As some of y’all know, I’ve been focusing on my music thing for around a year now.

I’ve been MAKING and recording music forever, already.. It’s just that with the new tools that are available, I decided I wanted to learn something new and get really good at mixing music.

I’ve done that now. I’m really, REALLY good at mixing. I know exactly what I’m doing. I’m about 1,000 times better at mixing than I was at video editing when I began my professional career by joining Diversion Pictures back in the day.

Actually, I should say “When I began my COMMERCIALLY-PROFESSIONAL career, because I did professional work for individuals and companies before I started doing videos for Diversion that played on MTV, VH1, BET, etc.

So.. Something’s been bothering me for several months now, and I wasn’t able to put my finger on it until today. Until about 20 minutes ago. I had the elements of the understanding, but it hadn’t become a concrete concept for me.

Little Boxes

When I’m on a self-improvement kick, I study incessantly. All I want is to be who I want to be instead of who I am right now. I don’t want to hang out with you. I don’t want to go to that party at the hotel penthouse. I don’t want to meet your foyine homegirl that’s sweating me.

The thing I found funny about studying mixing was that as I moved up the ranks of understanding, where I would recite the answers to questions before going ahead to read the answers because I had already read those same answers in so many other places, I came to a point where I ran into the same situation over and over.

I mentioned this to friends of mine. I would tell them “I’m watching these videos of big-time Mixers (actually, I suppose I called them Mix Engineers at the time, because I didn’t understand the difference until several days ago) and, invariably, instead of talking about mixing, they’re talking about the boxes that they run the signals through. o_O”

At first, I thought it was a fluke.. I thought I was just having bad luck with the videos I clicked on. Then it happened again. Then it happened again. Then it happened again, and it kept on happening until I got the picture that a high percentage of what I was “learning” from those videos was what people’s favorite FX boxes were.

To make another distinction.. Along the way, I found out that there are Recording Engineers and Mix Engineers. Many people are both. Recording Engineers are responsible for getting the information from the instruments into the computer (or onto the tape or whatever you’re going to use to create the final song). Mix Engineers are responsible for taking the elements and making them work together and enhancing them by any means necessary to make the recording sound good.

I immediately knew that I didn’t want to be a Recording Engineer. I’m totally, absolutely, positively, completely disinterested in that process. I don’t care HOW people get the elements recorded. I’m interested in the musical side of Post-Production, which is what I do already for videos.

I also found out that I didn’t want to be a producer. I’m completely disinterested in “making beats” as people call it. With Logic 9 I can make a beat in 5 minutes or less. It’s a complete yawn-fest.

What I like to do, similar to video, is take audio that has already been tracked and make it shine.. according to my personal taste.

The “personal taste” part is what helped me understand this situation today.

Tin Cans & String

So I had this conversation with a homegirl of mine, and I wasn’t able to articulate it to her properly, not because she was looking FOYINE as usual and I didn’t feel like thinking about anything else or because I was several beers down, but because I knew what the problem was TO ME, but I hadn’t intended to tell anyone else about it, and it just happened to come up in conversation.

What I had said to her was something like “It doesn’t matter how good you are at mixing, because at the highest levels, the difference is determined by how many thousands or millions of dollars’ worth of equipment you have available to you”.

That’s clearly an incorrect statement, but it’s all I had at the time. Of course, she beat the **** out of my concept by saying “blah blah my friend whomever blah blah great music producer blah blah doesn’t matter the equipment blah blah blah”, which was fine, because I was busy checking her out and drinking my beer.

Yes.. I realize that there are some people that “Got It” and some people that “Don’t”. There are some people that can make a great recording by beating on a table and rapping. There are some people that make fantastic live recordings with an acoustic guitar and an harmonica. There are some people that don’t even OWN computers that manage to create great mixes. There are even people that make up their mixes live on the spot. My hat’s off to all of them.

The fact remains that the equipment you have access to determines how much you’re able to manipulate the sounds that end up going onto a song.

