By George Petersen
IF YOU HAVE ACCESS TO A RECORDING STUDIO (small or large) and can write and produce a song—you have an amazing amount of power within your grasp. So what am I talking about? Power. Political clout. And it’s all yours for the taking.
Here’s how it works: With the presidential election just 16 months away, candidates are starting to line up for the process, both before and after the primary. And if you have the gumption, talent or wherewithall to write a campaign song—either espousing your views or slammin the opposition—there are plenty of outlets to get YOUR message out. These can range from podcasts to political websites, to conventional broadcast radio and TV stations. And hey, sending or uploading an MP3 of your work to people who can spread your creation out to the masses ain’t necessarily expensive either.
As a case in point, before the last presidential election, I wrote, recorded and produced a song that took a humorous poke at one of the candidates. [I won't say which one, because Blair Jackson mentioned it in one of his blogs and it roused up a flurry of hate mail by some people who felt mixing politics and music was a bad idea—which it certainly is not.] But this particular song went on to rack up a startling 500,000 downloads and massive amounts of national airplay—not bad for a little ditty that took an hour to write and three hours to record/mix. So for a couple hours work, I could get my message out to a huge audience. And it isn’t hard at all…
Writing/producing the song is up to you, but it doesn’t have to be elaborate. In the spirit of simple = fun, mine only required nine tracks—three for drums (stereo+kick), one for bass, two for lead/backing vocals, acoustic guitar, flute and banjo. I will say that people (listeners and hosts) like humorous songs more than dirges, so a light-hearted approach is usually best. Once done, cut a couple MP3′s—I did a lower-res 128 kb version and a “broadcast-quality” 256 kb version—and host them and the words on your site/myspace page/whatever. Then start hitting up newsgroups, bloggers, podcasters, websites, broadcasters and others (particularly those allied to your cause), send them the link and watch the numbers grow. At last count, there were more than 500 links to my song and dozens of mirror sites hosting it. In fact, when you enter its fairly generic, 2-word title into Google, it comes up #1 out of 1.5-million results, so it’s definitely working.
Several people have told me that I should have charged for the downloads, because 500,000 downloads at $1/each is a decent return for a couple hours work. Great idea, but there’s something here called George’s 100,000-to-1 rule, where for each person that will pony up a buck, there are 100,000 who won’t. So given the choice of spreading my message with hundreds of thousands of downloads (and potentially millions of listeners) or making five smackeroos, I’ll take the big audience alternative, anytime.
YOU have the power. So get out, get involved, make some music and get YOUR message heard!
When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.
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