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Posts Tagged ‘The Composer’s Guide to Doing Business’

Dennis Tobenski on teamwork and community

Dennis Tobenski is a composer, vocalist, business owner, and blogger living in New York. Don’t worry, I’m not about to start preaching the Brooklyn scene as gospel, though what they are accomplishing there is impressive and, for what it’s worth, pretty rad. He’s been publishing a weekly series of articles titled The Composer’s Guide to Doing Business. They’ve been pretty insightful, and at the very least provide some good food for thought that all composers should take into account.

A good friend of ours here at the site, Ben Phelps, has been promising me a guest post on the idea of competition in the new music community, and how thinking we’re competing really hurts us. Really, when one of us does well, everybody benefits. Ben, I want my article! The reason I’m mentioning this today is that this week’s post in The Composer’s Guide to Doing Business deals with this pretty well, and although it doesn’t cover all of the bases Ben and I have discussed, it does make a great case for promoting each other and building a scene, and is certainly worth a read. Dennis says that, ultimately,

…concert music is not a zero sum game. We’re not really competing with one another – we’re in this together. And a rising tide lifts all boats.

He also offers up nice list of ideas, including:

• Linking to one another on your websites
• Mentioning one another in your newsletters
• Recommending each other’s scores to performers you know
• Recommending each other’s recordings to your own fan bases
• Placing score samples of one another’s works in instrumentationally-related scores of your own
• Guest blogging on each other’s websites

And goes on to explain how these ideas can benefit both you as a composer (or performer, or really as anyone interested in this) and the composers around you.

Check out the article over at dennistobenski.com/news/2012/05/17/the-composers-guide-to-doing-business-cross-promotion/. And hey, don’t forget to mention to him that you read it here.