Many of you may have heard of OurStage by now. They have teamed up with CMJ, Bonaroo, Paste Magazine and a multitude of music related companies to promote artists that fans have voted worthy of recognition and a $5,000 cash prize.

Yes, that’s right…$5,000 is given away, once a month, to the artist that gets the most votes. The clever folks at OurStage have installed a few obstacles to prevent it becoming a popularity contest, including a .50 cent charge per vote, billed to your cell phone. A bit of a bummer, but you can expect that the talent that rises to the top is the cream. My good friends, Saturna, were close runners up in month and became featured artists at the Ourstage Bumbershoot stage.

Through The Roxy I have had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with their delightful and enthusiastic staff. EJ (Entertainment Jockey) Alyssa Jane is an engaging host and one sharp tool in their marketing shed. If she and the other staff I have encountered are anything like the rest of the team at OurStage, artists can rest assured they are in good hands.

Bands on a Budget is a one-stop shop for all your merchandising needs. Founded by musicians, they understand the challenges in gathering all your merch needs in one place.

They offer the following services:

* T-Shirts & Apparel
* CD Replication & Packaging
* Sticker Printing
* Posters, Postcards, & Other Print
* Graphics & Website Design
* The States Of Independents Tours
* Special Promotions
* Trailer Dog: Trailer Security Systems

For CD & DVD Replication Little Radio still has the BEST prices anywhere. And we love to support Little Radio.

Hello guys and gals. I’ve been on hiatus from my blog in August, feverishly working on my new book about blogs and blogging. Once it’s ready I’ll give you more details.

In the meantime…here is a video presentation of Gerd Leonhard on the Future of Music. Gerd is the head of Sonific, a streaming music application. He calls himself a Music Futurist and has written several books on the subject. Rick Rubin recently quoted some of his ideas on subscriptions services in an article for the New York Times. I have not read any of his books but based on this informational video, he knows his stuff.

Pay close attention to his new paradigm of purchasing. “It is no longer a pay first paradigm.” How true.

LAMbCase enables artists to sell their entire CD in a digital file using a technology similar to Win Zip. They were featured in the CMJ newsletter today. Here is what the company has to say about their product:

“LAMbCase is the name of our patented container format which allows easy distribution and payments of digital products. Using our system, content owners can sell retail equivalent CD and DVD titles along with web based formats such as MP3 and iPod compatible video.

Our services are intended for content owners serious about delivering digital goods with the quality and standards consumers expect from retail products.

Our system works in 3 easy steps:

Your content is stored under a dual layer AES 256 shell! This is double the security used by governments using password protected Zip files.

We provide sellers with extra features such as:

A HTML badge which can be placed on your website or MySpace page:

And advanced features such as real-time payments and “point of sale” split payments for up to 3 partners!

“

We7 is a company that is taking on the world of FREE music with a new slant. By placing an ad in the digital file, they can make DRM free MP3s available for FREE download AND the artist gets paid. Once the file has been played a few times, the ad disappears. Sounds good, right? Check our their site here - We7.com

Let me know if you like it.

The first time I heard about Freemium was on my new favorite blog A VC.
Who knew a Venture Capitalist could be so cool!

I highly recommend reading his article on Freemium and the music business.

“I’ve riffed on the notion of free as a business model frequently on this blog. We’ve even come up with a name for a business model that uses free as its foundational element - ie freemium.

The fact is that the Internet demands a free business model. It’s a network where content flows freely in abundance. Scarcity works great for physical goods, but crumbles in a digital world.” Read more…

Some of us in the music biz have been waiting for something like this to materialize for the last few years. Although this may not be the brass ring - it is an option worth exploring.

Web Communities

Web Communities are places for you to create profiles, connect with people based on specific niches, share content, submit content to the community at large and market yourself all over the world for FREE.

All web communities are social sites. But some cater more to the experience of sharing yourself while others focus on your interests or what you have to sell. Here, Social Sites are ones based on interaction between the artist and other artists or fans. Music sites are sites where the community can find your profile with links to your information but not interact with you directly. Some are retails sites. Internet Radio Stations are sites to submit your music for addition in their rotation. Some require you to send the information to the station directly while others you add your music to the site or you build your own station. Today’s post lists the social sites that have a strong focus on music.

