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October, 2004

"Playing Benefits"

by Webmaster

I'm swamped this month. I have a challenging band that requires me to actually practice. I have been saying, as a joke, I'd do anything to be a better musician, anything except practice. Well, I need to practice bass playing, singing and writing musical notation today.

And, I'm out of ideas for this month's column. I wish folks would contribute columns, but it's a lot of work to write a column that really helps folks in the music community.

So, I'll keep this short and, hopefully, sweet.

An e-mail came around last week about a product you can buy that will cause the manufacturer to donate money toward breast cancer research. Now that's a worthy cause, so a lot of people forwarded it and they got a lot of free publicity out of it.

I added information to it. Keyser makes a pink capo. For every capo sold, money is donated toward finding a cure for breast cancer. I don't mind giving them some free publicity here.

Watch for them when you go to see your favorite performers. Bill Barwick used one in his stage shows at the Walnut Valley Bluegrass Festival in Winfield, Kansas, in September 2004. I'm sure other musicians use them, too, but he is one performer I've observed using one.

In August, I got my waist-length hair cut to the shortest it's been in 40 years: above my ears. I got a free haircut and Great Clips sent the hair to be made in to wigs for people with cancer. Another worthy cause. The program is called "Locks of Love." I learned about it from a friend who donated her hair in April.

When I told some friends about it, they were amazed that Great Clips doesn't publicize this a lot. I'm more impressed by their failure to publicize it at all. They aren't doing a good deed and then exploiting it. They're just doing a good deed.

So, good deeds can generate publicity—word of mouth publicity. And word-of-mouth publicity can be the best publicity that any company can ever have.

So, play benefits. Help someone else. Don't exploit it. Think of it as a donation to "the Karma bank." And, maybe some of that generated good Karma will come back to you, in ways you never imagined.

Thanks for visiting Acoustic By Lines.

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