{"id":1222,"date":"2008-05-17T19:24:51","date_gmt":"2008-05-18T03:24:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/archives\/2008\/05\/17\/somebody-good\/"},"modified":"2008-05-18T09:02:22","modified_gmt":"2008-05-18T17:02:22","slug":"somebody-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2008\/05\/17\/somebody-good\/","title":{"rendered":"Somebody Good"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote dir=\"ltr\" style=\"margin-right: 0px;\">\n<div style=\"margin-left: 40px;\">Bob,<\/p>\n<p>A friend of mine turned me on to you blog. I have to say that i look forward to reading every update. Your views on the music industry are right on! I have been thinking and feeling the same thing for a while now, it is refreshing to actually read it and know that there are other people out there that actually get it. Your recent blog &quot;<a title=\"From My Side of the Screen\" href=\"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/archives\/2008\/05\/16\/from-my-side-of-the-screen\/\">From My Side of The Screen<\/a>&quot; really hit home. I have been writing songs for a few years now and have had some success as well as countless days thinking&#8230;..why am i doing this&#8230;&#8230;&#8230; The reason is not to sell records, or become famous, but to do something that i truly love to do. It took me a long time to realize that loving what you do is way more important than anything else. Especially in this day and age when the record labels struggle to make a profit in a market that is, let&#8217;s face it, evolving to a point that will be better for everyone involved. It&#8217;s really not so much about the music anymore. It&#8217;s about how willing you are to market you band\/product by putting the time and effort into it to it. Connecting with fans. Creating a community that will keep coming back because your constantly updating your content. Basically everything you have said in your blogs.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks and keep can&#8217;t wait for your next post.<\/p>\n<p>Sincerely,<\/p>\n<p>Wil Deynes<br \/>www.myspace.com\/wildeynes<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>My response:<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<div style=\"margin-left: 40px;\">Okay, I listened to the stuff on your MySpace page.  I&#8217;m stunned, you&#8217;re actually good.  VERY good.<\/p>\n<p>Tell me the true story, of how you got here&#8230;  Any big investor, are you signed to a major label and saying you&#8217;re not, like Marie Digby&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;re too good.  Tell me more&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Bob<\/div>\n<p>_________________________________<\/p>\n<p>How does the cliche go, you catch more fish with honey?<\/p>\n<p>No, that&#8217;s not right, fish don&#8217;t eat honey&#8230;  I think it&#8217;s flies.  Whatever, you get the point&#8230;  Did I listen to this guy&#8217;s music because he was kissing my butt?  I&#8217;m wondering that.  But I don&#8217;t think so&#8230;  There were two elements that captured me.  The lack of desperation and his point about having already had some success.  Not knowing the cat&#8217;s name, I figured maybe he was a behind the scenes songwriter, looking to get famous as a player under his own name&#8230;  Whatever, I fired up his MySpace page.<\/p>\n<p>And was stunned.  From the very first instant, I knew this guy was not a wannabe, he had TALENT!<\/p>\n<p>He had a good voice, the changes immediately enraptured me, I was drawn in.  This is hit music.  At least ten or twenty years ago.  Today?<\/p>\n<p>I kept listening.  The subsequent tracks weren&#8217;t quite as good.  But, the second time through, I liked the other tracks more than &quot;Super Wonderful&quot;.<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t e-mail me and tell me you&#8217;re a punk fan, or a metalhead.  I&#8217;m just telling you if you want mainstream success, you&#8217;ve got to sound like this guy, be talented like this guy, Wil Deynes.<\/p>\n<p>He&#8217;s still too talented for me to fully believe he&#8217;s completely unsigned.  God, it&#8217;s so easy to lie online, to appear indie.<\/p>\n<p>Or maybe the bio is true, that he&#8217;s a Mac tech by day.  Maybe that&#8217;s how he made a recording so good.  That he&#8217;s giving away for free on his site: <\/p>\n<blockquote dir=\"ltr\" style=\"margin-right: 0px;\">\n<div style=\"margin-left: 40px;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wildeynes.com\/wildeynes.com\/Music.html\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stay EP - Wil Deynes\">Stay EP &#8211; Wil Deynes<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>you can download it as MP3 or m4a, your choice.  And I think you should.  Because this guy has got something.<\/p>\n<p>His Website has not been updated enough recently, check the blog, the last post was July 30, 2007.  But there&#8217;s a plethora of action on his MySpace page, he&#8217;s got 16 posts from fans already today, Saturday.  Are the play counts accurate?  Has &quot;Super Wonderful&quot; really been played 375,000 times?  Who knows?  Quite possibly, because it&#8217;s good.<\/p>\n<p>I mean if John Mayer can make it, so can this guy.<\/p>\n<p>Or maybe the powers-that-be can&#8217;t handle a guy who looks like this, who doesn&#8217;t have matinee, suburban good looks.<\/p>\n<p>Point is, if despite his NPR break THIS guy can&#8217;t break through, if he&#8217;s not a household word, what are YOUR chances.<\/p>\n<p>But it doesn&#8217;t matter that he&#8217;s not a household word to his fans.  They own him now.<\/p>\n<p>This guy is doing it right.  Unless I&#8217;ve been snookered here.  Which could be the case.  But that doesn&#8217;t change the fact that this guy is GOOD!<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bob, A friend of mine turned me on to you blog. I have to say that i look forward to reading every update. Your views on the music industry are right on! I have been thinking and feeling the same thing for a while now, it is refreshing to actually read it and know that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business","category-the-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-jI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}