I ran into this issue a couple of years ago, when I did a tutorial video about editing in Final Cut pro.

YouTube Link => http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHh1tAA-UFE

When we released that video, I went to the Indy Mogul Forum to interact with the community members and ask if they had any questions.

Interestingly enough, several of the comments were along the lines of “Who cares about Final Cut Pro tutorials when we can’t afford Macs? :/”. This made sense, being that the show’s premise is filmmaking on a low-ass budget. However.. What I had to say was applicable to ANY nonlinear video editing software package, including iMovie and Windows Movie Maker, either of which come absolutely free with your operating system when you buy ANY computer.

I understood and empathized with their points. What use is it to say to someone “You can do what I can do if you buy this particular computer and then you buy this particular software and then you have the time to use it excessively and get really good with it”?

This is how I felt watching these videos, even though, granted, I was watching product endorsement videos, not “How To Mix” tutorial videos, because that’s what companies want to allocate their budgets towards.

I’m watching this stuff, going “That’s very nice and all that you ran a cable to a box and then turned a knob on that box and you liked how the kick drum sounded, but HOW IN THE **** is that information useful to anyone that can’t afford to kick in $3,000 for the ******* BOX and then another $275,000 for the ******* CONSOLE you’re sitting in front of?” :D

Make It Happen!

So I was understanding that once you get to a certain level, your progress (towards what?) is impeded unless you become affiliated with a studio that already took out the business loans to afford all these toys…

Meanwhile, I had the good fortune of rubbing elbows with several DIY musicians. And I *DO* mean DO. IT. YOUR*SELF*!!!

What I got from them was that they were/are focused on their craft. No funding, whatsoever. No particular training in creating music. *ABSOLUTELY* no training in creating videos.. Yet, they were still makin’ it happen, because that’s what they want their lives to be. They want to entertain. They want to get their message out to the world. They want to express themselves.

Because of a music video project, I ended up meeting one of these DIY musicians, Yannie Falcon:

YouTube Link => http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUeBfwmWaO8

Now.. I don’t understand just about one single word of that song, but I love it! :D

I know that “Mio” means mine, but I have no idea what a “Tiro” could possibly be. haha I don’t care what a Tiro is, either. It was just a weird situation, meeting her and chatting with her about her music. She and I do similar things, but in a totally different way. Meanwhile.. I’ve been studying for a year while she’s been writing, singing and performing her own handycam or flipcamera or whatever amateur-ass videos she makes, and she’s DOING. HER. THING. and getting her message out to whomever feels like listening to it. :D

Granted, I’ve been dropping music tutorial videos this whole time, but it’s not the same thing AT ALL. I recognized as I reflected upon my conversations with Yannie that I wasn’t exactly on the proper path for myself, but I still couldn’t figure out what the issue was.

Since I mentioned her, here’s another song she wrote and performed that I filmed and edited the video for:

YouTube Link => http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7vUJymfUyE

On Our Way To Nowhere…

So now I’m thinking that I’m striving for “excellence” in a craft that depends on resources in order to advance, while other people are doing the absolute best they can with little-to-no resources whatsoever… There was something incredibly WRONG with this picture. :D

So today, I’m watching more videos of professional mixers, and the interviewee is asked a question about sound in popular music.

His answer was essentially that what he does is a business, and that business depends on people buying what he creates. Their buying what he creates depends on his being able to provide them with the sound they’re looking for. The sound they’re looking for is dictated by the sound of the records they’re currently buying…

I suddenly completely ******* realized what my ‘problem’ is with this system.

There’s an amount of learning that you can do that empowers you to make people’s records better than they could make them on their own. The next level up, which I didn’t realize I was looking at, is where you make records sound THE. WAY. OTHER. PEOPLE. EXPECT. THEM. TO. SOUND.

This is the missing link. :) I’m sitting there going “The kick drum sounded fine before you ran it through the box. It sounds almost exactly the same AFTER you ran it through the box. What was the point of your running it through the box? :/”

Now I know what the point is of running it through the box. You want your sound to match what people are currently addicted to so you can make sales, because music, just like television, is a BUSINESS.