Social Sites

• Amie Street – Where music is free and referrals are rewarded
• Buzznet – Social site for musicians and music fans. They provide some cool technology. They have a MoBlog – a blog that can be updated with video and photos from your cell phone.
• Face Book – Started as a site for college students to connect but now has profiles open to everyone.
• Haystack - To help you collect your life on the web. Built for musicians and music fans.
• iLike – Recommendation and networking site owned by Ticketmaster.
• Indie 911 - By combining a social networking approach with an emerging artist network, indie911 takes the online music and film experience to a new level, where artists can interact directly with their audiences.
• iSound – Focuses on allowing all unsigned artists to easily create their own websites with every feature they could possibly want.
• Imeem - An online community where people and groups can upload, share, tag, and playlist the media they care about.
• Mog - Automatically builds you a web page that displays your music collection and real-time listening stats without you having to type it in. Built for music snobs.
• Mozes – Site similar to Buzznet. Allows band to choose a keyword and once that word is entered and sent to Mozes it will send photos and video updates to the cell phone.
• Myspace – Need I say more?
• Project Opus – Canadian company. Online music community designed to support artists, fans and local music. It is a single point of contact for discovery of new music.
• Pure Volume – A site for your profile and your songs.
• Ruckus – Site for college students that revolves around sharing music.
• Tag World – Built mainly for people connecting but music sharing is a part of the community.
• Uber – Funded by Universal Music Group, this site caters to the artist, journalist and musician by making their portfolios and music available for sharing and networking.
• Virb - A community website that combines social interaction with music and entertainment exploration.

Most musicians I speak with about the idea of taking their businesses Online have no clue where to start. The Internet is flooded with sites offering musicians fancy tools and features to help with everything from touring to ringtone sales. It seems impossible to keep up with all the new sites coming up, almost daily. Selling music and it’s ancillary products Online is becoming big business.

With so many choices, how does an artist pick the company that will support his/her interests most effectively? There are several factors to consider when deciding to invest any time, effort, or money into a new venture. First of all, you want to make sure the company is going to be around for a while and isn’t just a site developed for the sole purpose of driving ad dollars. Who started the company? Why? Where are they headed? What is their basic philosophy about music in the new world? When considering sites to build profiles on or create associations with your band or new record you must consider other factors. Sometimes it is the technological expertise that will make a site a winner and other times, as we have seen with Myspace and You Tube, it is about the community associated with the site.

I’ve been researching these sites, new and old, for months. From my research I have come up with various lists to help any artist navigate the mysterious road of self-promotion. I will be publishing different lists over the next few weeks. As I find new sites that I feel will be beneficial, I will post those with links and explainations as well. Please let me know if you are aware of a site that I have not included or if you have not had a good experience with one that I have included. The lists are always growing and changing.
The first lists are Calendars and Search Engines.

Calendars

These are important for two reasons: They allow people to find your event through a variety of FREE listings and they increase your Search Engine Optimization. The more listings you have online the easier it is for people to find you.

Upcoming - Upcoming.org is a social events calendar driven by people just like you.

Eventful - Find events that you and your friends care about, share and syndicate your discoveries with friends, family, and contacts, search the future to receive alerts about events that haven’t even been announced yet, create grassroots campaigns to demand that desired events happen

Myspace Events – Event calendar on Myspace

Media search engines are growing in popularity. Many of them simply crawl the web for content, but some of them are built on content uploaded by users. The top picks for user-generated content are below.

Blinkx – Video search engine

Google video – Video search engine

Live Music Net – Find live concert video, sessions, online radio and more

Mpeg-Search – MP3 search engine with free downloads

Music IP - Unique music matching technology defines relationships between sets of music based on acoustic traits and characteristics

Podziner – Search engine for audio and video podcasts

You Tube – Video search engine

My Stumble Upon addicted mother stumbled upon a real gem recently.

