I am stealing this quote from a post Mack Collier made on his The Viral Garden blog. While he mentioned it regarding the originating company’s intention to reach out and empower their evangelists, if you replace evangelists, since few bands seem to refer to their fans as such, with ah, fans, you are talking about one and the same and it is a great point all bands interested in building a long-term career should take note of:

We enjoy talking to our customers one-to-one. It really is in our nature. We never worry about the fact that this is inefficient because we are only talking to 50 or 60 or a thousand or ten thousand instead of a million. Which you do when you try to slap everybody on the ass with an advertising message. Because we know that our next customers are going to come from their efforts, not from our efforts.

I have mentioned the Viral Garden [and the point I am about to make again] in the past, and it represents just one quick example of finding great ideas and information that can be applied to your music career in places you may not expect to find it and likely you aren’t looking.