I was peering into a world that’s beyond my personal interest. I don’t give a flying **** about making a song sound like pop music or anything else for that matter.

Prepare For Liftoff…

This is what I recognized while talking with Yannie and other DIY musicians over the last couple of months… Would they LIKE to be recording in multi-million dollar studios?.. Sure. Can they afford that?.. Nope. Are they good enough to record in studios?.. I think so. Is *not* recording in a high-budget studio stopping them from being the stars they are?.. Nope. >:D

So.. While I will always be learning, because artistic endeavors always involve on-the-job training, the core of my studies are officially concluded, as of this very ******* second.

I’m now moving from the “Learning” phase to the “Doing” phase. I already know everything I need to know to make music that *I* like.

I dropped a collab remix with MrFresh 9 days ago, even though it seems like it was several weeks ago:

I’m Walkin’ (MrFresh:::BillCammack Regroove) by mrfresh

That project was on-point. We both use Logic, so he sent me the scratch .mp3 of what he was working on, I sent him some ideas back, he finalized the core of the remix and I finished it up.

I didn’t realize it last week, but I’ve already arrived where I want to be. If someone wants to make something commercial out of a project I’m working on, I’ll send them the Logic file or a stack of .WAV or .AIFF files and they can have a field day connecting a series of boxes to it and making it sound the way that people that still listen to the radio expect it to sound so someone might spend money on it.

I totally love, respect and admire what these people do, but it’s not for me. :)

They can keep the Chris Brown sound… The Kid is going Ramones, Iron Maiden & early Metallica. \m/ ^_^ \m/

It sounds like what it sounds like. It is what it is. You get what I give you.

**** making hit records! >:D
–
Connect with Bill via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Email Subscription, RSS Feed

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Social Media

People always want to know how to make money with social media.

The problem is that social media doesn’t make money FOR you. Social media ENABLES YOU to make money…. maybe.

Everybody wants to know how their sales are going to increase once they hire you to create a website or set them up with a presence on Facebook or Twitter.

In Fact… Your sales are NOT going to increase unless a) YOU know what to do with your own internet presence, or b) you HIRE SOMEONE ELSE that knows what they’re doing to handle that aspect of your business for you.

Buying Trophies

In contemplating social media strategies, you have to see yourself as the owner of a race car team and your goal is to win races, thus receiving trophies.

As the owner, you have to decide where you’re going to allocate your budget (money) so you achieve your desired outcome.

If you’re racing in a legitimate organization, you can’t BUY TROPHIES. If you could buy trophies, your competition would be able to buy them too and there would be no reason to run any of the actual races.

Similarly, in social media, you can’t BUY SUCCESS. If you could, everybody would pay some money, receive a positive ROI and there would be no need for professionals at any point of the process.

Unfortunately, this is how a lot of people sell social media to you. They know you know less than they do, so they give you useless tidbits of information and charge you handsomely for “consulting” with them. This is usually the best thing for them to do because if they told you what you REALLY needed to do to be successful with social media, THEY wouldn’t get very much of your money because most of them don’t’ have any of the technical skills necessary to actually DO any of that process for you.

Winning Races

In reality, you have to actually WIN RACES to receive trophies.

What’s the process involved in doing that? o_O

1. You get the trophy by winning the race
2. You win the race by finishing in first place
3. You finish the race by starting the race (driving)
4. You enter the race by having something to drive (a car)
5. You have a car and a driver because you spent MONEY on them

As you can see, you spend your money ENABLING yourself to potentially win. You don’t spend money directly on the WIN.

What does this look like in social media strategy?

The part that people TELL YOU is that you need a website and a Facebook account and a Twitter account. The part that they TELL YOU is that you want people to follow you and the more the merrier.

