It might be a matter of order. After writing Startups Open Sourced, if I had just put it on the Kindle store and let it sit there, nothing would have happened. But I was pretty active in blogging, which has resulted in it becoming a bestseller. I tried to get people to engage before, and it didn't work (example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2163427).
I'm not a musician so I don't understand that creative process, but it sounds like Mayer was trying to engage his fans while writing an album. The only musicians I've known to effectively pull off something like that is 50 Cent, where he wrote in 50th Law that he would intentionally leak parts of his album just to understand how his fans would react. He would then reconstruct the album based on that feedback (one leak resulted in fans complaining it was too "soft" so he released newer tracks that were more aggressive, and the response was more positive). Nine Inch Nails is probably the band that comes to mind when I think of musicians who engage with their community, but Trent Reznor had even admitted to being fed up with Twitter at one point and shut his account down. He eventually came back to it. But I don't recall Trent Reznor doing much while he was in the process of recording. It seems like one of those "goodbye world, I'm off to create, see you on the other side" types of things.
I guess what I'm getting at: it seems like I never really see the creative process while it's happening. I only see it from artists afterwards. For a while, Ronald Jenkees was doing this on YouTube, although I don't know if he has done that for years now. There might be a reason why artists work that way (I recently read an Eminem biography, and he has the same pattern for producing music: he locks himself in a studio for long hours, doesn't engage with anyone until after the work is finished). Produce first, engage later.
> It might be a matter of order.
That's exactly what John Mayer was saying. He was telling people not to prematurely publish and be distracted from the creation process.
I'm not a musician so I don't understand that creative process, but it sounds like Mayer was trying to engage his fans while writing an album. The only musicians I've known to effectively pull off something like that is 50 Cent, where he wrote in 50th Law that he would intentionally leak parts of his album just to understand how his fans would react. He would then reconstruct the album based on that feedback (one leak resulted in fans complaining it was too "soft" so he released newer tracks that were more aggressive, and the response was more positive). Nine Inch Nails is probably the band that comes to mind when I think of musicians who engage with their community, but Trent Reznor had even admitted to being fed up with Twitter at one point and shut his account down. He eventually came back to it. But I don't recall Trent Reznor doing much while he was in the process of recording. It seems like one of those "goodbye world, I'm off to create, see you on the other side" types of things.
I guess what I'm getting at: it seems like I never really see the creative process while it's happening. I only see it from artists afterwards. For a while, Ronald Jenkees was doing this on YouTube, although I don't know if he has done that for years now. There might be a reason why artists work that way (I recently read an Eminem biography, and he has the same pattern for producing music: he locks himself in a studio for long hours, doesn't engage with anyone until after the work is finished). Produce first, engage later.