At the offensive hour of 5 am my allergies woke me up and didn't allow me to fall back asleep. Needless to say, I had some time to think about what I should blog about this morning. It's been awhile since I posted a nice legit blog. So, without further ado...
In mid-March two of my musician friends, Caiti 'High-C' Laszewski and Daniel 'Sunshine' Heier, and I were asked to participate in a writing challenge. The challenge was posed by the author of the book The Savvy Musician, a book that is used for McNally Smith Liberal Arts Department Head and faculty member, Janis Weller's class Creating A Life In Music. The challenge was posed to college-level music students across the globe.
We accepted the challenge with enthusiasm...And then had no idea how to answer such vague, loaded questions. After a session or two of individual free-writing, however, we were able to come up with some pretty sweet ideas. We then combined our responses into one super-essay.
The challenge posed was this:
Are Musicians Truly Important? Most people immediately agree that doctors, farmers, and teachers provide essential services to our communities. But what about musicians? Is our work vital? What kind of important differences can we make?
Since our essay was submitted, it has been published on the author's blog. You can find that blog here: Click it
McNally Smith also wrote something up about our involvement in this challenge as well. To read what they had to say about it all click here: Click it
And in addition to that, the blog has also been linked at McNally Smith's student news publication's blog The Decibel, for which the three of us are editors. You can check out The Decibel's shiny new blog here: Click it
Moving on. :)
In my artist promotion resource knowledge quest, I have been introduced to really, really awesome website. This website is called Squarespace.
It's a website that allows you purchase website domains for an amazing $14.95 a month. And not only that, but you don't actually have to start your website from scratch. Much like blogging sites such as WordPress or Blogger, or even websites like MySpace, you can alter how your website looks without having to know all the ins and outs of web design. The site allows you to try it out for two weeks for free. Which is precisely what I did.
So last week I sat down and played with Squarespace. This is what I came up with:
The site is fairly easy to use. The only confusing thing I ran into was what each section is actually called within the formatting mode. After some time though, and playing around with things, it's pretty easy to work out.
Basically what I'm getting around to, is that this site is fanTASTIC for electronic press kits (or EPKs). Over the course of this semester, I have had many, many conversations about what an electronic press kit actually is nowadays. The conclusion I've come to? EPKs are just websites. The Blue Jay Radio image above is basically that - a clean, professional looking website that contains links to all of their social media sites and "tabs" across the top of the header that link to different pieces of their EPK.
The only thing I personally have not figured out yet, is how to embed audio - not videos, but just audio. In the I'll be doing more research on that in the near future, but for at least the next two weeks, Blue Jay Radio has the beginnings of an EPK.
On another note, did you check out the sweet poll that's living on SayWAM?? How sweet is that?! Not nearly as sweet as it'll be after you answer the question. ;)
And so, I am now going to leave you with this.
Have a great day!!
Jenna
