#063: Bruce Houghton – Blogging the future of music
Bruce Houghton (Founder of Skyline Music) is a long time industry veteran who has been booking music talent of all shapes and sizes for over 20 years. As the shift in the music industry became apparent, Bruce started a blog as a way to keep the artists on his roster informed on new developments in the business. His blog, called Hypebot, has grown in popularity and become one of the leading music business blogs that pays special attention to the growing indie music community, or as Bruce likes to call it, the musician middle class. His experience and insights make his blog a must read for the indie artist who is serious about moving their music forward.
Check out Bruce’s blog Hypebot here – http://hypebot.com
Great Ying to the Yang of the last interview! Both sides of the coin. David and Golliath! Love the podcast and can’t wait for the round table
Man, he works really hard! Wish I had the energy to get up at 5am and start going through the blogs for a couple of hours.
Thanks for the interview, very interesting.
I have a comment concerning Bruce’s concept of the Magic Door Syndrome – that there is no one ‘thing’ that leads to an artist’s success.
In my opinion, many artists are stricken with The Magic Door Disease from “Behind the Music,” the movies, and artists biographies. These stories are produced in such a way as to suggest that accomplished artist’s achieved their fame simply by walking through several such Magic Doors. After all, the simplicity makes for a better story.
Although Kevin mentioned in the interview that this Magic Doors topic had yet to be mentioned in the show before, I think that the myth of easy-fame/discovery is a theme of this podcast.
To bring this idea a little further, I believe that this very myth is behind the romanticism of musicians. Ironically, this Myth of the Magic Door which is so enticing and fantastic to the fan in all of us can only be reflected, recreated, and made to look easy by artists who understand that it is hard.
I am an artist who has been writing a song every day for hundreds of days now. My name is Eric Strom, by the way. During this time I have been listening to this podcast. In the way described above, this Magic Door concept represents to me THE lesson that I have learned over the past 9 months. Thank you Bruce, Kevin, and the rest of the crew.
Great Ying to the Yang of the last interview! Both sides of the coin. David and Golliath! Love the podcast and can’t wait for the round table
Great interview. Another golden nugget of information about booking and why you should build a fanbase. Loved the advice he gave about concentrating in the beginning on about three distinct towns/areas, getting more people to your concerts and thus having a track record to show guys like him, a little step on the way to national/international touring (we hope).
I fond the podcast incredibly insightful. It definitely sets a good path to get yourself setup for future success by setting up a track record people can reference to.
Some good tips, realistic but necessary.. Particularly liked the bit about big cities no longer being the right place for a band to go but rather to find the smaller audiences in little places where the people are hungry for new music. Or maybe zone in on a particular suburb in a city or network.