Marni Wandner is the owner of Sneak Attack Media. In this interview we talk to her about what new bands should focus on when they’re building out their social media presence, some of her personal success stories with artists like Florence and the Machine and Leonard Friend, and what she would do if the tables were turned and she had to promote her own music.

We sit down with Chad Metheny (aka Emperor X) to discuss his life as a musician, his thoughts on the music industry, and why he started recording music in the first place.

Toward the end the internet connection on his end gets a bit overloaded and the audio clips off here and there. For those who are interested, we’ve made a transcript of that part of the conversation which you can read here:

MB: I’m curious, at the end of the day, how would you like people to view you?

EX: I don’t think about that a whole lot. I guess like a programmer really, like a web developer or someone who does this Thing that fills a need for people because I wouldn’t do this if it were self-indulgent. I’m too sensitive to that. I would be very mad at myself if I did that and I’m always on the watch for being self indulgent. I’d like to be especially among my friends, and family and stuff seen as a guy who has, you know, a defined Thing that I do and who tries his best to do it well. Like anybody else there’s really no difference. The whole idea of the artist being a different mentality than other people is true to some extent based on what we were talking about just a second ago but I think the root want is just to have to, you know (contribute to?) your community that you live in to hopefully history and thats what everybody wants, right? Same as everybody else.

MB: Immortality

EX: Yeah, exactly! Well, I don’t know. That’s tricky right? (???) and then you know…(??) don’t get me started on cosmology

MB: Well to that end you’re already there. You record a record and it gets distributed…as long as that stays in someone’s catalog you’re golden.

EX: Right, but that’s why I started recording, that’s exactly (???). I was obsessed with heat death, the entropy version of how the universe is going to end there’s a bunch of cosmological models but the one that fascinated me the most was the (???) uh, just because of the dissipation of kinetic energy and transforming it into undirected thermal energy and the fact that (???) fascinated with the tape recorder because it sort of preserved the entropy that I was (??) in singing, the structure of the song for, you know, indefinitely. And that was definitely a beginning (??) philosophical motivator for me to start recording music. Absolutely. But nothing lasts forever and that’s why I wanted to start pressing vinyl because vinyl survives everything you know? You could do an electromagnetic pulse and it would (wipe our every) drive in the world, every piece of magnetic data and all the CD players would be fried (???) vinyl record is there, right? It’s etched in and all you need is a needle and a piece of paper to form a cone out of it and then you can hear what’s on a vinyl record. That seemed to me like immortality [but] that is going to go away when the sun blows up so I’m thinking more nowadays about process, more like what you said a second ago where (??) it’s distributed to other people’s hard drives like cloud memory (if there’s) any immortality its in that kind of disseminated (??) thing. Read (Henri Bergson) and you’ll get what I’m talking about. Creative Evolution. Teleological things.

Casey Shea talks to us about what it was like to move to New York the first time and establish himself as a musician in the big city. He also gives us some insight into how he’s used web video to connect with his fans.

Check out Casey’s latest record “In Your Head”!

Lead singer and founding member of The Black Atlantic Geert van der Velde talks with us about what he did to get their debut album downloaded over 100,000 times.

He also gives us some insight into how he used this experience to release his follow up Darkling, I Listen, how he’s been able to connect with all of his fans around the world, and how he’s been able to book tours in China and Japan.

Be sure to grab a copy of the The Black Atlantic’s latest release here!

 

 

The Mixbridge Blog is going on a brief holiday hiatus and will return on Monday, January 9 with a new interview.  In the meantime, take a look at some of our previous interviews and stay tuned for some exciting developments in the new year!

Best Wishes,

Robert & The Mixbridge Team

What does a music supervisor do and how can you get their attention?

In one of the first interviews from this series I sit down with my friend Lilah Wilson to talk about her experience as a music supervisor in advertising and film. She walks us through the process of how music gets into both worlds, who the players are, and the best way to get your music into her hands.  She also talks about her latest project Sleepwalk With Me which is set to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012.

Audrey Ryan talks to us about her new book, The Need To Be Heard and why most books about “making it” in the music business fail.

I’ve always felt that some of the most valuable advice you can receive falls under the category of Tough Love.  Unfortunately, this kind of advice is hard to find because it takes a lot of courage to tell someone something that they know you don’t want to hear. Lucky for us, Audrey wrote a book about her experiences as an independent musician and delivers a little over 200 pages worth of tough love.  Along the way she treats us to some revealing interviews with the likes of Ian McKaye (Fugazi), Stephen Brodsky (Cave In), Bruce Flohr (ATO Records), and a host of other music industry vets who tell it like it is.

In this weeks interview, I speak with Audrey about her new book, what she’s learned as a promoter, and we wax poetic on the idea of NOT trying to make it in the music business.

Want more? Check out Audrey’s book here: The Need To Be Heard

Anytime you decide to put something new out into the world there’s going to be some anxiety.  What if people don’t like it?  What if I screw up?  There’s a long list of What If’s.

You learn at some point though, whether you’ve got a new album (or…gulp…a new website), that there is no possible way to do everything perfectly in the beginning.  You’re inevitably going to fall flat on your face a few times and you’re going to do it in front of a crowd.  It’s just part of the process. There are a lot of ways of dealing with this and in my conversation with Andrew Hendryx we hear one of the most effective: having a good attitude about it and pushing forward.

In this week’s interview Andrew and I talk about why his band Yarn has never had a rehearsal space, why they’ve been willing to play almost anywhere, and how they’ve been successful connecting with their fans online.

All the while, the wheeled hamsters who apparently run the internet in upstate New York (where Yarn is recording their new album) work feverishly to keep our connection afloat. You’ll noticed I squirm a bit and that I probably should have changed into a different shirt before we started rolling but…hey, it’s okay if it isn’t perfect, right?

Find out how the members of Tayisha Busay are able to be their own publicist and still represent themselves as artists.

Tessa G and Ariel Sims talk to us about vomiting glitter, how they’ve learned to record electronic music, dodging Canadian customs, and the keys to building their mailing list to over 2000 subscribers.

How can you get people to sign up on your mailing list? How can you get over being shy when promoting your music?

Michael Jurin talks to us about he and the other members of Stellastarr* went from playing to seventeen people in a small club in NYC to touring the globe with The Killers, Placebo, and Jane’s Addiction.  He gives us specific details on how they promoted themselves in the early days and why its important to stay involved in the day-to-day management of your career…even if you have people for that.