Budgeting Maintenance

The part that they DON’T TELL YOU is that they’re selling you a car, not a trophy. They’re selling you the ability to MAYBE win.. POSSIBLY…

They also don’t tell you that this isn’t a car show, it’s a race. If it were a car show, you could bring your car to the venue and potentially win a prize for “prettiest car”, or “best paint job”, or “best-built engine”… Being that this is a RACE, it means that you need a DRIVER. o_O

If you’ve already spent money on the car (website), someone has to drive it (maintain your presence). That’s either going to be YOU or someone you hire to maintain your online presence for you.

If you’re going to do it yourself, you’re going to have to spend HOURS each week interacting with customers and potential clients, reading blog posts, writing blog posts, updating your inventory on your site, searching the internet for positive and negative references to your company, checking your statistics to see which items and pages are the most popular and which aren’t doing well, reading and replying to emails, paying attention to the endless flow of twitter posts from the thousands of people you “followed” because some idiot told you to, fielding phone calls and returning voicemails from people that got your number from your website, reading and intelligently replying to comments you receive on your blog, keeping spam and other dumb comments out of your comment section, reading up on the latest technologies for maintaining your presence, spending time on trial & error with new and potentially exciting products…

Thanks For The Money

THIS is what they don’t tell you. They’re’ just like “Give me your money. Here’s your website. Peacebeyotch! :D”. This is why so many people have garbage internet presences, because nobody told them that after you make a blog, you have to populate it and constantly update it. Nobody told them that if you make a site where you’re selling products on the internet, you THEN have to spend your time advertising your product or you need to hire someone else to do that for you.

Nobody told them that if you make a Facebook page and then you don’t actively participate in conversations, you don’t build any rapport and you don’t make any sales. Nobody told them that they needed to participate in conversations that are important to OTHER PEOPLE and not just those that revolve around your being able to sell something and get some money.

Nobody told them that if you follow 3,000 people on Twitter, you’re going to have so many updates that you can’t possibly read all of them, much less contemplate them and reply to them. Guess what? :D .. If you can’t read everything from the 3,000 people you’re following, the people that are following 60,000 people don’t see what YOU WROTE either. o_O

Are You Qualified?

Even if you tried to maintain your own internet presence, how good are you at doing that? How good are you at socializing? How good are you at holding conversations with people? How good are you at SPELLING and GRAMMAR? HAHAHA How good are you at knowing which posts to weigh in on and which to leave alone? How good are you at finding out where people are talking about you or your company, what they’re saying and how you can respond to them? How much time do you have to monitor the internet and respond quickly, giving yourself the appearance of caring as opposed to the appearance of someone that built a car that they don’t know how to drive or built a store that they don’t have time to stock and maintain?

So.. Next time you’re thinking about incorporating social media into your business strategy, recognize that you have to budget not only to BUILD your site, but also to MAINTAIN it.

If you don’t have money to pay someone to maintain your site, either it’s not going to get done or you’re going to have to pay yourself to do it during time that you could have spent billing clients and making your money back.

Either way, nobody’s going to hand you a trophy because you got a website built or because you made a Facebook Fan Page or a Twitter account. That’s not where the work ends. That’s where the work starts.

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Reader Adam H. had a couple of questions about what I thought about the Fast Company / Robert Scoble / Shel Israel thing that’s been going on now for about a month. The first GlobalNeighbourhoods.TV video was dropped on March 19th… Actually, the first FOUR episodes were released on that date and since then, post-production of that show has essentially been non-existent during a virtual metalstorm of criticism of nearly every single aspect of that show.

I commented five days ago on Shel’s site here and here. I thought I’d say something today about budgeting for internet video, with the focus being essentially that you get what you pay for, and if you don’t pay for anything it’s not only the content creator that’s going to be ridiculed, it’s YOUR brand.

Here’s the problem with internet video. I’ve been saying this for probably over a year now, and nothing’s different today. The way television works (which I know, because I’m a broadcast editor) is that the money comes from advertisers. The reason the money comes from advertisers is because they want to take advantage of *you*… the viewer. They know that 2 million people are going to sit in front of the television and watch this show, so they’re willing to pay the network to get their product in front of that many potential customers. Television is ALLLLLLL about sales. That’s why they call them “soap operas”. The point was to sell soap. ACTUAL soap.

