VOORHEESVILLE — When the Brian Kaplan Band got its start 20 years ago, frontman Brian Kaplan used to spend hours calling venues and putting together demo tapes in the hopes that the band would reach an audience. 

All that seems archaic now, Kaplan told The Enterprise this week, with social media putting a much larger audience right in front of him, with no club owners or record labels acting as gatekeepers. 

“The first album I made in ’95, which we spent weeks and a lot of money on, I could sit down in GarageBand and create something in two hours that is going to sound better,” he said. And, he said, going to the trouble of releasing music on a CD “doesn’t seem to make any sense anymore.” 

That’s where Kaplan, a band director and music teacher at the Voorheesville Central School District for 16 years, calls on his students for help. 

“I’ll say to my students, ‘OK, I need to promote this video, what should I do?,’” he said. “And my students know all the answers, so I tend to take their advice.”

But the options — BandCamp, SoundCloud, Instagram (Facebook is for old people, he learned) — are so diverse and each one so vast that, even though making and sharing music is easier than ever, capturing people’s attention is that much harder. 

“The paradox of being able to promote stuff sitting at my coffee table is that it’s overwhelming, because where do I promote it?,” Kaplan said. 

The Brian Kaplan Band recently published a music video for its new single, “Harder to Stay,” in part because it’s something that Kaplan had always wanted to do as an artist, but also because social-media users are gravitating away from text-based platforms to more visual ones. 

Research suggests that the human brain can process visual information much, much more efficiently than text, so marketing experts stress the importance of well-executed imagery.

Kaplan also makes promo videos that he tries to keep short, having read a statistic that said people move on from videos after about 30 seconds. 

“It becomes a decision about which 30 seconds of my song am I going to choose to make people interested in listening to the entire song …,” he said. “You used to want to keep the song down to three-and-a-half minutes so that people would listen to the entire thing. Now we’re down to 30 seconds.”

But, once the pieces are in place, Kaplan said that the call-and-response of social media can make a frustrating part of the job more fun. 

“I’ve gotten 200 new Facebook followers in the last two months, whereas it took a long time to get the first 800,” he said, adding that he’s also connected with other musicians who will boost one another on the platform. 

“One of the things I’m seeing that’s really kind of cool is that [my students] are subscribing to my YouTube channel and they’ll sort of reach out to me on Instagram …,” Kaplan said. It means that he has to be more mindful about what he’s putting out on those platforms, but, “at the same time, they’re excited about it, and I love that.”

For all their modern savvy, kids, he’s noticed, seem to have become much more interested in the music of their parents’ generation, instead of rebelling against it in favor of what’s new as they had in previous generations.

“I’ve seen over the years that a lot of students come in and they love Nirvana, they love Led Zeppelin, they love the Beatles, they love Pink Floyd,” Kaplan said. 

New single and performance

At the same time that Kaplan is changing his approach to marketing, he’s taking new steps musically, too. 

Until his most recent single, Kaplan said, most of the music he wrote for the band was in the style of the Dave Matthews Band, which leans heavily on guitar sounds. 

But he had come of age listening to the synth-based music of the ’80s, and decided that he “really wanted to try something musically that was reminiscent of the music I grew up with.”

He also found that he had more freedom writing songs on the piano than on the guitar, since the piano allowed him to use “bigger chords and more interesting progressions.”

And, although he’s becoming more interested in creating online content than going out and performing every weekend the way he used to, Kaplan will be playing a solo acoustic show on July 31 at the Albany Elks Lodge 49 at 25 South Allen St. in Albany, where he said he’s going to “try out some new originals.” 

The hour-long performance, which starts at 7 p.m., will be outdoors, family-friendly, and free.