Adam Monroe: Another Web 2.0 Talent Promotion Success Story

One day last December, I was on YouTube, checking out videos of songs by Tool and A Perfect Circle, two of the fantastic bands fronted by singer Maynard James Keenan. At one point, as I was watching a performance of “3 Libras”, perhaps my favorite of the many great songs by these bands, YouTube’s related recommendations feature suggested several videos of various artists performing cover versions of the song.

In the past, while watching videos of original bands performing songs I enjoyed, YouTube’s related videos feature had introduced me, through cover versions, to the wonderful Meghan Julius and Kiersten Holine. This time, after listening to a couple of other cover versions of “3 Libras”, I was introduced to an amazing piano and vocal version of the song by the incredible Adam Monroe.

I then visited Adam’s main YouTube page and listened to many of his other great cover versions of songs by Tool and A Perfect Circle – along with others. I was so impressed, in fact, that I wondered what the members of the bands themselves would think if they were able to hear his versions of their songs.

So imagine my pleasant surprise when, after almost 8 months, I returned to Adam’s YouTube page yesterday to see if he had posted any more videos or news about his pursuit of a music career and discovered that he was now on tour as the keyboardist and backup vocalist with Ashes Divide, the new band of Billy Howerdel, the guitarist for A Perfect Circle.

I was thrilled.

The importance and methods of finding one’s authentic gifts and the ways that modern Web 2.0 technology and new models of talent development and promotion empower people to share those talents with the world in ways never before possible have been recurring themes in my thinking and writing over the last few years.

I’ve talked about them in pieces that include:

• How American Idol Changed My Life
• The Joy and Power of Discovering True Selves
• Josiah Leming: Brilliant, Haunting Music & Web 2.0 Drive American Idol Castoff’s Prototypical Success Story

In Adam Monroe, we have yet another inspiring example of a relatively unknown, but extremely gifted individual, attaining well-deserved success via the less hierarchical, more meritocratic systems enabled by recent technology and a resurging populist mindset regarding talent discovery. The fact that Adam’s success has come by way of his connecting with one of the very artists whose music he harnessed to display his talents only makes the story even more powerful.

So congratulations to Adam. I urge you to check out his cover song videos, as well as his own original music (he has a new EP out of his own work called Illusions Fade). And I hope his story can serve as just one more example of how, when you find your talent and wisely use the growing arsenal of available means to promote it, opportunities and niches can present themselves that, as recently as a few years ago, would never have been possible.

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Tags: a-perfect-circle, adam-monroe, american-idol, ashes-divide, billy-howerdel, hierarchy, josiah-leming, kiersten-holine, marketing-&-promotion, maynard-james-keenan, meghan-julius, meritocracy, music, success, talent-development, tool, web-2.0, youtube

Included in: Carnival of Rock and Roll - August 1, 2008, Blog Carnival: 10 Posts about Realizing Your Potential — August 2008

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Marketing & Promotion, Music, Success, Talent Development, Web 2.0.