John Mayer On The Pitfalls of Social Networking

The Berklee College of Music welcomed John Mayer (he attended Berklee for a short time), who gave the students a lot to ponder.  The Berkleeblog goes into great detail about his visit with the students. 

John Mayer was the king of Twitter for a time.  He had millions of followers, my husband being one of them.  It was most interesting when he was talking about working in the studio and on his music.  Other times he got into trouble, but not as much as he did for his Playboy interview.

He stopped using Twitter and explained why.

The tweets are getting shorter, but the songs are still 4 minutes long. You’re coming up with 140-character zingers, and the song is still 4 minutes long…I realized about a year ago that I couldn’t have a complete thought anymore. And I was a tweetaholic. I had four million twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. And I stopped using twitter as an outlet and I started using twitter as the instrument to riff on, and it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn’t write a song.

Interesting analysis which makes sense.  He cut out all distractions while making his recent record. When the recording day was over, he went home and there he could do whatever he wanted, but not during the work day.

Solid advice not only for musicians:

• Good music (substitute your area of work) is its own promotion.
• Manage the temptation of publishing yourself.
• Anybody who tells you to have a fall back plan are people who had a fallback plan, didn’t follow their dreams, and don’t want you to either.
• Anybody who’s made it will tell you, you can make it. Anyone who hasn’t made it will tell you, you can’t.

Read the whole article.  It's an interesting take from someone who's been there and done it all.