Thomas Mahoney

Rad flyer designed in 5 minutes by me. You should see the unicorn over LA one. Very not worthy. Matt, don’t play that psycho bullshit job music. Play a riff!

So you have a band. You’re on MySpace. Or you have a Facebook page. Or you’re on iMeem, Bebo, whatever.

It’s cool that these companies exist that allow you to freely post your music and info, and connect with potentially millions of fans.

There are several problems with this model that are only now apparent.

First, and totally deserving of its own post, is the fact that your band is probably terrible and doesn’t need or deserve an audience outside of whoever you are fucking and whoever is stupid enough to want to load your equipment in and out of your local venue.

More important is this: you are, under 99.9% of circumstances, not sharing revenue from the ads generated when your fans are accessing your content. Until recently (see YouTube and MySpace Music over the last month, if you are a real band with real financial backing), you gained nothing from the banner ads generated around your content. Sure, it might be a miniscule amount, but times 8 million bands, it’s the reason FOX Interactive and their competitors are able to employ hundreds upon hundreds of employees. 

But I’m going to assume since you are at thomasmahoney.net that you are somewhat smart. Your IQ is above 100, you have a bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience, and you’ve read books slightly above the norm for a nation in which newspapers demand their writers produce for an 8th grade level audience or less. 

So what else could possibly be of value? You’re making 50-70% from your iTunes deal, your t-shirts sell well, and your tour guarantee is at least a grand a night, right? What could possibly be of more value?

Well, let’s say you’re some tattooed kid from the midwest who used to play in shitty metallic hardcore bands. You’re the bass player and your band — we’ll call you Fall Out Boy — has exactly 1,776,554 friends on your MySpace profile. Fuck yeah! You married some babe. You’re hosting MTV shows. You’re in Rolling Stone. Sweet!

Except you share something in common with the band that has 2,500 friends or 117 friends. Hmm?

You have exactly ZERO knowledge of your audience. Zero. None. 

Whoever is hosting your shit online for free knows. They know the IP address. They know the age. They know the DMA and most of the time, the exact geographic location down to a T, displayable in Google Earth. They know what site the kid was on before they came to yours, and what site or link bounced them away from you. These days, they even know how much your visitor makes, their level of education, their marital status, and other information that’d make both the drug-shooting anarchists and gun-toting conservatives shit their pants in disbelief. 

They have your data.

Who gives a fuck about a percentage of ad revenues when you can potentially know a hundred different traits about each and everyone of your friend and non-friend visitors?

The so-called Information Age, or the Age of Google, is built upon data. Do you have your data? Can you access it? Can you control it? Can you analyze it? Can you determine, based on current input, your best course of action in response?

Most likely, no. Why not? 

We could say that these corporations are committing crimes, but I don’t believe that. You are committing a crime against yourself. You are willingly selling off your content for exactly zero dollars and zero cents, with absolutely no equity. Why? Because it’s free, and easy, and trendy, and the norm?

Don’t worry — this isn’t a Bob Lefsetz newsletter that lets you down with all vitriol and no solution.

Save up $50. Buy a domain and a web host. Get your nerdy friend who plays World of Warcraft to tell you about Drupal or Joomla or Wordpress or some other free, open source content management system. Maybe he’ll already have a Google Ad Manager and AdSense account or have done an install of Open X, and maybe he knows how to build a sitemap, install Google Analytics, or Quantify the site. Maybe you do. And maybe you know how to call up someone and tell them that your new site attracts 10,000 uniques a month, and that is worth value for a local business focusing on some niche that your typical fan is interested in. 

I don’t think you are stupid. I think you may be ignorant, and most definitely lazy. To this day, the internet, this giant fucking tool of communication and community and commerce, is mostly free. Definitely way more free than television or radio or print. If you play an instrument and you play it well, it means you are reasonably gifted, and you should simultaneously be picking up any given O’Reilly or “For Dummies” text on web development, design, or metrics.

Steve Albini once wrote about how fucked your friends were for signing to a major. I’m telling you how fucked you are for thinking you’re independent when you’re signing up for “free” services backed my Microsoft, News Corp, Universal, or whoever else.

My friend James, who is twice as big as me, asks the same inane, rhetorical question every time he sees me: “Do you want to live or do you want to die?” Without fail, I always tell him I want to die. And as we have this personal relationship, he knows that translates into, “bring it on, motherfucker.”

So you want to live? Fuck that shit. It’s time to die. 

Come and get some.

You and I both have met at least one person in our life who has screamed out and consequently sulked about someone “stealing their idea.”

Ideas are free. They cannot be stolen. They are in the noosphere, the collective conscious, the akashic records, or whatever the fuck you want to call it. I repeat: ideas are free and cannot be stolen.

What is not free is the execution of an idea. The strategy, tactics, devotion, manpower, and elbow grease behind making a thought become a reality has a value, anywhere between a few hundred dollars to nearly infinite, depending on the particular idea.

Calculating conservatively, I’d say I’ve had at least 70 amazing ideas, probably more than a hundred. Most have been ignored or forgotten, and several have been taken and produced into something real, either my myself of those invisible “thieves.” For those self-created fictions that are now palpable realities conjured by others, have I turned into a jealous, outwardly-loathing, super-secretive motherfucker? No.

Why?

