For those of you following along, I’ve been working steadily through ArielPR’s Music Success in Nine Weeks (MSi9W) to establish a foundation for my career as a singer-songwriter.  Week 5 of MSi9W focuses on the epic topic of blogging; bloggers and their content constitute a major pillar of the contemporary music community, so it’s really imperative that artists learn how to engage bloggers properly and get involved in their community. 

This week was definitely the biggest challenge for me.  In the past, I never really delved past the big-time music blog-y sites like Pitchfork, Stereogum, and NPR.  Discovering the vast indie, DIY-minded music blogging community was both awe-inspiring and overwhelming; where was I to start?

I set up a Google Reader (which is the most amazing piece of work, btw) and started the long search for music blogs that I liked and thought might be interested in covering my work in the future.  Given that my brand of music is “fearless folk for the wandering soul,” I started to search for blogs that were covering like-minded singer-songwriters.  Slowcoustic was a great find, especially for its blog roll.  Things slowly came together from there; thankfully, Sharon Van Etten, an amazing singer-songwriter who I identify with stylistically, came out with a new release this past week, Epic, which made it easy to find even more relevant blogs through the Hype Machine.

After I finished adding 50ish blogs to the ol’ Google Reader, I took note of 10 blogs I especially liked and thought would be compatible with my music and began getting used to commenting on them.  It’s still kinda weird for me; for the past few years, I took the I’m-above-it-all approach to social media, so the idea of sharing content and opinions is pretty new to me, as sad as that sounds.  But it is pretty cool to get in the habit of telling others positive things about their work, even if it is like “thanks for the link” or “i really like that song ya”. 

Having a smartphone really helps with all of this; if you have an iPhone, there’s a Reeder app that handles Google Reader RSS feeds really well, and an application called Seesmic can follow Twitter, Facebook, Ping.fm, etc. from one hub.  

On the creation side of things, I’ve been keeping up with my own Tumblr blog, clipping time’s wings.  It’s been updated at a steady pace with my travels and, of course, my music.  As I’ve mentioned before, I started a songwriting project at the same time I began MSiNW called Year of Song, in which I write and release a new song for free each week to my mailing list as well as the blog.   I’m in week 5 of the project now, and it’s been really great hearing others’ responses over email and whatnot.  I guess the challenge for me at this point is to figure out how to get my blog out there in the Tumblr world — I’d like for my songwriting project to reach more ears, so if you have any ideas, I’d love to hear em :)

Alrighty, that should do it.  Thanks for reading along, and stay tuned for Week 6’s update!

-Andrew