Big news for those of you looking to book tours and communicate without running up your cell phone bill. Google is now allowing you to make free phone calls within Gmail using Google Voice (a service I am absolutely in love with). While you may not see it in your Gmail yet they will be rolling out the service in the next few days so keep an eye out for a great new way to communicate. More info here.
Groups always ask us how to get featured on more mainstream press. One of the things they are smart enough to realize is that just having music out and putting out a new record rarely gets an unknown band in to bigger press. Instead you need to make or find a story that is part of a narrative writers will write about.Look at the news including your state and local paper and find stories they regularly write about and find a plausible way to work your group into that story. Does your group have a van that runs on bio-diesel you can easily get your tour promotion worked into an article on that subject in the local paper by pitching it to a writer and how we can get off the dependency to horrible companies like BP. Do you regularly play in mosques? Well probably not, but we know the news can't shut up about the fake controversy right now. When you find a story you could have a connection with, get in touch with the writer at that paper and pitch the story. Use your imagination and you can probably convince a writer looking to easily fill a word count to do an article about you, just don't abuse this concept, The paper grow tired of your ploys to get in the news if you are too ridiculous, so put down the Osama Bin Laden costume and stop calling the mosques for gigs.
Chris Bracco who writes one of our favorite blogs, Tight Mix Blog, has up a fantastic guest post on Hypebot that takes on many ideas behind the Freemium model. This in depth article gets your mind racing around the ideas of this selling point and can lead you to a great reconsideration of how you work your music promotions.
Bandcamp's blog has up a wonderful interview on the release of NPR rockers Sufjan Steven's latest release. One of the more interesting points in this great interview was a strategy we touched upon in our our story on Man Overboard's recent record leak. They released the record on Bandcamp before iTunes in order to get email addresses and higher profits from Bandcamp. Check out the full interview here.
Lissie - Cuckoo (Official Video) found on Pop
Well you don't see this everyday. Lissie has been making lots of buzz lately for her great music but another way she will be making buzz is her new music video changes with the weather. You can see this video on her site(as opposed to the video above where you can hear the song) and read about the process here. (via Jesse Burton)
Making good sounding vinyl is a lot of work. The first step in the
process is to get your record professionally mastered. Once this is done your
mastering engineer then needs to send the person cutting your vinyl a
Vinyl Split master. This is a master that designates where you split the
sides. 9 times out of 10 your mastering engineer will not be the one
who also cuts your vinyl. Your mastering engineer will make a master
that translates well on CD and Digital and you will then pass it on to a
engineer who will cut a vinyl lacquer. This can often times be a
engineer who works in a specific business or one at your vinyl
manufacturer. This person is very important to your vinyl's sound and if
you value your fidelity you will make sure you get a lacquer master
(this is what your vinyl will be duplicated from). If you went to a
reputable mastering house they can often advise you on someone who will
do a great job cutting vinyl for your release that they work well with.
In case you didn't know, today is the day that Facebook will be trimming their tabs down from 720 pixels to 520. This means if you have made welcome pages or have any pages installed (aside from ReverbNation's MyBand which will automatically adjust). You may want to keep an eye on your profile and make sure the look and function does not get messed up. As usual, Facebook has made life difficult, but at least this should be an easy fix.
TweetForATrack has always been a fun service but as you may recall we got pretty pissed when we found out they would be charging $25.00 to harvest emails collected by the service. Well if that didn't bother you and you only wanted to use their sharing facilities anyway you can now do Facebook sharing with the service in addition to tweeting. This does make their service all the more powerful. If only they were more reasonable with the fees.
- The Arcade Fire Show What Podcast Technology Can Do For An Album Experience
- How To Make Your Own Siguir Ros... I Mean Slowed Down Justin Bieber Song
- Use Postcards To Spread Your Word
- Sound Profile For The Film Inception
- Check Out A Tour Of TopSpin's Interface
- The Insanity Of Licensing
- Who Do Your Fans Trust For Recommendations?
- Grooveshark Now Rewards You For Referrels!
- Selling Out Shows Every Time You Play
- DamnTheRadio Enables Streaming Music And Email And Phone #
- SoundCloud Enables Creative Commons Search
- Check Out This Music Video Made Only From Creative Common Images!
- Virb Will Now Host And Help You Build A great Looking Site For $10 A Month
- What Is Album Artwork Worth?
- The Fairtilizer Is Now Official.FM
Grooveshark is doing a pretty cool thing. They are now offering rewards for your group if you refer others to their pay-to-play promotion campaigns. This means you can earn free play credits by telling your friends groups about their service. Below we have details on what you get for these promotions.
- 5 referrals = 2,000 targeted Radio plays + 1 month VIP
- 10 referrals = 4,000 targeted Radio plays + 6 months VIP + chance to win site skin
- 15 referrals = 6,000 targeted Radio plays + 1 year VIP + chance to win site skin
- 20 referrals = 20,000 targeted Radio plays + lifetime VIP + chance to win site skin
- Top 10 referrals overall = Featured on Grooveshark social media (50k+ readers)
- Top 5 referrals overall = Custom banner ads featured on Grooveshark
- Winner will receive a free custom site skin on Grooveshark ($10,000+ value)
The Music Think Tank has a fantastic article on playing appropriate shows for your crowd and how to make sure you are not over supplying your live show demand. Check it out here.http://www.musicthinktank.com/blog/selling-out-your-shows-every-time.html
DamnTheRadio is a new service that is currently in beta that enables you to make smooth looking Facebook designs and trade downloads and shares for users emails and phone numbers. Obviously an extremely powerful tool this new service looks to have the potential to be an amazing tool for building a fan base. Check out The Ting Tings use of it for the release of their latest single.
