zealots on both sides – those that think that giving an MP3 to a friend will lead straight to the 7th level of hell and those that think they are some kind of technological revolutionary sticking it to “the man” – but neither are worth listening to.

As a musician, the only thing you really need to know is that people are doing it. A lot. And they’re unlikely to stop doing it unless someone turns off the internet. You can get upset, they’re still going to do it. You can get angry, still happening. You can even try to sue them, your album’s still on BitTorrent.

Or you can encourage them.

What if you told your fans they can share your music? What if you got them to share it aggressively, in fact? What if you gave it to them in different formats – MP3, OGG, hell, the original WAVs if you want – and told them to give it to all of their friends? What if you got them to tell their friends to give it to all of their friends? What then?

As you’re contemplating this, think about how many CDs you’ve sold this month.

Often, the biggest roadblock to getting stuff done is the simple act of starting to do it.

Here are some of the excuses I’ve used:

“I need at least an hour to do anything worthwhile with it, so I’ll leave it until the weekend.”

“I’m too tired to focus on this right now.”

“I don’t really know where to begin, so I won’t be able to start until I’ve figured that out.”

“I need to be in the right mindset, and I’m not really feeling it at the moment.”

This happened to me more times than I honestly care to recount and I was getting sick of it. It was actually making me depressed as the things I wanted to do remained undone and the feelings of guilt and internal reprimands piled up. I needed a strategy.

So, for the last 18 days I have been following the Ten Minute Rule and it is simply this. Create a list of things that you want to achieve, and do each of these things every day for ten minutes.

That’s it. Ten minutes every day. It’s really not hard to find a spare ten minutes. It’s not important what you do, just that you are entirely focused on the task for ten minutes.

If you miss a day, that’s fine. Just do ten minutes the next day. Don’t pile it up so you’re doing 70 minutes on Saturday. It doesn’t work (I’ve tried). It’s all about the small, consistent, daily effort.

Here’s what happens:

Some days you really don’t feel like doing it. You start, you’re not into it and you do some average work that you think is rubbish. Then you stop bang on ten minutes. Sounds like a waste of time, right?

Wrong.

Soon after you start feeling better. You know that, even though you really weren’t into it, you’ve still taken another tiny step towards your goal. It’s these days where the power of ten minutes has the strongest feel good effect. You can’t help but feel better knowing that when you come to it tomorrow, it’s a little bit more done than when you came to it today.

But what if that average work was actually really, really bad work?

Doesn’t matter. It’s no longer a blank page, but something that your brain can work with. While you go and do other things, your brain starts playing with the idea in the background. The next morning in the shower, on the bus or at breakfast, you’ll get an a-ha moment where you know where you want to go with whatever you’re doing.

Often, you’ll return to your project the next day genuinely excited because that little piece of rubbish work has generated a ton of other ideas that you can’t wait to get down.

Other days, you start your ten minutes and it’s an hour later before you even think about how long you’ve been doing it. I’ve started things for ten minutes and ended up working on it all day.

It’s not hard to do ten minutes and if you make that your daily goal instead of focusing on the huge and distance end goal, then suddenly you start achieving a lot more.

I’m currently writing a screenplay over at PlotBot. The first draft is pretty much done and the plan is to get filming as soon as possible.

I’m under no illusions that this film is going to be anything extraordinary. The whole point is just to get it done, to have a film finished that I can call my own. It would be nice if people liked it – according to Dale Carnegie, the desire for approval is one of our key motivators – but it’s not that important for the simple reason that making something is a lot more difficult than criticising or condemning it.

And when I say a lot, I mean by a factor of hundreds.

There’s a nice speech made by Anton Ego at the end of Ratatouille that sums it up nicely:

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.

This thought has been rattling around my brain for the last few weeks as I work through my screenplay. It applies equally to that devastating internal critic as much as it does the external ones. In fact, if you listen to those negative external critics, all you’re actually doing is listening to your negative internal critic for the simple reason that, if you truly believe in what you create, then no external criticism – positive or negative – would actually have any effect on you whatsoever.

By choosing to allow the negative internal critics to affect you, all you’re really doing is giving power to your own self-doubt.

Last Tuesday I wrote about PAX. Before that there was a debate about the evils of file sharing. Today, we combine the two.

We sold some books and videos recently. A lot of these videos and books held a lot of meaning for me and it was heart-breaking to watch the films that I loved so dearly being sold for next to nothing. I thought it was totally unfair that no-one would buy these things for a price that I considered reasonable.

Then I realised something important. These things don’t mean the same to others who haven’t watched or read them a hundred times as they do to me. They don’t mean much to them because they haven’t experienced them like I have. They can’t see the value that I see because they just don’t know yet.

Penny Arcade give away their primary product for free (that’s the comic strip, in case you were wondering). You go read it three times a week. You get to know and love the characters, and it doesn’t cost you a penny.

Then, after they have your love, they sell you a whole bunch of other things around the strip. Some of these things include books of all the strips which are available, for free, online.

You may have worked really hard at producing a song. You may have lovingly crafted it and recorded it with great care. The value of each digital file, to you, may be at least 99p.

The thing is, this music doesn’t have any meaning for me at all. None. There are other artists out there who I will give money to long before I give any to you, because I have grown to love them.

How do you get your songs to have meaning to me? Give them to me for free. Let me put them on my iPod and listen to them a lot. Let me hear what you hear.

Once I love what you do, then we can start talking money.

I’ve been reading Penny Arcade, on and off, for about four years now. I love it’s “you wouldn’t get it” attitude. They couldn’t care less if you think it’s too violent, sweary or ultra-geeky, they just do what they do and they do it damn well. So well, in fact, that they routinely raise obscene amounts of money for charity and organise a yearly conference celebrating all things video games.

What does this have to do with music?

Other than their comic would never have got syndicated in much the same way that many awesome bands will never get record deals because they’re too “out there” and not commercial, apparently not much.

Today, though, I went over to the PAX site to read about the Penny Arcade Expo. Down the bottom of the front page is a section for ‘Musical Guests’ and it got me thinking. Here’s what I thought.

PAX 2009 is, basically, sold out. I understand that there are still a few day passes available, but the 3-day and the Saturday passes have all gone. I don’t know how many tickets that is (it was 58,500 people in 2008) but I do know that it has “nearly doubled in size each successive year since its inception in 2004.

The hand-picked musical acts write and record songs that are totally relevant to this audience. As a musician, you go in knowing that everyone there is pre-disposed to like your material. You’re guaranteed to pick up new fans. It’s an amazing opportunity and I can’t imagine how much of a buzz it is to play.

What’s most interesting, though, is that the acts are independent musicians who have fearlessly carved out niches and gone in musical directions that would have, traditionally, had no commercial appeal. They have worked really hard for years and developed huge reputations amongst their community (and 0 reputation in the mainstream) that have allowed them to do what they love for a living.

So what can we learn from this?

First, do things your way. Totally your way. Don’t worry about whether or not your music is going to be commercially successful. If you like writing songs about growing flowers, write songs about growing flowers. Don’t try to please anyone but yourself.

Second, go out and find people that love the same stuff as you and see if you can’t work together. If you have a collection of songs about Hydrangeas, go find your local flower show and see if you can’t put on a show there. Don’t play rubbish gigs around town to people who don’t care – go find your audience.

Third, have fun.

From the PAX FAQ:

“[I]t’s a big party we throw for the gaming community in general and PA readers in particular.”