I knew that I saw something like this before and after a few minutes I remembered that it was on an episode of Dead Like Me, except these things were actually killing people. Infomercialscams is a great site by the way. But I gotta wonder about people who don’t already know that most infomercials are scams–can they really be reached?

Dynamic duo, originally uploaded by ekai.

My friends (Irina and Eddie) and fellow Podtech people went to see the original K.I.T.T. car from Knight Rider that is for sale now. The thing I love about this photo set is that you get to see all the prop buttons up and leds on the dash close and personal. I was never a huge fan of the show, it’s kinda sad that it represents some of the best television of the 80’s.

Here is the rest of the set.

This release of Final Cut Studio seems to have everything I hoped for. One thing in particular is the new Color app that comes with the new suite. I love the fact that you are going to get near Photoshop level control over your video images now—and not only that but save the settings in portable files that can be traded in much the same way that Photoshop layer styles can be passed around. This is of particular interest to me because I’m a bit of a color nut when it comes to video. Maybe it’s my graphic design background and years of building Photoshop skill, but I can never just use the standard color I get from a camera. I frequently will increase the contrast and saturate or desaturate accordingly. The 3 channel color corrector in FCP is my most used effect. It was the singular tool that allowed me anywhere close to the level of control over all these things that I was looking for. But from I can see there are new curves controls that strongly resemble the curves palet in Photoshops UI. So … YAY!

Also from the looks of it, some of the functionality from Apple’s Shake compositing software has been cannibalized for FCP too. The video demo reveals a very shake like workflow UI that might take some getting used to. Shake had a reputation for being a little quirky in the UI department (this is what I’ve read—I’ve never used it myself).

So this stuff and all the new goodies in Motion and Soundtrack pro and I know that I’m gonna be out the $499 upgrade fee soon.

Ok here is a simple strategy to promoting your band online. This could be a very long post so in the interest of brevity, I’m just going to lay out an outline now and do a few more posts on the finer points of these.

1. Get your own damn web site. Buy a URL (internet address) from Godaddy ($8) and sign up for a hosting plan from them or someone else. I use Dreamhost but there are others. Sometimes these services (like dreamhost) will give you a free domain registration when you sign up. That’s fine, but I prefer to keep all my domains registered in one place because it makes it easy to manage them all. Good hosting is generally fairly cheap (but not free). A lot of hosting companies charge around $10 a month and often less. It’s worth it.
2. Put good relevant information on your site. Photos, band bios, mp3 samples of your music, and links to other services, like MySpace that you might use. But make sure that URL that you registered (you know the one you OWN) is the only URL that you publish for your band. Don’t promote a MySpace address, because you never know when a fickle service like MySpace might accidentally delete your shit (see previous post). And put your URL on all everything you get printed, and use it in your message signatures, on myspace and everywhere else.
3. Set up a blog. Yes, this is the single best way to generate traffic to your site and develop a community of fans around your band. It doesn’t have to be great, it only needs to be relevant. Don’t do long posts. Just keep people updated on what you are doing as a band– recording, taking a break, up coming gigs, or what you are listening to, blah blah blah. Make it relevant and make it regular. Why does this work? Regular updates mostly. Blogs get indexed by search engines more often than other sites because search engines know that they are up dated more frequently.
4. Link to other sites and blogs that you like. That’s important because if those other bloggers and site owners are smart they are curious about who is linking back to them. And if you like them, chances are they’ll like you and link back to you. And that means more traffic for everyone, and the beginning of a community. Sites like MySpace exploit this idea with their “friends list” construct. But this kind of interaction has already been in place on the open Internet for a long time. Learn this and use it.
5. Set up email addresses for you and your bandmates with your own URL. Use this email for official band communication. Most web hosts make it easy to set up forwarding addresses so you don’t actually have to set up a mail box. I have all my mail forwarded to my gmail account because it makes it really easy to manage all my mail there. Yahoo mail can work too, but nothing beats gmail IMO. DO NOT DEPEND ON MYSPACE MESSAGES FOR OFFICIAL COMUNICATION. If you are a serious band, you need to manage your band business seriously. MySpace messaging is not a serious messaging system. It’s a toy for kids.
6. Use other web services besides MySpace. Again I’m not saying to not use MySpace, I’m just saying it’s not the only game in town. Some of these other services are used by people who wouldn’t get caught dead on MySpace. If you want to reach them, you need to go to them. Some of these services I like are Flickr (photos), UpComing.org (calendar publishing), Twitter (short messaging), Google (for all kinds of stuff), Yahoo (all kinds of stuff too—owns UpComing and Flickr above). But always use your own web site as a hub that links to your identity to any and all of these services that you choose to use. Someone asks if you are on one of these other services just send them to your web site for the link. I’m a big proponate of not trying to reinvent the wheel. If someone has a great service that you can’t do just as well from your own site, use it!
7. Set up a store for your music and merch. There are a number of ways that this can be done. There are services like Sno-Cap that allow you to sell your music online, and of couse there is iTunes. And for merch there are a number of options. Café Press is very popular but there are others like Spreadshirt and GoodStorm. And don’t forget CD Baby. If you are really ambitious you can even set up and manage your own shop hosted on your own site. But if you have a lot of popular items you might have a problem keeping up with order fulfillment.

