Mailing List Comments

02020-07-17 | Uncategorized | 1 comment

Thanks for your comments. I appreciate them. I realize that many of you use email as your main communication tool and will miss the newsletter. We can meet here, on this blog, from time to time. No ads, no tracking, no data collection.

Your words make me feel better about having kept up the newsletter for so long, but there are the other folks who sent me email aggressively accusing me of spamming them, of having added them to my newsletter without their consent. I have never bought email addresses for my newsletter, so the only way an address could be added to my list was if someone signed up themselves. It is possible, of course, that someone else could have signed up another person without their knowledge… but I don’t have control over that.

I just deleted my Mailchimp account. I never liked how slick the interface was and how they seemed to push towards advertising and marketing. I guess I miss the old homemade websites and interfaces from the mid-nineties – before everything became commercial and efficient and so on… I am showing my age.

As I already wrote, come visit this blog. You can bookmark it or use RSS. I’ll make it worth your time by giving away some music, too. :-)

PS: I remember sending out emails to a few fans via a creaky CompuServe account. This would have been in 1994, when the World Wide Web was still a tiny tiny baby.

1 Comment

  1. JaneParhamKatz

    Ottmar, I have been troubled and have given much thought to your grappling with stardom and self-promotion. In fact, this has troubled me my entire life – commercial enterprise of art. First of all, I don’t think there is anything real called “a star.” Public adulation, demand, high prices for your time and talent, loss of privacy: all these things are extremely uncomfortable and amount to nothing compared to truly exercising your talent and craft. My mother told her students that a career as a singer was an “international punishment.”

    My mother was a great voice teacher and could develop almost anyone into a fine singer. However, she rejected students who aimed at stardom without true interest in the craft of singing. Nor could she for a moment promote herself. I constantly criticized her for this and got quite angry at her attitude. Now, with maturity, I understand and applaud her genuine quality.

    I finished off my interest in the business of music promotion after a brief period working for the President of Columbia Artists Management in New York. This guy did not know music and judged the performance of his artists by the number of curtain calls they got. When they made fun of my most beloved, magnificent opera singer, Franco Corelli, [may he rest in peace] for scooping up to his high notes, I cried for days and soon handed in my resignation – after numerous other unpleasant events.

    I weep at your heartful and untarnished life as a musician. I think that comes out in your recordings and performances. More power to you – and I don’t think you should give another thought to self-promotion. I believe you know who you are. You have a beautiful home in the best town in the U.S., your fans love you, your guitar loves you, you are conscious of Spirit. That’s all you need, and besides your blog is a wonderful and real offering in the name of promotion.

    Reply

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