Ani Tix Winner: Jennifer Heit!

Congrats! Names were pulled from a hat, and you won two tickets to the Ani Difranco show July 9th. :)

Send me an email for confirmation: jessicalforrester@gmail.com.

To the others- Keep checking back for freebies and general blabber.

Jennifer- See you at Rams Head Live!

I'd make a graphic but most unfortunately I am without laptop this week, and so I am without Photoshop. I suppose I could mess with GIMP, but I'm not feeling so inclined.

Here's hoping HP gets it back to me soon.. Four days without it feels like torture. I think these are the signs of addiction, no?

Win Two Free Tickets to See Ani DiFranco at Rams Head Live

This feisty, smart, ambitious (but conscious!), guitar-string-bustin-punk-rocker-with-an-acoustic is heading to Baltimore, MD’s Rams Head Live on Thursday, July 9th. I’ll be there. Will you? I have two tickets to give away to one lucky reader.

For a shot at the tickets, leave a comment here!

Contest ends at 8 pm on June 30. I will put the names in a hat and have my grandmother pick a winner. I realize that you have no way of knowing whether I’ll actually do this. Guess you’ll just have to take that chance. :)

Didn’t win? Don’t stress! There will be more give aways, and tickets to Ani aren’t sold out yet!

Ani DiFranco and The Conscious Job Hunt

A 1997 letter to Ms. Magazine, famous now to her fans, quotes Ani Difranco as writing, “I'm just a folksinger, not an entrepreneur.” Ani Difranco’s team began the Buffalo, New York-based independent label Righteous Babe Records: “a small business that puts music before rock stardom and ideology before profit.”

Like many recent grads on the job hunt, I’m discovering just how important it is to me that I work for a company I can feel proud of. The decision of where to apply feels heavier than, “Who do I want to work for,” as I also try to answer, “What will I represent?”

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The Social Media Informant: Information Freedom or The Ultimate Rumor Mill?

Where were you when Michael Jackson died? I was on Twitter, watching the tweets turn almost completely from Ahmadinejad to the King of Pop faster than I could get up and tell my grandmother to say her prayers for Michael Jackson’s family along with Farrah Fawcett's and Ed McMahon's. After the May 19 hysteria over Patrick Swayze, I tweeted with some cynicism: “did michael jackson really die, or is twitter the rumor mill from hell?” Of course, as we now know, this time it was true.

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Promoting Music and Shows with Web 2.0: Bassnectar

A web presence is important for any business; this is particularly true for musicians. How do I decide whether or not to attend a show at The Lantern in Blacksburg, Virginia by a band or DJ I don’t recognize? I look them up online. A poor web presence or unappealing recorded tracks can easily dissuade me.

When I met Lorin Ashton of project Bassnectar in August of 2007, he was already a frequent MySpace blogger and a YouTube hit with a large following on the west coast, including what SF Weekly described as “The largest cult following of any DJ in San Francisco.”

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Research Confirms: If I'm Cryin', I'm Buyin'

Your company has an amazing product. You want to show me everything it can do. It can get the stains out of my clothes and cut a car in half while calling my ex-boyfriend’s mother to gently inform her that I broke her flower vase - all at the same time. But research shows that learning these benefits has little impact on me as a consumer if I’m not driven emotionally.

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