I started writing music when I was 15 in my bedroom, and I'd post them on MySpace, and from there it shifted to doing covers on YouTube and building my Twitter.
It all started with social media, building a fan base via Tumblr and YouTube, doing covers, and releasing a project with original music. Labels started to peel interest then. It was around the same time I was applying for college.
I started using Twitter a lot and realized I had a lot of fans. Then I saw that I can share my music on Twitter and share my YouTube videos on Twitter. That's how I knew social media was going to be a platform to show my music. That's how I started. I started with Twitter.
For me it's all just one big online world. Everyone has a favorite social network, and some people like YouTube more than Facebook or Twitter. But I make sure that when I post a new YouTube video, I post it on Facebook, and I tweet about it.
That's how it all started, when I met my wife. My music career, even though I started when I was 16, it never really started till I was like 30, when I started singing and writing my own songs, and that's when it really took off. But prior to that, I was just doing a bunch of covers.
So all I really seen my whole life is just Myspace and Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and YouTube.
I've been doing this since 2011, when I started on Instagram. Building my presence on there was important to my brand, but I wanted to take my audience to other platforms, so I then crossed over to Twitter second, then YouTube third. It wasn't until I made my fourth crossover to a different platform that I went to Vine.
'The Washington Post' doesn't have to report on what I post on Twitter. CNN doesn't have to report on what I post on Twitter. All kinds of media outlets - they don't have to report on anything that I post on Twitter. Just like they don't have to report on all kinds of other things that other people post on Twitter.
I started to work up in my old bedroom, playing, writing songs, and it somehow came to me that I could introduce soul music. Nobody seemed to be doing that.
One challenge, if you do a website, a Youtube channel, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Ping, other things like that, is you don't have time to be an artist. As a performer, you need to practice.
Users socialize to figure out what they're going to do on the weekend. They use MySpace to discover new music and post events. Musicians upload their music. People use it for entertainment purposes or to sell goods in the classified area. MySpace makes what they do in the offline world a) more efficient or b) more interesting.
I consider us to be one of the first Internet-based bands, especially because we basically started our entire band via the Internet. Before MySpace Music even existed, we had a band MySpace page. We were one of the first fifty bands on PureVolume(.com), and we really built everything from the Internet. That's how we started talking to record labels, that's how we booked our first tours. Without the Internet social networking, like Twitter, we definitely wouldn't be where we are today. It is a huge part of the band.
When I worked in theater, I was always writing things on Post-it Notes and sticking them on screens or desks. Twitter has given me a way of continuing to post those notes, only a lot of other people see them, too.
I picked up the guitar when I was about 14 or 15 maybe, and then I started just messing around with loops on GarageBand, and just building my own beats in my bedroom and then just releasing that on SoundCloud.
I could always play the drums, so I have some musical talent, but I don't live in Atlanta or LA, so I can't just randomly bump into major artists. So instead, I started building my fan base and my name by networking through the internet. Mostly through Twitter, Youtube, Instagram and Facebook.
I was on Facebook. I was on MySpace. And somebody said to me, You should check out this thing called Twitter. I knew five people that were on it, so I started following those people and seeing what they were doing, and then I applied my own sensibility to it. The more that I shared, the more people started following me.
I started making videos to post just for my friends to see, and people really liked them. One day, I realized they had a couple thousand views on YouTube - I hadn't even known other people were watching them.