Author: Deano

If you're targeting a specific demographic try the following:

Go to a small town, and figure out where they tend to be at various times of day.

Then, return to your target market, and post

• one-sheet ads,
• postcards, or
• business cards

in

• laundromats (singles),
• libraries (old people),
• parks (stay at home moms),
• and/or other locations (gotta do SOME of the work yourself!)

as appropriate.

Also, relentlessly pitch yourself and your idea to everyone you meet. This will help you understand your market better, for free, as well as help you practice facing down much tougher stares from investors, recruits, customers, etc.

What are some low cost offline marketing strategies for a startup on a shoestring budget to acquire customers?

Craftwork is completed, Artwork is abandoned.

Fine art versus craft: is there a difference?

I like ordering a "Stoli Blu-driver", since it's both immediately apparent to the bartender what it is I want, but for some odd reason, seems to give anyone else pause, or outright confuse them. Good conversation starter in a new bar.

More to the point though – make sure you understand the difference between ordering a fancy drink, and "ordering fancy", which may have a tendency to aggravate a busy, overworked, has-to-deal-with-enough-random-crap-already bartender. The only real way to be seen as classy in the eyes of the bartender is to pay with a large bill and leave the change.

What are some fancy ways to order a drink at a bar?

Rock bands are expensive to operate as businesses, and generally full of dickish personalities with enormous creative control and ego issues.

The 90s gave rise to flagrantly auto-tuned pop idol groups, so-called "reality television", and a host of other forms of extremely low-cost, high-margin entertainment. Which, by the way, was always "studio led", reducing control issues over even fairly big stars.

It was also a period that included the impressive rise in power and sophistication of the (largely dial-up) Internet, which in turn provided many additional entertainment outlets, and the ability to "feel part of the group" in a much less geographically-specific way… You could be a proud proto-goth, without having to blend in with the skinheads or metal stoners at your high school. Did I mention video games? VIDEO GAMES. Frag. Men. Tation.

In short? The music business gave up on arena rock. It was too expensive, too much a pain in the ass, and required large affluent audiences to concentrate their entertainment dollars all in one place, precisely at a time when they were "spreading the love" across a greater number of different forms of play/indulgence. It also didn't help that due to the transition to CDs, burgeoning internet use, the mp3, and services like Napster (the original, not the current whatever-the-heck-it-is), the recording industry was undergoing multiple, drawn-out changes to their long-standing business model – one of which, at least, was entirely involuntary (so-called music piracy).

At the end of the day, all these guys cared about was money. And there wasn't a lot of money in promoting single rock bands in the 90s (though, for a time, music festivals like Lollapalooza experienced a huge resurgence – again, by providing an alternative to the existing model – greater attendance in exchange for lower dollar-per-band in the cash box).

Why did there appear to be a corporate conspiracy to destroy rock n' roll in the 1990's?

What advantage do squares have over rectangles?

As AJ Slater states, polyfidelity is a subset of polyamory, rather than an alternative to it.

This highlights at least one the main advantages: by being a specific subset of a larger/sweeping/more generalized practice, it may be easier to reach agreements over definitions and boundaries within a relationship.

Polyamory in the generalized sense, by contrast, may have a different meaning for every member or even bystander to a relationship, which in turn may signify the need for increased frequency of checkins/communication to ensure that everyone's "on the same page", at least until some rebalancing and renegotiation has occurred to the point in which roles and responsibilities are universally understood, rather than assumed.

What are the advantages of polyfidelity over polyamory?