We share the inspiration behind this solo artist's powerful acoustic Georgia pop.
We sat behind Brendan at the day one keynote speech by Gina Chavez. His story was deep and we share that here.
He was in a band for 3 years at the University of Georgia, but that band was challenging for many reasons. At graduation they separated, but the calling to pursue his dreams in music remained. It was in his heart that we each can be great, so in the midst of interviewing for healthcare related jobs, he dropped that and began his solo career (May 2019).
Brendan is a singer-songwriter performing artist. He is mostly playing house shows in the Athens, Georgia area.
In today's popular music, artists make the music about themselves. Brendan doesn't want it to be about him, but rather the people listening to the music. He wants to build a community rather than a fanbase and house shows are a great way to do that since it's a small environment to truly connect with people.
Brendan distributes through CD Baby, but has used Tune Core in the past. He says Tune Core is nice because they don't take a chunk of royalties, but it's not as scalable as CD Baby. CD Baby has so many marketing tools to make it easy to get music out to listeners not just the streaming platforms. The culture and customer support at CD Baby are also unbeatable.
He says getting people to listen to his music is the hardest challenge. Three minutes is difficult to find in 2019, so 40 minutes for an album is almost impossible. There are 40,000 songs uploaded to Spotify per day and many of them are very good. Gina Chavez, as mentioned above, is so great she had a keynote at this conference, but she only has ~8,000 monthly streams on Spotify. Where is that disconnect? Potentially because people are looking for background music, not big bangers. Then let's say you do get listeners, how do you transfer them from a passive listener to an active supporter?
Email us at seth [at] collaboarator.com and it'll happen! This post was created August 30, 2019 by Seth Kitchen of Collaboarator LLC.