We are huge Creative Commons fans and this video really does show some great potential of it. Check out the band Changing Clocks website for more info.
We at Musformation read A LOT of blogs. Like, A LOT! We often find
things that are interesting, but we don't have the time to write em up
for you guys. This makes us feel bad since we are trying to make our
community a more educated and entertained one. So every Wed. I will be
sharing with you Recording Nerd Links. So if you are that particular
brand of nerd/insomniac/internataholic/crazy shut in, enjoy. Nerd.
We have all seen postcards dropped on a record store window sill or being handed out outside a show a million times. While these forms of promotion have led to you littering or tossing a postcard more times then you can remember there is a way to make them work. Right now, MusforMGMT group Man Overboard is out on a tour and opening for artists in a similar genre to them and being exposed to many new fans. While we hope they convert all of the other band's fans into their own, that is no easy task. One way we try to help this conversion is to hand out free postcards that you can see in the picture above. These post cards on one side have a logo the fans have responded to. If you are one of our fans you can take that postcard and hang it in your room (giving us free advertising in the fans room, for what that is worth). The other side has the recent great reviews we have received and a URL where new fans who haven't heard of the group to get free music. This helps new fans see why they should be listening and those who have heard of us know that they can get more from us and increase our stickiness with those fans and make sure they are exposed to all of our material. One of the keys to this promotion is we do not force these postcards on anyone. They sit on our table people to take if they want to, if they don't keep on walking. This ensures that the fan has a cursory interest at the very least and increases the likelihood the postcard will be effective.
We always liked The Fairtilizer's quirky name but it looks like they have undergone not only a facelift but also a name change. After being hipped to an outage via their Twitter feed, we have seen that they now have up a blog post explaining they are now going by Official.FM and marketing themselves as an offical place to get streams and downloads from labels and musicians. By the looks of the blog post they have redone the whole service in little ways and enhanced the performance as a whole. We are excited to see a great service get even better.
Arcade Fire The Suburbs Synchronized Artwork Version from ian rogers on Vimeo.
Lately, this blog has sounded like a Arcade Fire fan club forum with all the chatter about their new record (funny since Todd and I haven't even given the new record a good listen). The reason for this is, these guys really did bring the creative thunder to this release and until now we really hadn't even seen just how hard they brought it.In the above video you can see the group used technology usually reserved for Podcasts where you can click within the album art and it will change and open up links for you to read up on all sorts of interesting tidbits to make your listening experience all the more interesting. This technology being available to artists opens up limitless possibilities of creating a truly interesting user experience for the listener. I think we have only begun to see what could be a extremely interesting leap for the MP3 album format.
In the coming week Musformation will bring info on both how to author an experience like this and deliver it to iTunes. Can you see how excited we are? You should be too!
- Using QR Codes To Promote Your Music
- Headliner.FM Now Offering Express Promotions
- Check Out A Fantastic Template For A Music Based Facebook Welcome Page
- MySpace's Music Romeo iPad App And How To Get Your Video On It
- Twitter Releases Their Own Tweet Button And It's Worth Updating Your Old One For
- Keep Records Of Everything On The Road
- Pro Tools vs. Reaper Sound Test!
- A Breakdown Of Physical vs. Digital Sales On Arcade Fire's #1 Album
- ReverbNation Will Automatically Adapt Your MyBand Page On Facebook
- SoundCloud Enables SoundCloud Remix App To Makes Remix Contests Easier
- Record All Your Ideas Right Away
- Be Willing To Play Shows For Free
- SongKick Now Aggregating Show Listings To VeVo And YouTube Videos
- 10 Awesome Tumblr Themes For Your Music Tumblr
- More On Making QR Codes Work For Your Music
- More Dates Doesn't Make It A Better Tour
- The Public Record Is An Awesome Collaboration Site Where You Work With Popular Artists
- Vanna have signed with Artery Recordings
- The Plot In You have signed with Rise Records
- Tooth & Nail has signed I Am Empire.
- Where The Ocean Meets The Sky has signed to CI Records
- These Kids Wear Crowns have signed with Capitol/EMI
Today MySpace announced an iPad App entitled Music Romeo. While we all may be wonder where their heads are at (how many Basement Jaxx references can I drop in this post?) as their social network dies and they develop something like this, it could indeed be a part of a gran plan... er or something. The App is like a "Pandora for music videos" in that it will recommend you music videos based on genre or mood. If you want your video to get aggregated the clues are emerging that you need to upload it to MySpace and then have it aggregated by a blog in We Are Hunted's network. For more info check out Music Ally.
For years now we have all had tweet buttons on our site so our fans can easily share our content. The TweetMeme version of this button is one of the most popular buttons across the Internet but as of today it is obsoleted technology. Twitters own Tweet button now only allows less clicks to tweet the content you want to spread, but it also allows the option to suggest that the person tweeting your info follow you on Twitter. Genius stuff! Get it here.
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