Because I didn’t have the time nor the desire to make them happen. Notice I did not say the resources, i.e. money or time. If you think of something original, I praise you for being a step above the rest, but an idea is not enough. If you don’t take the time to believe in your idea and give it life, then it doesn’t matter that you thought of it. I won’t get into the existential argument that there are no original ideas in our minds, but I will argue that an idea is worthless until proper attempts at execution are employed. These are free, open source times - ideas are literally worthless.

Don’t write down your ideas. Do them. Make them happen. Breathe life into them.

If you’re telling your friends or posting on a message board about how you came up with the idea for custom Nike shoes or Facebook or chocolate raspberry ice cream or the artificial heart, let me be the first to tell you: no one gives a fuck. Sure, maybe you thought it, but you didn’t do it. 

Stop complaining. Start doing. It’s that easy. 

If you have a riff in your head, play it. Play it loud, play it hard, and play it often. Otherwise, shut the fuck up and go back to your day job. Sympathy is for cancer patients, not visionaries. 

Thank you.

Currently working on CSS, very minor PHP rewiring, catalogue taxonomy, e-commerce engine, #16, and the first micromix and the first digital 7″. And the first non-music releases (hint: you can wear some of them, you can read some of the others).

In related news, Conifer played Los Angeles last night and won over several new fans. It’s not very often that a.) I think a band performs well and b.) they think they performed well, but last night the perfect celestial alignments were in place. It’s been nice spending the past 48 hours with Zack, Shadley, Nate, Leif, and Camlin (and Lesbian broham/van driver/merch dude/shirtless guy Pete). LA only becomes a strange place when you forget the path you took to get here. Though many aspects of my memory are clouded over indefinitely, I know where I’ve been and (hopefully) know where I’m going.

Always go off.

[P.S.}

In the, “in case you are still reading” installment of this post, I’d like to add one additional thought, regardless of its randomness and non-relation to the above, purely because I don’t want to honor it with its own permalink.

Saying “I love you” indicates a feeling, not a timeframe. The problem with telling someone you love them is not in the phrase or the emotion, but in the infinite length it can supposedly suggest. “I love you” means I love you. It does not mean “I love you forever,” or “I love you regardless of these specific faults.” This armchair philosopher posits if we can take “until death do us part” out of the inferred meaning, there just may be a strong decline in murder/suicide statistics. XO.

iPhone photo courtesy of Josh Steinmetz, my newest client/collaborator/general mad man. In this picture, I’m optimizing his blog for superior performance while simultaneously messing around with Dashcode. This is my life. Computers are my girlfriend.

Also, I’d like to point out that Mr. Steinmetz, like myself, likes to dedicate absurd amounts of his own personal time running an independent record label, Adamant Records (you can also visit the, ugh, MySpace).

Our new housemate, “Model” Ryan Curry, likes the Yankees and Jets, introduced Psycho Matt into our lives, and broke my rib, so you probably know how I feel about this dude. Anyway, besides being tall and handsome, he likes to star in videos by bad rock bands. Check out his appearance as a voyeur/stalker in this video by Saving Abel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq3MK8dLyvc

Good job, Ryan. Set me up with a babe or something.

It’s called “Outliers: The Story of Success.” It comes out on Tuesday, November 18th. It is written by the consistently brilliant Malcolm Gladwell, who needs no introduction to my loyal blog readers. If you are familiar with “Blink” and “The Tipping Point,” I’m sure you already have this pre-ordered. My goal is to not sell you on this book or describe it, but just to make you aware of it. This is what I’ll be reading in a few weeks. That’s all. You should be reading books by smart, innovative people, and Gladwell is one of them.

It’s not often I email a stranger, but I have to admit, I emailed Gary Vaynerchuk tonight after his New York Jets defeated my New England (very fucking injured) Patriots.

Who the hell is Gary Vaynerchuk? Well, he’s two people really. First, he’s the guy behind Wine Library TV. If you’re into wine and having little, loud men (much like myself) scream at you, you probably already know him and his site.

Second, he’s a social media consultant, or at least that’s what I’d call it. Watch his vids on his site. He’s slightly out of his mind, but always informative and entertaining. He definitely embodies many “east coast” qualities I find lacking in lots of forward-thinking innovators around here. Yes, there are plenty of mad men in Los Angeles, but it’s just not quite the same.

‘Tis all.

Back in late June, I was introduced to Georgetown alumnus (and former Georgetown football place kicker!) Brad Scoffern. Brad had a very simple vision - a version of CraigsList specifically for college students, written in the language of web1.0. Tonight his brainchild is alive. It’s called KegsList. I’m his technical partner in the site and implemented everything you see over at http://www.kegslist.info.

Please keep in mind we are expecting minor growth and major kinks in the next few weeks, so expect errors, delays, growing pains, etc. And over the course of the next few months, we will be rolling out various features, including display ads, a blog, other college conferences, and some other nifty features.

Whatever. We go off. Woo.

In other web news, the new Trademark web site will launch November 24, so stay tuned for that. After that, I’ll once again be available to all of my crazy friends to build whatever they can imagine, though the queue is already somewhat lengthy what with all the ad networks, blogs, iPhone apps, and other ideas on the agenda. Did I mention I have a day job, too?

We were doing some research at work, and a few links later, we discovered this. Holy fuck, Dave Keyes’ dad needs to see this immediately.

Also, I already tweeted about it, so I won’t post it again, but search for the JCVD trailer. Jean-Claude Van Damme action/parody/reality/comedy? The world continues to get even more weird lately…