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Letter to a Young Artist: Popularity and Commerce Must Not Matter

I’m always disappointed when I talk to Artists and the first thing they start telling me is their resume, how many blog hits they have, how many tickets they’ve sold and how many social media followers they have.  I’m dismayed not by their success, but by the business metrics they’re using to calculate what will always be only a fleeting, and diminishing, rate of return.  Art must not be commerce. Creation must not be commercial.  The Arts must never belong to the business school. The only thing of value you have as an Artist — and can control forever — is your belief in what you know is true and how that knowledge affects the quality of the work you produce falling into the long game beyond the grave.

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Evaluating Lost Blog Readers: Ten Million vs. One Million

We reached the One Million — 1,000,000 — reader/hits/visitors milestone for the first time (again!) here on BolesBlogs.com since we became the consolidated Boles Blogs a year and five days ago.

Reaching a million of anything is an accomplishment and a joy, but it also forces you to reflect on what was and where you once stood as you wonder if you’d stayed the course and kept a finite focus, readership would likely be over Ten Million — 10,000,000 — reader/hits/visitors today instead of just a million.

In November 2007, when we were only the Urban Semiotic blog — we were close to smashing the one million mark — and we did just that a few weeks later!  It’s hard to imagine how many millions of readers we’d have tallied by now if we’d stayed a single blog.

Continue reading → Evaluating Lost Blog Readers: Ten Million vs. One Million