Glasnost

The following is an excerpt of a 29 November 2014 email exchange between Art and Will. It should be noted that, since 1 November 2014, all Art's emails have originated from Farthington's account.


"Reagan and Gorbachev signing" di White House Photographic Office - National Archives and Records Administration ARC Identifier 198588, courtesy Ronald Reagan Presidential Library: Source URL: http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/photographs/large/c44071-15a.jpg Source page: http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/photographs/gorby.html. Con licenza Pubblico dominio tramite Wikimedia Commons.

Well, things have been cracking pretty good on the Worldwide Interweb today, thanks to your stirring the pot. Got the highest number of pageviews ever on the blog. I don't understand Facebook stats, but our "Reach" is in the hundreds for each of our recent posts.

This experiment has engendered some new thinking for me, which is exactly what I hoped it would do!

It reminded me of an idea we had early on in the project. It's so interesting that there apparently are no new ideas in this project, only rediscovering the old ones! Ecclesiastes, anyone?

Are you ready? Wait for it...wait for it...wait for it...

TRYOUTS!!!

Yes, that's right. Tryouts. People are trying out for the band. Now, we obviously don't have widespread devotion (I'm thinking Adrien Belew begging Frank Zappa for a second audition), but we could twist a few people's arms into choosing a song to play along with that we can post. This would initially happen through direct communications to musicians we would like to audition.

Then have a voting stage, wherein fans choose between among the different band members! And then, maybe those band members will do a show!

To me, this sounds like a challenge. This sounds like fun. And it feels like it's the missing link, the answer to that critical question: how can we make participating fun for people?

Now, rollout is important. See if the following sequence makes sense:

1. All the Iceland songs should be available on the playlist, which will take some more time
2. We should line up some people, twist their arm into choosing a song, recording it, and having a backlog ready when we make the announcement; they can be recorded alone or with the bare-bones accompaniment of the YouTube video
3. Then we wait a few days and start releasing some of the demos as if they flooded in, hopefully getting some new ones as people get emboldened watching the auditions
4. Finally, you can have people vote on the best demos with videos as choices as you may have seen in Carlton Farthington's latest post

The additional cool thing about this is that there is no lull. Now, our project may very well die for any number of other reasons. People seem to not want to go anywhere near it.

Even in its new glasnost phase, it does little to make itself palatable to anyone!

But lull = death in the zeitgeist and there will be no letdown for this project until we choose to close up shop. Lull will not, in other words, be our cause of death. Blog posts, low-budget online audition/talent show, an ongoing stream of YouTube videos and recordings, etc. No lull.

I guess the final question is, do we need to make it worth people's while? I think the promise of a well-attended show with a decent payout that might be enough. I'm reminded of my algorithm idea for encouraging everyone to drum up interest (15 September 2013 email):

Secondly, I want us to make money on the show.  Here's an idea for that: at the door, in addition to someone collecting money and/or tickets, there would be someone asking whose guest they are. This person would tally the number of guests of mine, of yours, etc. etc. Then, after the show, there would be some agreed-upon algorithm for divvying up the money. I like the idea of a little friendly competition between stakeholders, which would doubtless lead to a larger take. Once everyone has his or her money in hand, we can individually decide if we want to collectively reinvest any of it back into the project. What do you think?