. . . you have to develop a skillset that goes far beyond writing good songs and being able to play them compellingly in front of people. Case in point: today’s piece of music business. If you’re playing along at home, you might remember that one of my new year’s resolutions this year was to do something productive for the business of music each day – it doesn’t have to be submitting materials to be considered for a gig (although it could be); it could be writing a blog post, doing publicity for an upcoming show, or other related things that contribute to my broader ability to have a music career. Today I thought I’d do something relatively minor: join the organization “Concerts In Your Home,” which is an organization that connects house concert producers with musicians who want to play house concerts. So I went to the site to discover that you can’t simply decide to join; you have to send in materials for them to consider whether you are an appropriate member (a perfectly reasonably approach). And I noted that one of the things you need to send is a link to a video of you performing. Now it’s true that I have plenty of videos posted on youtube, but some of them aren’t great, and others of them feature much more of a band than I’d likely have with me at a house concert. So I figured – since getting a better video presence is also a good goal for music promotion – that I’d just quickly make a video from my most recent live performance, which I managed to capture on Flip Video. Luckily I’d already downloaded the video onto my computer, because that process takes forever. I’m not a technophobe, and I find most Apple products intuitive, but I’ve never quite gotten the hang of iMovie. In fact, the newer form of iMovie I find even more puzzling than the previous version, so I managed to keep an older version on my new computer that also has the newer version. In the old version, at least, I’ve learned how to snip off bits of the video until I’m left with only the parts I want. So I did that. But I thought the useful addition this time would be to add information on the screen (a title). I’ve spent the last two and a half hours trying to figure out how to usefully add a title to this video. After it wasn’t intuitive, I read help manuals and searched the web for info from other users (made harder by the fact that I’m using an old version and most of Apple’s help info is for the current versions; I even briefly decided to learn instead how to do it in the new version, but for some reason couldn’t figure out how to import my clip into the new iMovie, so that was another wasted half hour). I’ll spare you the details of what I couldn’t figure out, although the short version is that I wanted the title to appear on the screen while the video was in process. While I could get it to do that in a test clip, when I tried to add that actual title to the clip it would do that, but then add that clip on to the beginning of the video so that it would stop when the title stopped, and then song would start AGAIN from the beginning. It’s not about the details (although if anyone wants to offer expert advice, feel free to contact me!) but rather about the fact that I just spent two and a half hours of my life unsuccessfully trying to make a video with titles vaguely the way I wanted them. I finally gave up and put the title over a black silent screen before the song itself plays; that will have to do for now. But it reminded me of why I need to make resolutions about doing one piece of music business a day: this stuff is hard, it takes time, and it’s not the bits I enjoy about being a singer-songwriter. But if I want to be able to continue to be a singer-songwriter (at least one who has anyone to sing my songs to), these are the things I have to get myself to do.