This model doesn’t exist with internet video. Not only do you generally have a smaller audience, but you can’t prove demographics. This means you can’t convince an advertiser to give you big money to do an internet show. Since there’s no real revenue stream, it’s spawned a mentality of individuals and companies trying to do or get something for nothing. The less they can spend and still have a video to put on youtube or wherever and try to get hits, page views and revenue shares, the more they like it.

That’s the internet video formula. Spend little, get a garbage product, have people click on it anyway, split the revenue with the host. As we’ve seen with people that have gotten millions of hits on a video and pulled in maybe a couple of thousand dollars worth of revenue, it’s just not worth it. The odds are low that you’re going to get that many hits, and the fact of the matter is that time is money. Unless you have a sponsor, making video on the internet is a money-LOSING situation.

For example… If you work in NYC, and you’re the slowest, least-knowledgeable nonlinear video editor with his/her own system, you can still get $30/hour. Using that insanely-low number as a base, let’s look at the time that it would take to do the Shel Israel show. Actually… Let’s kick it down to McDonald’s wages… What do they get? $10/hour? Is that minimum wage at this point? Let’s say you could get someone to work for $10/hour to make Global Neighbourhoods Television.

The first thing you have to do is shoot the show. Assuming the company you’re going to talk to is local to you, you have to get paid for the time you spend at that company plus the time it took you to travel there. Let’s say you spent 5 hours at a company, traveled another two hours to get there and back and shot 2 hours of footage while you were there (I have no idea how long they actually take or how much they shoot to do their show).

Off the bat, your show has now cost you $70 in time and $15 in tape if you didn’t buy bulk. That’s assuming you already own a camera. That’s assuming you already own a microphone. That’s assuming you already own lights. That’s assuming you’re going to run the camera yourself WHILE you do the interview. If you want to have a cameraman follow you around, let’s say you were able to find someone else that was willing to work for my version of minimum wage, $10/hour. That means that your show is infinitely better, but that it now costs you $140 to shoot. It also means that most likely, the person that you hired… SUCKS, so there’s a good chance that you won’t get anything good for your no-budget production.

Now you have a show “in the can”, meaning you have the elements, but you don’t have a finished show. This means that you have to find someone that’s willing to edit your show for $10/hour. Off the bat, there’s going to be a two-hour loading fee because if you used tape, it has to be ingested into the system in real-time = $20. If you didn’t hire a producer for $10/hour to make sense out of the footage that you shot, that means that the editor has to play through ALL of your footage to extract the best parts = another two hours = $20. Now, the editor is either charged with making your show him/herself, or it’s a supervised edit, meaning someone is telling the editor what they’d like to see happen. Let’s assume it’s going to take four hours to edit the show. That’s another either $40 or $80 depending on the number of people involved. That also doesn’t take into account Suite Fees and Equipment Fees.

So… Adding up this bunch of $10s, we end up with a base price of something like $165/episode for a show that’s shot in one day, by one person and edited during a four hour time span. No revisions. No changes. No more work done on that show past one day. Now… How does that money come back? Revenue-sharing? Let’s say you can get a $7 CPM (cost per mille) for your videos. That means that for every ONE THOUSAND TIMES that someone clicks on your video, you receive a whopping $7. And that’s AFTER you accumulate enough of those thousands to make it over the low limit which the host has agreed in their ToS that they’ll write you a check. That might be $25 and it might be $100, so you don’t get paid JACK unless you get 25/7×1000 views. Let’s call it 4,000 views gets you $28 and THEN you get paid.

$165/$28 = 5.892. Multiply that by 4,000 views, and you’d have to get over 23,000 views to break even if you’re working for $10/hour. Sure, you can do other stuff like have banner ads on your page and google ads, but basically, you can see that without sponsorship, Shel’s not only doing a show for free, he’s actually LOSING MONEY doing the show. SOMEONE’S got to come up with that $165/episode. If it’s a weekly show, that’s $660/month.