It is a documentary that examines the Canadian version of an issue we are dealing with in the US. What is piracy? Is it killing the music business or is that just what the Record Associations want us to believe? This is valuable information for anyone in the music industry. All of our futures will be affected by this. You can watch the full movie here: On Piracy: Piracy and the Future of MusicThank you to the filmmakers for a great project that we can all view for free. Visit their website here and buy a copy of the DVD - Piracy Documentary

It was only about a year ago that I first heard about blogs. The band I was managing at the time loved the word and used it to describe everything. Blog this and blog that and bloggity blog blog became the response to every question. A year later Web 2.0 has re-defined the way we use the Internet and blogs are more than a mere catch phrase. They are a valuable tool for sharing information. Every industry can capitalize on this new tool, especially the music industry. But what is a blog and why the hell should you have one??? Justin Kistner from Metafluence wrote a great post on what a blog is and the importance of having one:

“[Blogs] are intended to be a forum for an individual or group to publish information on a recurring basis. Blogs originated as online journals and the name blog itself comes from the mash up of Web+log. Blogs have been traditionally valued for their informal, chronologically-based structure because it frees writers to write with their flow. Blog posts differ from traditional articles because they are supposed to be personally biased and shared for the purpose of conversation, which is carried out through comments left on the post. They are a great way to gain search engine traffic because search engines like websites with frequent content additions. Blogs also foster relationships because of their conversational and opinionated nature.”

Now, as a musician or label, you probably have a Myspace page and some of you may even utilize your Myspace blog. Well, its time to take off the training wheels and join the Blogosphere. Having your own blog will allow you to connect with your fans without the restrictions of the Myspace template and, most importantly, your blog is your domain, not Rupert Murdoch’s.

In a blog post you can have five types of content:

1. Text
2. Photos
3. Links
4. MP3s
5. Video

What does this mean for you?? A few examples of potential content:

• Imagine being on the road, all those great moments in the van, and you wish you could share them. You have a video camera and a microphone. Record it and put it up on your blog.
• Your best friend is in a band and their new record rocks. Write about it on your blog and put an MP3 with it.
• You had an amazing show last night and you have some hilarious footage from the opening band, throw it up on your blog.
• Your favorite band is coming through town tomorrow, put their poster on your blog.

As long as you are not violating copyright laws, you can put up anything you want.

The next step is getting that information into the hands of your fans. This is another awesome component of having a blog – the RSS Feed. In a nutshell an RSS Feed is a way for you to get your content to people who want it. Rather than sending out an email to your lists every time you post something new, an RSS feed will automatically send your post – as you created it, with the text, video, photos and MP3s – to the people who have subscribed to your feed. In order to view the post your fans will need a Feed Reader, but they are free and easy to obtain from Google or Yahoo!. I think even Safari has a built in Reader.

As I mentioned in my previous post, content is king. As a band you are constantly creating content and now you have a way to share it.

Some tips on blog postings:

1. Use it as a forum to promote yourself as well as your friends and get them to do the same for you.
2. Don’t limit your postings to just band or music related content. Put up poetry, photos, funny stories, etc.
3. Study other band blogs but don’t feel like you have to be just like them. A blog is an opportunity for you to express the fullness of your personality. Your blog is an integral part of your promotional arsenal. It should be as unique as your music and the members of your project.
4. Use lots of pictures and videos. It makes the blog more interactive and interesting.
5. Register your blog with Technorati. (Technorati is a blog search engine. Once you register with Technorati your posts will automatically be included in all searches. Unlike with Google searches, Technorati responds to queries with the latest post that fits the query, not the ones that fit the current search algorithms. For instance, if you post something about your concerns regarding Net Neutrality, and someone goes to Technorati and puts in “Net Neutrality” if your post was the last to mention it, it will be the first in the search results. You also improve your status by having lots of links…)
6. LINK LINK LINK! When you link to someone ask them to link to you. The blogosphere is a community. Consider your Blog Roll to be like your friends on Myspace. You want lots of them!

Contact me if you need a blog or have questions about how to manage one. kyra@kyrareed.com