So that’s a start. But it’s mostly common sense. I’ll add more to this list in future posts as I think of them. I think my next one is what to put into an online press kit. But if you can think of anything else, or have questions please ad it to the comments.

Here is my standard advice to bands in regards to dealing with social networking sites like MySpace.

A few bands I know have as their singular Web presence their MySpace Page. A really bad idea, IMO. I’m NOT saying that you shouldn’t use MySpace at all—it’s a great tool for promotion—that’s not really in despute. I use it myself. But what I’m saying is DON’T make it the ONLY place on the web where your band can be found. Here are some reasons not to and my next post will be what I think is a much better strategy for promoting your band online (using myspace and other web services).

1. You Don’t own your MySpace Page.
MySpace can and does delete user profiles often without notice or an obvious reason. If you are using MySpace as your bands only web site and this happens you are shit out of luck. If you also have a real web site that is hosted on a paid server, then you aren’t necessarily SOL. If you aren’t paying for a real web site on a paid host then do it now. It ain’t that hard and not that expensive. The cost is less than 2 beers a month. Give up 2 beers a month for tour piece of mind.

2. MySpace wants you to host all your media with them.
Have lots of photos on Photobucket, or Flickr embedded on your MySpace page? Guess what? MySpace can easily block these services to force you into hosting all your media with them. In fact they just started playing hardball with Photobucket. Put a few choice photos on your MySpace page but host the rest on your own paid for web space. Embed them on MySpace from there. Yeah MySpace could block that too, but it’s not very likely.

3. Looks like shit
MySpace profiles all look the same (more or less) and they all look like shit. There are a lot of reasons for this, but it’s a fact. I can’t help but think that using MySpace as your only web site degrades your bands image on at least one or many levels.

4. MySpace is slow and it breaks a lot
You know it, I know it. Enough said.

5. MySpace us only as useful as the number of people using it
What happens when the day comes that there is a mass mirgration from MySpace to the next new hot social network and you’re fully invested and only invested in MySpace? Yeah you can move too. But if you have a real web site you can keep your fans updated on all the services you participate in right there, on your page, that you own.

6 … So what am I missing? Can you think of any other good reasons bands shouldn’t use MySpace as their only web presence? Am I wrong? Tell me in the comments.

Next I’ll lay out my online band promotion tool kit.

Business week came out with their list of most liveable cities in the world. Magazine lists are notoriously mostly bullshit and usually not based on any scientific surveys but I found it interesting that St. Louis ranks 64 on the list. Here is part of the table that shows the cities that immediately rank better and worse than STL:

55 55 LOS ANGELES, CA United States 98.3 98.3
59 59 CLEVELAND, OH United States 98.2 98.2
60 60 MINNEAPOLIS, MN United States 97.9 97.9
61 62 ROME Italy 97.4 97.4
62 63 MIAMI, FL United States 96.3 96.3
63 64 YOKKAICHI Japan 96.2 96.2
64 65 DETROIT, MI United States 96.1 96.1
64 61 ST. LOUIS, MO United States 96.1 97.6
66 66 ATLANTA, GA United States 95.7 95.7
67 68 LEIPZIG Germany 95.5 95.4
68 68 HOUSTON, TX United States 95.4 95.4
69 67 OMUTA Japan 94.9 95.5
70 68 HONG KONG Hong Kong 94.3 95.4
71 72 SAN JUAN Puerto Rico 92.9 92.9

I find this kind of interesting in a sort of gee whiz, non-scientific sorta way.

My buddy Peat Wollaeger, a stencil artist from here in St. Louis recently got this sweet gig painting a Mexican wrestling themed room at the Hotel Des Arts in San Francisco. Next time I’m there I’m gonna try to stay there and get that room. Here is a time lapse of him working. He likes to make movies around his work, which makes it as much a performance as art. We’ve also been working on a special secret project together too.

Here are a couple of movies I made about him at different times here and here.

I found another even earlier segment from Wild Chicago this one, from 1989, with the original host Ben Hollis. The bar in this segment, Phyllis’ Musical Inn was a place that I literally lived right around the corner from for several years.

Amazingly this is the only Wild Chicago segment that I could find on YouTube. Wild Chicago was a great show on public television in Chicago that was a huge inspiration for what I do now on LO-FI SAINT LOUIS. Obviously I didn’t rip it off completely, my format is quite different but I think I picked up some of the editing and shooting techniques from that show. One of the greatest local TV shows ever IMO. This particular segment was about the famous Williams game company in Chicago, makers of lots of Pinball games and video games like Mortal Combat. Great episode. I wish WTTW would put the achives of this show online for everyone to enjoy. It was one of those local shows that anyone from anywhere could enjoy. Will Klinger was the second host of the show. And I think the show suffered a little in it’s later years as personell changed and some of the origninal energy was lost. The first (and my favorite) host of the show was Ben Hollis who is now doing a new show (which I haven’t seen yet) that is similar to the original concept called Wild Chicago’s Illinois Road Trip.