PLUS… Unless you’ve got it like that, and you have a business that makes money without you being involved, you have to factor in the opportunity cost of not being able to make money during those hours that you’re shooting and editing your show. You also have to factor in downtime on your computer while videos are being rendered, compressed or uploaded to the internet.

So, even with this hypothetical minimum wage example, we’re looking at $800/month to produce Global Neighbourhoods Television…. in its CURRENT state.

So now, you’d have to wonder WHO you could get to pay you $800/month as a sponsor of a no-budget show. You’re not going to be able to sell “numbers” unless you’re popular for some reason. You’re not going to be able to sell page views either.

Apparently, what happened in this particular case is that Shel Israel’s show has been submitted for editing. Today is April 10th. The show, which was originally announced as a daily… was kicked back to being a weekly… and now hasn’t been updated since March 28th, which will be two weeks ago, tomorrow. If it actually becomes a weekly show, tack on that four hours of minimum wage editing for another $40/week = $160/month and now, the budget is approaching $1,000/month, including shipping tapes to the editor.

So now, I can get to Adam H’s questions:

Adam H: What is Bill’s opinion on this? What are his thoughts on why the videos are lag coming out, why they are long and boring, about FastCompanyTV in general?

My guess is that the videos aren’t coming out on schedule because Fast Company’s in between a rock and a hard place. They only have two choices… Release videos of the same ‘quality’ or get the videos worked on. It seems like they’ve chosen to get them worked on. Neither solution “works” for them.

If they release videos similar to what they’ve already produced, they’re going to be the subject of even more ridicule than they already have been. “They”, being the entire crew involved in this: FastCompany, Robert Scoble, Shel Israel… in that order.

If they get Shel’s videos worked on, the minimum wage editing money is going to have to appear out of thin air. As far as I know, there’s still no sponsor, even though that Seagate advertisement is STILL on fastcompany.tv/global-neighbourhoods-tv. Actually, they could virtually “pay” for Shel’s show to get edited if they have a staff editor and just tack it onto his/her list of duties for fastcompany.tv. That still incurs the opportunity cost of that editor taking time away from doing edits that were originally in their job description.

The other problem with getting the shows edited is that they’re already shot incorrectly. This means that the 4 hours (plus 2 hours for loading, plus an hour for encoding, uploading, tagging, etc) that I estimated for the edit will probably be more like 8 hours and probably spread out over several days, including running the show by an EP (more minimum wage $$/episode) and making several revisions until it’s deemed worthy to be released.

Why are they long and boring? Their focus is on “content” and not entertainment. Basically, what they do is bring you along as a fly on the wall while they hang out with business people and ask questions. Their goal is to archive these Q&A sessions. Basically, as an editor, I can tell you that watching their shows is like watching raw footage. It’s what you would see if you opened up the viewfinder on the camera they used to shoot it and pressed play. The credit that I can give them is that the only show of theirs that I’ve listened to end-to-end was the Jason Calacanis interview, which was broken up into a 20 MINUTE SEGMENT and a *24* MINUTE SEGMENT with a third segement still to be released. I probably watched the first 5 minutes’ worth, then let it play in a background window like a radio program while I did other things. So I can guess that if the niche that they report on consistently has topics/guests that someone’s actually interested in, then their long, boring videos are consistently useful to someone. I’d love to see stats on how many people are return viewers and what percentage (time-wise) of these 44-minute and counting videos are actually being watched.

What about FastCompany.TV in general? hahahaha Interestingly enough, I said what I had to say about FastCompany.TV when I heard about it through the grapevine. I left my comment on Robert Scoble’s announcement post, three months ago, on January 16th, 2008. Video quality isn’t based on a website… It’s based on a team. Bring the same team and you get the same videos.

Meet the new boss….

Same as the old boss………

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