Did you see the Facebook post I tweeted about my blog on my website?

I do two things for a living: 1) I write, and 2) on the weekends, I play music with my band, The Guinness Brothers. That’s it.

There was a time, not long ago, when performing these two jobs consisted of 1) writing, and 2) playing music. For me — because I love doing both these things — it was a great time to be alive.

No more.

These days both these jobs entail all sorts of busy work that has nothing to do with either writing or music. There’s so much busy work, if fact, that I barely have time to perform my “real” jobs.

In the Golden Age when the band had a gig, we played the gig, we collected our fee, we left. It was a system so simple even a musician could understand it.

Then came (cue ominous music) the Internet. 

At first, this consisted of nothing more than setting up a cheesy band website featuring a few photos, a schedule of coming shows and a little contact information. Since this was still the early days of online life, I had to teach myself HTML to build the site. I wasn’t interested in learning to write code, but I couldn’t afford to have someone else do it for me.

Then I had to set up an email account to let our “regulars” know where we were playing each week. Bothersome, but still not too time-consuming. 

Then came Facebook. All of a sudden it was imperative the band have a “presence” there, a presence that was updated at least a few times a week with “behind the scenes” photos, comments from listeners, and personal information in which no rational person could possibly be interested.

And then came Reverb Nation, where I was supposed to upload recordings of our music. And YouTube, where I was supposed to upload video of the band’s recent gigs. And Twitter, where I was supposed to upload “tweets” that show how witty and fun-loving all we band “boys” are.

Meanwhile, this whole ridiculous scenario was being mirrored in my other pursuit, writing. Writing was no longer enough; I was expected to “promote” myself on — you guessed it — Facebook, Twitter, websites and YouTube.

Then I was supposed to blog about my writing and then promote the blogging on all those same social media outlets!

Why must I do this? Because everyone else is, so I have to as well, in order to stay “competitive.”

It’s reached the point I no longer have time to produce any actual music or writing; I’m too buy promoting myself. 

With these constraints on my time, it’s unlikely I’ll ever create any music or literature worth the paper it’s written on. But I will probably be famous.

Just like everyone else.

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273