Yesterday was transition day…the backpacks and pocket protectors of Interactive faded away and has been replaced with skinny jeans and cigarettes.  Hallelujah!  Music is here at last.  Interactive was a great time.  Made some new friends, saw a chilling film about a war photographer called "The Blood Trail" and went to some fun parties.  

But today through Saturday is all about the music.  It actually started last night with The Upsidedown at Elysium. I love those guys.  Piper and I are staying at the Super 8, aka, SX Shangri-la.  She is shooting for MoJo this year.  Its going to be a fun trip.  Will update tomorrow with video and photos of fave new bands.

The brilliant minds of Platinum Blue Music have taken their Xray machine and turned it into a new service for musicians and music industry professionals.

Music Xray Introduction

From the website: “Music Xray will use music information retrieval science to enable Music Industry Professionals to create dynamic, high-speed music filters where quality metrics, success potential and sounds-alike search criteria are defined by the individual needs of each Music Industry Professional. You could say that Music Xray is the first fully customizable music filter for Music Industry Professionals.”

Music Xray provides artists with a customizable module that contains a song, lyrics, video, market share info, blog mentions and artist bio. These modules are then matched up with music industry professionals based on requests such as types of songs, tags, hit ratios, etc.  The basic modules are FREE for musicians with options for an up sell on premium services.

Music Xray did a great job on the design of the modules.  They are sleek and intuitive to use. Simply click on the information you want and it expands the window.  Since the modules contain all the information an artists needs for press, labels, etc.  it will also be a useful tool for artists to add to their press kits and blogs or websites. 

Congratulations to Mike McCready and the folks at Platinum Blue…Music Xray is a compelling product and I hope it does well. Please let me know what you think of Music Xray.

Tags: music, technology, platinum blue music, mike mccready, xray, musicians, artists

I am very excited to share with you the latest news from the Roxy Theatre's social media success story! Nic Adler, owner of the Roxy Theatre, made the cover of Nightclub and Bar, the leading trade rag for venue and bar owners. "How The Roxy Regained Relevance by Listening and Communicating" features an in-depth look at Nic's reinvention of the Roxy's image by ditching his website for a blog and opening his doors to the community. And thanks for the name check Nic! Nic is a true pioneer in the music and social media space. I wish him and the Roxy staff the best of luck in the coming year and look forward to seeing what's next!

This story from Boing Boing:

“Ars Technica’s Julian Sanchez takes a long, investigative look at the entertainment industry’s claim that piracy costs the American economy 750,000 jobs and $250 billion and discovers the truth: they made it up and repeated it until they forgot they had made it up.”  Read More…

Is anyone surprised by this revelation? 

Yesterday around 4:30 I was working at home with Marjorie and my sister Alex. We heard a popping and a bang coming from upstairs. We weren't sure what it was and almost chose to ignore it. I walked to the back door and saw water coming into my place and smoke off the porch above me. Outside I saw huge orange flames shooting from the laundry room. I ran back into the apartment, screaming, "FIRE!!!, get out!!" I called 911 and ran upstairs to my neighbor's place. I heard her leave a few minutes before the fire started so I knew she was safe, but there were animals in the house. I bolted up the stairs and didn't see any fire, thought for a minute I was overreacting and had called the fire dept for no reason. Then I saw the smoke and flames in the kitchen. The dogs were gone, so I grabbed her turtle from his tank and flew down the stairs to help Marjorie and Alex. I had no idea what to take, where anything valuable was or what to do until the fire dept arrived. My brain shut down, I could hardly move. Read more

Earlier today an electrical fire started in the apartment above mine. 7 fire trucks and 30 firemen put the fire out and an enormous hole in the roof. My apartment is intact, but the extent of the water damage has yet to be determined.

I’m not sure yet, what I’m going to be dealing with, so if we had plans this week - they may be postponed.

Thank you for all the tweets, calls and emails with offers to help. My furniture and clothes are in good shape, however - I may need to find a place to work for a few weeks while the apartment is being worked on.

UPDATE:

This morning the LAist published a story about yesterday’s events as they played out on twitter.

*the fire was not started by a dryer as I assumed, but by faulty wiring in a porch light that was not even on.

Marjorie took these photos just after the fire was put out.

I could hardly wait to see Tim O’Reilly, the man who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, give his keynote on Wednesday. I expected to hear about cutting edge innovations in business models, groundbreaking developments in software, and the effect that Web 2.0 is having on the world offline; there was just so much to talk about! I’m sad to say it was a disappointing speech. He talked about a narrow version of Enterprise 2.0, data mash-ups. He mentioned Wesabe a company of which he happens to be a Board Member.

I walked out half way through, bored and wanting more. So I headed down to the Expo floor with my partner in crime, David Preciado, where I was met with more disappointment. It was a typical expo set-up. Rows of booths with huge displays staffed with personnel in branded t-shirts reciting memorized pitches. And, of course, TONS of brochures, hand-out, pens, foam balls, stuffed animals and other useless crap with company logos splattered all over them. Much of this stuff would end up in the collection cans outside the Schwaggin’ Wagon.

It was very disheartening, while O’Reilly was calling for Silicon Valley to take on bigger challenges (a part of the keynote I admittedly missed); the companies represented at his conference were anything but innovative. Now, I’m not a tech expert by any means, my specialty is marketing and from that perspective – there was no innovation or revolution or new standards setting happening, except in the white van parked in the loading zone outside the Mascone Center.

Two weeks ago I was invited to participate in a PR stunt called the “Schwaggin’ Wagon” at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. I was more than happy to accept, the conference has been on my radar for three years now and the opportunity to attend was more exciting than free tickets to Coachella.

The Schwaggin’ Wagon was an idea conceived by Social Media Consultants, like myself, with the intention of collecting all the schwag from the conference that no one wants and donating it to charity. Sponsors like Heavy Bag Media and Mashable jumped on immediately and the van was decked out and ready to roll 6 days later.

The Schwaggin’ Wagon departed Los Angeles on Tuesday and before we even hit San Francisco, Jon Gordon from NPR’s Future Tense was interviewing Idea Meister and wagon driver Mike Liskin.

We stopped off in Turlock for some of Anna’s award-winning Pomegranate Martinis and some wireless Internet access. The laptops were fired up, Twitter was tweeting and the blog posts were rolling. Our Facebook friends had doubled and the Twitter and Britekite accounts were blowing up since pulling out of Los Angeles just four hours earlier.

We finally arrived in San Francisco, too late for any parties, but just in time for a good night’s rest. Thanks to the amazing work of Get It Done Queen, Marjorie Kase, the next day was packed with media interviews and the buzz about the wagon was all over the expo floor, all before we had even set out the first collection can! It became apparent quickly that the Schwaggin Wagon was going to be well received at the Expo.

Reputation Management is a crucial element in online branding. A Google search of your name or product can tell you quite a bit about what is being said about you, who is saying it and why. Unless you are a real asshole, you shouldn’t be afraid of what you might find. Most music bloggers embody the sense of community that makes the blogosphere such a unique environment. They tend to lean toward being kind rather than being cruel. If you do run across any bad reviews, take the opportunity to reach out to the writer and clear things up. And who knows, some of those lemons out there may offer a chance to make some lemonade.

I recently did a Google search on Kyrareed and was surprised to see how well the recent post I wrote for Tunecore was received. Not only did I find some really nice things said about my blog, but I also found some new blogs to add to my list of recommends. Thank you to all the bloggers who mentioned kyrareed.com.

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