MUSICIAN SITE™
We build quality web sites for musicians and artistes
Musicians, actors, singers, painters, magicians, dancers etc.
~ Our prices are extremely cheap ~

I was in South East Asia with my band from 1997 till 1999. This is where I first began to use the Internet.
A simple reason: We needed to communicate with Europe and the
US for our business purposes
By post ?
Any outside contact abroad would have taken ages, with no guarantee that any of our letters would have arrived at their destination.
By phone ?
Much, much too expensive, and very often unreliable.

I was performing in Beirut for three months with the band FREESPIRIT in the summer of '97.
How many among you have ever attempted to send a phone call or a fax from Beirut to the UK?
By Internet ?
Great !
It's very cheap... it is immediate....
you are informed if your message
fails to arrive !
Plus it is a written communication.
Which means that agreements can be
enforced since you have the file save
or the message printed.

First Story

Place: Kuala Lumpur
Time: January 1998
Occupation: Performing in a great nightclub with the band FREESPIRIT.
Problem:
We are offered a gig in Bahrein, Middle East, from our agent in the UK (by e-mail). Our musicians could not or did not want to go to Bahrein, because bombings on Iraq from the US government had been widespread
during December 1997.
Bahrein is close to Iraq and many
US and British citizens working in
Iraq had retreated there for protection.
Our guitarist is Thai. His name is
'Muck' he's a fabulously talented
player. But you see, he had been performing in Cambodia with a
Thai band a few years earlier,
when the war broke out.
The new 'authority' were then after the
Thais, and the band, on stage at the time, had to flee for their lives

---

..'The musicians jumped off
the stage, ran through town,
into the jungle and walked for several days until they
reached the Thai boundary'...

---

The musicians jumped off
the stage, ran through town,
into the jungle and walked for several
days until they reached the Thai boundary
And all the time during these days the Cambodian soldiers were close by.
It is not so much Muck who had the
problem, but his parents who did
not want him to take the risk of their
son being bombed in Bahrein.
On top of all this, the relationship between Iraq and Thailand were far
from being at their best ...
As a bandleader, what would you
answer to this ?!
We have an American bass player
who was OK to go to Bahrein and
to join us from Singapore, as at
the time our keyboard player,
being from the Philippines and
now living in K.L., was also teaching
in the National Music School.
He had to hold on to his position for
obvious financial reasons.
But two weeks prior to the departure
to Bahrein, the American guy calls us.
He is scared too since the Americans have bombed Iraq, and 'who knows
if the Iraqis will not invade Bahrein..

...'If they do I'm f____ed man! I don't want to die in Bahrein !'...

---

'If they do I'm f____d man! I don't want
to die in Bahrein !'
As a bandleader, how do you answer
that ?
The gig in Bahrein is an important one, mainly because we accepted it and it
is unthinkable of us to put our agent in such a major pickle by not making it.
Solution:
Forget the mail, the gig is in 2 weeks. Forget the phone, all our fee would
be swollen up in one day.
The World Wide Web is the solution !
Handling:
Val, my wonderful partner and singer
in FREESPIRIT and I borrow the
computer of Steve, a local friend &
expat. from the UK, and spend hours
in front of the computer, leaving this message in all the classified adds
and musician-
related web sites that we can find
(and we find hundreds of them)
throughout the US and Europe.
Within 3 days we have our musicians
for Bahrein:
The Bass player is from LA and the Keyboard player is from Toronto.
We know what they look like. We
know their full CV. We know how they play, and whether they can handle our repertoire (we are doing a dance gig
in Kuala Lumpur, but Bahrein is a jazz/soul easy listening gig).
We know ALL we need to know to
judge and decide if
the guys will fit the bill. We received
about 20 answers by e-mail to
our postings.
The guys that we have chosen are top guys.

Out of 20 answers (from Australia,
Asia, Europe, USA) less than half
had a web site. They were not even considered as we had no means of knowing who we really were dealing
with.

 

Cost of this world wide & very fast prospecting:
Probably less than US$20 !
Thank you Steve!

But you should read
the next story!

Second Story

Place: London
Time: February 2001
Occupation: gigging in town with
FREESPIRIT and working on this web site when at home.

Problem:
We received a call from a venue that
we regularly perform at. The band they had booked for the coming Saturday
has cancelled, and they want us to
do the gig.
We accept. It is Thursday.
Calling the musicians, it transpires
that everyone is already booked
for that night.
We are left with Val on voice, and
me on drums... We need to dep. (replace) 3 out of 5 band members.
Call to the venue:
they really want us (they love Val's fronting of the band) and trust us in finding the right guys to back her up.
We find a guitarist and a bass player who have already played with us,
and know that they will do a
good job. Since the majority of our charts apparently went up in flames
in the car of our keyboard player
some while ago,
the guys will have to rely upon the
CD demos of our repertoire to
refresh themselves with the twenty
odd songs for the night.

Solution:
We telephone using our thick address book full of keyboard players. Each and everyone of those we know could fit the bill for that night are available on Friday but already booked for Saturday!
Next resource: The Web.
We spend 3 hours on the musician classified ads of various web sites
and post ads every where, plus
e-mail the guys who gave their web
site addresses and who had the right profile. We do not even bother
with those who have no web site
since the time is to short to
'interview' each one to check
whether they are OK or not for
the gig. Friday night after midnight
we are still looking for the right guy.
We stop at 2:00 am Saturday
morning. When we wake up we
do not find any answer to our
sent e-mails... We replaced the keyboard player with a second guitarist who did a wonderful job ~ the gig was a total success.

The next day:
We receive answers from a few of
the keyboard players that we had contacted on Friday.
They did not check their e-mail
on Saturday,

but are available for other gigs if we
need them. Two of them were available and would have loved to have played the gig.
We have their details now in our books and will call them next
time we need a dep.
(This is how we found our bass player
for a last minute New Year's Eve gig in London. He has worked with us 3-4 times since...)

Cost of this very fast prospecting::
Probably £5.00 in failed phone calls,
and £ 0.15 for 5 hours on the web!

CONCLUSION:
These are only two examples &
I could give you many many more.
I mentioned the 'speed', the 'area
of prospecting (i.e.. London or the
whole world) and the 'cost' of the prospecting.
These 3 factors are vital to a band
leader, a film director, an agent, a choreographer, a promoter,
a manager, an A & R man, a record company. We rely heavily upon these three factors in the success of our operations.

We need 10 out of 10 in our choice of these three factors, plus an additional factor:
the reliability of the communication
line. And the Internet is very secure
and reliable, and more so as time
goes on.

Four vital factors as a whole can determined whether we go bankrupt
or we succeed.
As an artiste, the last thing you want
is to have those who provide the
work go bankrupt, true?
A good reason why with FREESPIRIT, we take much care of our best agents:
if they go bankrupt... so do we...
and so do the musicians in the band
until another band ... another agent
comes along... but it can take months or years.

More and more bandleaders,
agents, promoters, managers, directors, record companies, choreographers etc., etc.
are relying upon the Internet
and the web to run their business.
Having your web site gives instant access to you & your creations
to any of the millions who browse
the web every day.
Including radios, record labels,
producers, managers, galleries,
agents etc etc.

Either you are part of the game,
or you're outside of the game
looking in.

This is your own personal choice.

So... WHY SHOULD YOU HAVE
YOUR OWN WEB SITE ?

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