The Invites Are Out There!

Yes, it’s finally true. At 5am this morning a small number of Indyish invites went out to some incredibly cool people, people who have been in touch with us about representing over here on Indyish, people who we’re stoked and delighted to have on board. They’re receiving a letter and invite code in their email inboxes today, along with this too awesome illustration by George Blott:

When they accept our invite, they’ll first be prompted to fill our their profile. These profiles have high search ranks, so Indyish folk: I suggest whatever name you choose for public display be the one you want people to find you by. I recently changed my display name to my full name and now my profile (finally!) knocks down Toronto’s Now and EYE magazines, the Montreal Mirror, the Gazette and the Canadian Journal of Communication. Ha! I feel empowered. You can see what a profile looks like by clicking on any author’s name.

New artists will also be able to participate on the new Indyish forums, which will also automatically create a forum profile for them (an example here). All this stuff - profiles, feeds - helps us follow the many conversations we’re having with each other, and also helps raise an artist’s visibility in web searches. That’s the main goal of Indyish after all - free tools to help you find your audience.

When new artists have filled out their profile and if they crave more Indyish action, they just click Upgrade on the new Accounts page to join the awesome blog contributors. All the different levels of Indyish membership are free, and we keep adding new features to each membership level, new rooms to our ramblin homestead, all the time.

For example, all Contributors now get their very own Podcast blog where they can build an audience of listeners. I’ve been warming up the podcast with some random readings, but I can’t wait to see musicians in there really making use of it. If I were a musician (instead of a writer organizer person who reads a lot and sometimes sings along) I’d be posting weekly or daily musical rough cuts, tracking my own evolutions as a music maker but also building a world wide web following from the privacy of my lil living room.

Musicians always make music, that’s probably the best of many good things about them: they sit around and friends come over and while they talk they make music. These are genuine, intimate, messy musical events, with the quiet (even shy) energy of improvisation and just-can’t-help-it-ness that you never get when the performance is planned and staged. A wholly different kind of energy. Posting these types of takes would build a different kind of following and I bet it would translate into a closer relationship with fans long before an album comes out.

Anyway - these are just some of my excited thoughts about the new artists joining us and the new tools we can offer them. Today is a day of twitchy excitement and celebration, watching the invites get accepted as some already have (yah!!) and scheming up what happens next!