On Monday, I convened a dinner meeting with some cool local folks in the Bay Area had our first meeting as a collective to come up with a strategy and plan for promoting and supporting local electronic music communities in the East Bay Area (Oakland, Berkeley, Downtown, etc.).
As we’re already pretty organized;) we grafted a S.W.O.T. analysis* on to our meeting and came up with the beginnings of a community/business strategy to being implementing before our next meeting.
We came up with the following:
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VISION (needs fine-tuning? – I’m particularly fond of the 4th tenet in speaking with local business/venues)
Visceral is a Bay Area electronic music collective. Focusing on the East Bay Area (Oakland, Berkeley, Albany, etc.) we support the local electronic music scene by:
- producing electronic music events
- marketing and promoting local electronic music artists
- connecting these audiences and artists to each other
- providing music, customers and revenue to local businesses
In one year we’d like:
- a successful monthly
- artists’ compensated for their time/money/energy spent
Internal – between us/our network for friends/colleagues…
- Strengths: what skills/strengths do we currently have?
- music, artists, talent
- photographers/graphic designers
- experience
- good taste in music;)
- Weaknesses: what skills/strengths do we currently need?
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- good artist bios
- strong marketing tactics
- a stronger brand identity
External – what the local scene looks like…
- Opportunities: what opportunities for collaboration already exist? What’s already been done or is happening?
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- 9th Floor Radio show with Timber!
- artists’ merchandise
- Radio Sagittarius podcast
- electronic music meetup for East Bay!!!! —> So far, 130 people are interested in an Oakland Electronic music collective
- Threats: what might keep us from accomplishing our goals?
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- East Bay venues
- someone is *already* doing this and we’re reinventing the wheel
- enough money to at least support the organizers – time, transportation, food, brain power. You can donate to our cause by clicking the yellow Paypal button to the right.
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Ideally, we can get to a point where we can support local independent electronic musicians. We’re focusing on minimal/techno, IDM, dubstep and glitch. Know anyone in the Bay Area that might be interested?
Download goodies
We also developed some goodies you’re free to download, share and remix as you like:
- My DJ mix (other members are currently working on theirs)
- S.W.O.T. Analysis for Community Group template (it’s a Word document that you can edit for your own use)
*S.W.O.T. analysis comes from my non-profit community building work, which asks participants for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats at the beginning of any collaborative business/community venture.
