Setting Up Shop

Little by little, bit by bit, step by step. It’s a different storyline that is starting to develop here. I’m setting up shop. Here’s the proposed roadmap…

I’ve never really been one to blatantly sell merchandise from my website. From a show, sure. But not from my website. At this point I’m looking back at things and thinking to myself – I’m a moron. If someone is interested in what you’re doing, why the hell not offer something in exchange for a little cash?

I’ve had this long standing view of it always being about the music, only about the music. In one sense it’s noble, in reality that’s stupid. A lot of missed connections with you. It probably has left a cold feeling between us and I’m a much warmer person than that and I know you are too.

Getting into this world of e-commerce is a process, at least for me. I’m learning as I go. Don’t we all? I know I need to keep it simple and I should be proffering things on the front of the store that are directly related to my latest release. They probably teach that in Marketing 101, setting up shop 101 or something of that nature 101 at university.

However, I’m not that organized outside of the music. Which means, you’ll have to bear with me as I slowly add things to the store and figure out how to sort them appropriately. The easiest thing for me in this initial phase is transcriptions of songs. Namely my songs. If you’re a musician and you purchase things like Guitar Magazine for the transcriptions (something I used to do when I was a budding musician), you know that often it was hard to get super accurate transcriptions. The beauty of my transcriptions is that they’re exactly what I played on the recording, because I’m the one doing them and I’m pretty sure I know what I played. I better, I wrote this stuff. And if you’re really into it, MP3 downloads of singles. Of course I’m offering them at a price that makes sense – the amount I’d make if you didn’t buy it on iTunes or somewhere else where they still sell music downloads. The store front makes this fairly easy for me and for you. So that’s a plus.

My next steps as I add more transcriptions and singles is to do Deluxe Digital albums. You know, kinda interactive like. With original album art, liner notes, lyrics, photos, some videos and full blown audio with the stories behind each song. As I’m sitting here writing this, I’m thinking I should do this for singles too.

I’m also going to be setting up shop for limited run T-shirts. Meaning you can be one of a lucky few to get a particular print of a shirt before they sell out and can no longer be found. Add baseball caps to that as well. For the sports minded fans of mine, I’m going to be doing Jersey’s that can be customized with your name on the back.

This is just the beginning. There will be more.