Ever wonder what it's like?

On the inside, behind the scenes, what does it take to shoot for success in the music world? From the artistic and visionary, to the harsh realities of running a business; this blog is about the path of Ghost of Gloria. This is not where we'll be promoting shows or sending blasts to our fan base. This is about the real deal. The good, the bad, and the funny.

Friday, January 7, 2011

New Year, New Plans

As the four of us rang in 2011, we knew that a lot of things would have to change.  A lot of our goals for this band remain unfulfilled, and we all agreed that this would be the time to make the changes we needed to make.  So we set our first band meeting of the new year for Monday, January 3rd, at a Starbucks in Hollywood, FL.

On the to do list: put the finishing touches on our next 3 song EP, name it and agree on artwork, settle on a release date, discuss promotions, shows and distribution.  Those collectively were item #1.  So you can see how this went.  Once we got a bunch of these specific items taken care of, we arrived at the most major point of the meeting.  You see, the four of us are almost always the first to admit when we suck at something.  On this day, like some meeting of recovering addicts, we all collectively came to the same conclusion.  We totally, utterly suck at running this band.  Our business has literally scraped along with such a painful limp that its amazing we are still doing this.  Truly, it has only been our love of music and the support of a lot of amazing people that has moved us forward.  It was our rock bottom moment.  We suck.

BUT, like any successful AA meeting, or anyone doing anything right around the turn of the year, we decided to start anew.  We devised a plan for not sucking in 2011.  Our business needs to be taken as seriously as we take our music.  The only other thing we take that seriously is hauling ass out of the van if Mark C lets one rip.  That's probably the most urgent item on our "serious" list.

What we're excited about now is that we've delegated each responsibility of the band to a different person.  One person is in charge of merchandise, another organizes all bookings.  On and on.  No sticking your nose in someone else's business unless they need help.  Obviously, new music remains a group effort, but we realized that any business in the world that lasts more than a week has different departments.  The best qualified people do the jobs that are relevant to their skills.  Aha!  It's a whole new world for us.

In fact, that meeting was the genesis for this blog.  It's another great idea that should've been done a long time ago.  Only now, it was given to one specific person to get off the ground right away.  That's a world of difference from how we used to operate.  In the few days since that meeting, it's been amazing to see the sheer number of things that have moved forward.  We plan on continuing that trend for good.  And we're expecting great things from this year.

A quick closing note: between now and January 25th, the release date for "Trial + Virtue, Volume One," you can go HERE  to help us make this EP a success.  It provides many different ways to support our new release and we came up with a whole bunch of different rewards for your help at each level.  Please take a look!

2 comments:

  1. looking forward to following your journey on yet another social media outlet, guys :)

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  2. You guys are shining examples of what TO DO in the industry. It's hard keeping up!

    ReplyDelete