For the last 4 years I’ve posted at least three blog posts a week every week. I’m really proud of that. It takes a lot of effort to be consistent through the major changes that have happened in the last few years.

Today I’m breaking my streak. Starting with this blog, I’m running a one-week no-blog experiment to see whether blogging is something that I will to keep doing.

Why? I’m trying to figure out if it’s worth the time it takes. It takes me about 4 hours a week to blog and post them, and while that doesn’t seem like a lot of time, that’s over 200 hours a year spent writing. Over the course of the blog, I’ve spent over 900 hours pecking out words on a Macbook.

As musicians, we’re always trying to figure out if we’re spending our time wisely. 900 hours writing is 900 hours I didn’t get to make music, or develop my network, or a million other things. We’re always making hard choices about what is really important, and what we think is really important. Just because you like doing something and you’re helping people doesn’t mean you should keep doing it.

What is my criteria for if it’s worth it to keep blogging? A few things:

1. Do my numbers go down on my website traffic? People spend a lot of time visiting my website for MainStage patches, to find out about my producer/session work, etc. It’ll be interesting to see if people stop coming if I stop blogging.

2. Are people actually reading blogs any more, or just looking for free stuff? Suppose that I took that 4 hours a week I spend blogging and created 5 free MainStage patches for everyone to download, no strings attached. Would they miss the tutorials? Would anybody miss my thoughts on developing a music career? Or what would happen if I started doing youtube posts/tutorials instead of blogs- would people prefer the medium of video more?

3. Does anything I post help, or is it possible to find the same questions answered elsewhere? When I first started talking about making a career as an independent professional musician and talking about MainStage, there weren’t that many bloggers who covered these topics. A lot has changed in 4 years, and it seems there’s a new blogger or company popping up every day that covers these areas. I’m trying to figure out if I have anything important to add that makes it worth reading for you, dear reader.

As usual, I try to be brutally honest with you and I don’t mean for this to seem gloomy. I feel very positive about how I’ve been able to interact with literally thousands of you in the last four years, and I’m not going to fall off the edge of the digital cliff to never be heard of again. I’m just trying to figure out what’s important four years later, and make sure that you get it.

As always, thanks for reading. I’ll see you in a week.

-Eric