John Mayer On Creative Quality Versus Quantity

At a recent event at the Berklee College of Music John Mayer talked about the lure of quantity in a social media world. John had amassed millions of Twitter followers and became more focused on the quick high of tweeting then he was on the hard process of creating quality music. John said, “The tweets are getting shorter, but the songs are still 4 minutes long. You’re coming up with 140-character zingers, and the song is still 4 minutes long…I realized about a year ago that I couldn’t have a complete thought anymore. And I was a tweetaholic. I had four million twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. And I stopped using twitter as an outlet and I started using twitter as the instrument to riff on, and it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn’t write a song.”

As John indicates the temptation to frivolously publish is a strong one. It's so easy with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other outlets that people publish without thinking. I use and enjoy all of the sites I mentioned but I do so in moderation. That's a conscious approach on my part. People who are publishing in support of a business endeavor should take care to use social media outlets to reach people as a means to an end but not as the end in itself. Follow the link below to read the entire post on Berkleeblogs summarizing the John Mayer event.

http://www.berklee-blogs.com/2011/07/john-mayer-2011-clinic-manage-the-temptation-to-publish-yourself/